On Examinations (addressed to students)
As a teacher, the most annoying things for me are the exams. I believe one should not judge the other person. Every student or scientist is good in something. There could be gradations in aptitudes in various skills like analytic, memory, problem solving, experimental, design etc. A written exam for several hours is simply not good enough to test various skill. In fact, it is meaningless to test all the skills, because typically a person has liking for one or several of these skills. The problem is that the outside world wants to know who are the better students of the class. the award-giving institutions want to know the best students. Given all these irritating constrains, we award grades and conduct exams. One may say that the grades are the thing, because we can get the coveted job/scholarship/awards etc. by getting very good grades. It turns out that if you try to focus too much...