Intelligence, Creativity and the English Examination

XAMINATIONS PROVIDE MORE than means of assessment ; as is well known, they provide, among other things, incentives.Unfortunately, encouragement of one type of ability or method of thought may well be at the expense of others.Even where there is no question of examination results being used for selection, there is obviously pressure on the candidate to provide the sort of performance that the examiners will reward with high marks.Where the question of selection is involved, this pressure will probably be even greater.American students of 'creativity' (e.g.Getzels and Jackson 1 ) are worried about the use of 'objective' tests, usually of a form demanding the one correct answer to any item.These tests are widely used in the United States and have also been advocated in this country (e.g.Eysenck 2 ) for university selection ( or 'guidance').It is felt that these tests may be unfair to the 'creative' student, whom Getzels and Jackson found to perform as well in school subjects as did higher scorers in the 'intelligence' tests, and it is also felt that such tests encourage conformity (at least intellectually) among students.In this country, we tend.to make more use of essay-type questions in examinations in the upper forms of the secondary school.It is not immediately obvious what qualities questions of this sort encourage.Indeed, it has been claimed that they do not measure anything consistently.Ballard 3 commented, 'My scepticism goes further than denying that it (the essay) is a good means of measuring the pupil's knowledge of geography, history and science.I deny that it is a good means of measuring anything-even his knowledge of the mother tongue'.Hartog and Rhodes 4 quote lengthy and thorough investigations into examinations of a wide range of subjects at levels ranging from the 'special place' (equivalent to 11 +) examination to university honours degree examinations.Their views on the reliability of the essay-type examination were highly unfavourable.In one case, (school certificate history papers of fifteen candidates, each marked by fifteen experienced examiners) they commented, 'there are eight candidates altogether out of the fifteen who might, in a real examination have received a failure mark or a pass mark or a credit mark, depending on the particular examiner who happened to mark his script'.These findings reported by Hartog and Rhodes would appear to dismiss the reliability of essay examinations completely, but Wiseman 5 defends their reliability in grammar school selection.Vernon and Millican 6 suggest that the discrepancies can be explained by several factors.(I) The less skilled the writer, the easier it is to mark for mechanical faults -and presumably such marking is more reliable.