“Students, this is the end of the exam. Please close your test papers and put your pens down—I repeat, no more writing, please.”

Disgruntled by your incomplete exam, you slam my pen on the table and close your eyes, trying to calm yourself from the horrifying fiasco. But instead, your mind is drawn back to the empty lines in your exam, not yet filled due to the time constraints.

Why are time limits imposed on examinations that are meant to diagnose a student’s understanding of a particular subject? Why should the speed of our handwriting take part in such a large role of determining our intellectual ability? By setting a time limit to an exam, we may be testing how quickly students are able to complete it, rather than how well they actually know it. This fails to accomplish the real purpose of tests.

For example, the speed of your writing is often a crucial factor in completing tests with time limits. Furthermore, seeing as the purpose of a test is to assess the student’s understanding of a topic, when teachers see an empty space on a students test, how should they react to it? Should they assume that the student “did not fully grasp the concepts of this topic”? Or could it be that the student needed two more minutes to write down the correct answer? It isn’t completely fair to equate an answer left blank to poor understanding of a particular topic.

Suppose Van Gogh only had an hour to draw his sunflowers, or that Thomas Edison only had an hour to think of how he could possibly create illuminating bulbs. Would Van Gogh’s sunflowers be the iconic image they are today? Would electric currents even be able to flow through Edison’s light bulbs successfully? Great work comes with time, and when timeframes force us to hustle through an exam, it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to present our full potential understanding towards a particular topic.

Being able to work under pressure is obviously a good thing, but in the case of seeking an objective measure of an individual’s understanding of a topic (especially a multi-faceted, humanities-related topic), forcing a student to work to the stopwatch can be detrimental and ineffective.

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2013 issue of UNIT-E. It was written by Dion Dong, a student at the International School of Beijing.

About UNIT-E
UNIT-E was founded in the spring of 2010 with the aim of establishing a non-profit, student-run magazine for international students in Beijing. Staffed by current students from a range of international schools, the magazine provides an amalgam of cultural tidbits, fragments of Beijing student life, and a broad spectrum of unique perspectives from a diverse group of young adults.

Photo courtesy of ccarlstead (Flickr)

If I had been asked that question 10 years ago, I would have pointed to the stars and stripes and said, “Duh! The United States of America!” with a flourish of the hand. After all, I was born in America. When I was 5, my parents decided to move back to Beijing not only because of the increasing business opportunities, but also to reunite with their family.

After my parents’ decision, I was full of resentment towards Beijing when I first arrived. My first thoughts were “lousy, lousy and more lousy” – a typical example of how little kids exaggerate things that they dislike to make them sound worse than they actually are. The buildings were flimsy and needed reconstruction, the sky was gray, cars were everywhere (but not those fancy exotic sports cars with rumbling engines), the food was terrible, and the list goes on. I could pick out a million shortcomings if I wanted to.

Even though I look Asian, I just felt like an American kid. Being a stubborn 5-year-old, I believed I was one of those “hidden immigrants” who looked like everyone else but thought differently and did not believe that he was from China. Having now lived in Beijing for almost 11 years, my Chinese is already way better than my English. Dwelling in the suburbs of Shunyi as a typical Shunyi-er, I brace myself to face the “sea of humans” waiting for the subway just like everyone else. In fact, I actually quite enjoy the Beijing lifestyle now. Besides the occasional days where the sky is gray and blurry and the air smells like chemicals, the city’s food, music, art, and culture please me.

Being born in the US, holding an American passport, and still longing for an American lifestyle – do these things necessarily mean that I am from the States? Likewise, is living in China for two-thirds of my life and having Chinese parents enough to prove that I am truly Chinese?

If I was simply an American kid, I would probably be preparing for the SATs at this point in my life; if I were a true Chinese boy, I would be working very hard to fight for
a better ranking at the standardized university exams. Either way, I would at least be able to have a sense of social identity and a clear cultural background. Right now, I am in a permanent state of bewilderment: Am I Chinese, or am I American?

I feel I am not yet able to fully answer the question: “Where are you from?” This is a question that will require a lifetime to discover. But if we were to solve it mathematically by drawing a line between America and China and finding the midpoint, then I could proudly say that the closest place to where I am from is probably … in the Mediterranean Sea, on a small island called Malta.

Dion Dong is 16 years old and attends Yew Chung International School of Beijing.

This article is excerpted from beijingkids May 2012 issue. View it in PDF form here or contact distribution@beijing-kids.com to find out where you can pick up your free copy.