What are exams for?

My daughter is about to start her exams (again!), but what are they for?  This might seem a silly question, but the answer determines an awful lot of other issues.

Broadly the choice is that exams are either to show the innate intelligence of children or to determine which children are most suited to further education or various jobs.

When I did exams I believe that they were to determine who was most suited to further education and jobs but somewhere they seem to have morphed into ways of showing innate intelligence.  Does this matter?  If you believe (as I do) that innate intelligence is not a good correlator for the ability to do a good job outside of academia then it does mean that exams are no help for this.

Universities and employers still appear to want to select the "best" (or perhaps most appropriate) candidates. However exams no longer provide this information.  I also recently got involved in a conversation about extra time for exams.  In the real world if someone needs additional time, or special surroundings that is potentially a drawback to carrying out their duties, but exams no longer tell this.

The problem is that universities are starting to set their own exams because they cannot determine what they wish to know from public exams, and I suspect that more employers will start to do the same.  When I was recruiting we used literacy and numeracy tests together with psychometric profiling - what is the literacy and numeracy other than an exam?

So why do we have the exams we do?  Answers on a postcard please!

What is education for?

This has been prompted by conversation with my daughter - for whom this is an essay assignment.  You will be pleased to hear that I don't intend to match her 5,000 words, but chatting about it made me question what I thought.

At one level I want to say that it isn't "for" anything, or perhaps that it is for its own sake.  Having been a pure mathematician, one of those who delight that there is no practical use for their study, I would certainly reject the idea that it is for the development of knowledge of facts.  This of course seems to go against government policy - but I would want to argue that that is not education but training!

Perhaps a better way into this is to ask what an educated person looks like - and here I surprise myself - I would have thought that I would be defining this in terms of knowledge, but find myself doing so in terms of skills and abilities.  An educated person is someone who knows what they think and why, is capable of expressing it, is prepared to change their mind in response to a challenge, but doesn't change their mind in response to emotional blackmail.  I have probably left something out, but you get the drift.  The actual facts of any subject seem to be less and less important as reference material is more and more available.

Of course this looks nothing like our current education system, with its teaching to the tests (which don't prove that people are getting more intelligent, just that we are better at taking the tests).

Interestingly these are also the qualities that I think are required for employment, although I don't think that delivering good employees should be the aim of education.  The current policies deliver people with knowledge of stuff, rather than themselves, and businesses then have to train people in the skills that they require.