It begins to look as if the test-examination-marks business is a gigantic racket, the purpose of which is to enable students, teachers, and schools to take part in a joint pretense that the students know everything they are supposed to know, when in fact they know only a small part of it--if any at all. Why do we always announce exams in advance, if not to give students a chance to cram for them? Why do teachers, even in graduate schools, always say quite specifically what the exam will be about, even telling the type of questions that will be given? Because otherwise too many students would flunk. What would happen at Harvard or Yale if a prof gave a surprise test in March on work covered in October? Everyone knows what would happen; that's why they don't do it.

...

When I was in my last year at school, we seniors stayed around an extra week to cram for college boards. Our ancient-history teacher told us, on the basis of long experience, that we would do well to prepare ourselves to write for twenty minutes on each of a list of fifteen topics that he gave us. We studied his list. We knew the wisdom of taking that kind of advice; if we had not, we would not have been at that school. When the boards came, we found that his list comfortably covered every one of the eight questions we were asked. So we got credit for knowing a great deal about ancient history, which we did not, he got credit for being a good teacher, which he was not, and the school got credit for being, as it was, a good place to go if you wanted to be sure of getting into a prestige college. The fact was that I knew very little about ancient history; that much of what I thought I knew was misleading or false; that then, and for many years afterwards, I disliked history and thought it pointless and a waste of time; and that two months later I could not have come close to passing the history college boards, or even a much easier test, but who cared?

I have played the game myself. When I began teaching I thought, naively, that the purpose of a test was to test, to find out what the students knew about the course. It didn't take me long to find out that if I gave my students surprise tests, covering the whole material of the course to date, almost everyone flunked. This made me look bad, and posed problems for the school. I learned that the only way to get a respectable percentage of decent or even passing grades was to announce tests well in advance, tell in some detail what material they would cover, and hold plenty of advance practice in the kind of questions that would be asked, which is called review. I later learned that teachers do this everywhere. We know that what we are doing is not really honest, but we dare not be the first to stop, and we try to justify or excuse ourselves by saying that, after all, it does no particular harm. But we are wrong; it does great harm.

It does harm, first of all, because it is dishonest and the students know it. My friends and I, breezing through the ancient-history boards, knew very well that a trick was being played on someone, we were not quite sure on whom. Our success on the boards was due, not to our knowledge of ancient history, which was scanty, but to our teacher's skill as a predictor, which was great. Even children much younger than we were learn that what most teachers' want and reward are not knowledge and understanding but the appearance of them. The smart and able ones, at least, come to look on school as something of a racket, which it is their job to learn how to beat. And learn they do; they become experts at smelling out the unspoken and often unconscious preferences and prejudices of their teachers, and at taking full advantage of them. My first English teacher at prep school gave us Macaulay's essay on Lord Clive to read, and from his pleasure in reading it aloud I saw that he was a sucker for the periodic sentence, a long complex sentence with the main verb at the end. Thereafter I took care to construct at least one such sentence in every paper I wrote for him, and thus assured myself a good mark in the course.

Not only does the examination racket do harm by making students feel that a search for honest understanding is beside the point; it does further harm by discouraging those few students who go on making that search in spite of everything. The student who will not be satisfied merely to know "right answers" or recipes for getting them will not have an easy time in school, particularly since facts and recipes may be all that his teachers know. They tend to be impatient or even angry with the student who wants to know, not just what happened, but why it happened as it did and not some other way. They rarely have the knowledge to answer such questions, and even more rarely have the time; there is all that material to cover.

In short, our "Tell-'em-and-test-'em" way of teaching leaves most students increasingly confused, aware that their academic success rests on shaky foundations, and convinced that school is mainly a place where you follow meaningless procedures to get meaningless answers to meaningless questions.

— John Holt, How Children Fail