2. The General Certificate of Education at O Level When people discuss education they insist that preparation for examiriations is not the main purpose. They are right in theory, but in practice, we all realize how importarit examinations are. What do you know about the examinations taken at English secondary schools？ Here are a few facts about some of them. . Pupils who remain at school until they are sixteen normally take what is called the Geneial Certificate of Education at Ordinary level. The examination is a subject examination. This means you can take a number of subjects. Some pupils take as many as ten. The more subjects the better chance a pupil has of getting a job on leaving school.
　　3. Homework Row Led to the Death of a Girl A nine-year old girl was beaten to death by her mother for failing to finish the day's homework in time. Liu Lin- was a third-year pupil in a primary school in a Tibetan autonomous¹ prefecture in Northwest Qinghai Province： She was one of the best students in her school, according to yesterday's Workers' Daily. But on July 10, she did not do her arithmetic homework when Sun Fengxia, her mother, got home from work at 16：00 p.m.
　　Sun severely² beat her daughter with a rolling pin, the newspaper said. By 19：30 p.m. that evening, she found that her daughter had done only part of the homework, and she became even more angry. Sun slapped her daughter in the face and kicked her, according to the paper. Lin became unconscious and later died despite efforts of doctors to save her. Such cases are not rare in China.
　　In December last year in the province, Wu Yuxia beat her nine-year old son Xia Fei to death . She later committed suicide in a prison. In Dalian of Northeast Liaoning Province, Li Liansheng beat his 14- year old son Li Guobin to death in March last year because the boy was playing truant³. In Nanjing, capital of coastal⁴ Jiangsu Province, 19-year old Wang Lin killed his parents at home because they forced him to try to get good marks in examinations.
　　4. Examinations Are Primitive⁵ Methods of Testing Knowledge and Ability We might marvel⁶ at the progress made in every field of study, but the methods of testing a Person's knowledge and ability remain as primitive as they ever were. It really is extraordinary that after all these years, educationists have still failed to devise anything more efficient and reliable than examinations. For all the pious⁷ claim that examinations test what you know, it is cotnmon knowledge that they more often do the exact opposite. They may be a good means of testing memory, or the knack⁸ of working rapidly under extreme pressure, but they can tell you nothing about a person's true ability and aptitude⁹.
　　5. Examinations Are Anxiety-makers As anxiety-makers, examinations are second to none. That is because so much depends on them. They are the mark of success or failure in our society. Your whole future may be decided¹⁰ in one fateful day. It doesn't matter that you weren't feeling very well, or that your mother died. Little things like that don't count： the exam goes on. No one can give of his best when he is in mortal terror,or after a sleepless¹¹ night, yet this is precisely¹² what the examination system expects him to do. The moment a child begins school, he enters a world of vicious competition where success and failure are clearly defined and measured. Can we wonder at the increasing number of “drop-outs”： young people who are written off as utter failures before they have even embarked¹³ on a career？ Can we be surprised at the suicide rate among students？
　　6. The Examination System Never Trains You to Think for Yourself A good education should, among other things, train you to think for yourself. The examination system does anything but that. What has to be learnt is rigidly¹⁴ laid down by a syllabus¹⁵, so the student is encouraged to memorise¹⁶. Examinations do not motivate a student to read widely, but to restrict his reading； they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming¹⁷. They lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedom. Teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam technipues which they despise. The most successful, candidates are not always the best educated； they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress¹⁸.
　　7. Exam Is a Subjective¹⁹ Assessment²⁰ by Some Anonymous²¹ Examiner The results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. Examiners are only human. They get tired and hungry： they make mistakes. Yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled²² scripts in a limited amount of time. They work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. And their word carries weight.
　　After a judge,s decision you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner's. There must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person's true abilities. Is it cynical²³ to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them？ This is what it boils down to in the last analysis. The best comment on the system is this illiterate²⁴ message recently scrawled on a wall： “I were a teenage drop-out and now I are a teenage millionaire. ”

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