The last weeks of spring – if spring still exists, considering that the weather is more summer-like in May too – are an anxious time for thousands of students who will be assessed on the work they have done all through the academic year.

There are those who will be sitting for what will be their final exams, be it at university or at the end of their post-secondary or secondary school years. There are also those who seek promotion to the next scholastic year.

Examinations are always a difficult time for students, and they affect family life in general, too. It is a time which serious students spend reviewing all that they have learnt and all that could be included in the list of questions and problems they will be asked to answer or solve within an established time.

They start spending more of their time indoors, possibly even missing their normal activities such as dancing, football, drama and art classes, as they prepare for the examinations they will be taking. It is a time of pressure on the rest of the family too, as the other members show their support by various means – ranging from keeping the television volume lower than normal to offering advice on how to handle the stress.

Examinations are an important way of gauging the progress made by students, but at the same time it must be admitted that they create a lot of pressure on them.

Not everyone is capable of handling the situation in the same way. There are students who take exams in their stride, and are not affected that much when they have to increase their workload. Others, and this includes those intelligent enough to be able to pass with flying colours, feel the stress that examinations bring with them and are unable to perform at their best.

The more time that passes, the more it is felt that students are being put under pressure, and this from a relatively young age. Even those still in their early years of schooling have to pass through the exam system, when many European countries tend to prefer to take a different approach – in the sense that school in these countries is “learning through fun” and not the “learning through examinations” as we know it.

There are developed countries where six-year-old children do not know how to read and write, and here we are already putting them through examinations.

As they grow, the pressure increases as the examinations become more important and the hurdles to overcome even higher. We should ask ourselves whether this is the right system, and whether we are getting the best out of our students. Some will argue that there is no better way than examinations to know what a student has learnt and what he or she can produce. At the end of the day, it is examinations that determine who the “better” students are.

What we seem to forget is that the examination system is pushing our students to study just to be able to achieve a pass-mark, and what is learnt is quickly forgotten once the positive result has been achieved. There are subjects that they study just for the sake of having another pass-mark – because they need as many as they can get in order to be able to pursue their studies. Would it not be better if the number of subjects that they have to study is reduced, thus giving them time to concentrate more on the subjects that they really need?

Are we giving enough attention to the overall development of our children, or are we only interested in “producing” people who are capable of passing examinations, but whose general knowledge is

limited, who are unable to keep up a conversation in any of the languages they learnt at school and who have a low opinion of themselves?