Timed tests, according to the college board and the vast majority of teachers, are supposed to measure a student’s aptitude. But does it really measure a student’s pure knowledge of a subject or just how fast they can solve a problem? Because the latter solely promotes finding shortcuts to find a question as quickly as possible, which really doesn’t offer any benefits, except for the fact that it makes students robotic. Robotic in their studies, and robotic in their learning. This leads to students just memorizing shortcuts, preventing them from actually taking time to comprehend a question. Just because each  individual student understands content at different paces does not mean one is smarter than the other. Rather, it is because each student solves at different paces that tests should not be timed.

Why then, is it important to prioritize quality over speed? 

First, we need to realize that solving a question faster does not offer any exclusive benefits. What we’ve been told throughout our entire academic careers is to skip questions, use special tricks and shortcuts to mechanically solve difficult problems on timed tests, even when we have the capability to use concepts and actually try to understand these problems and solve them. According to Stanford scholar and Harvard alumnus thought leader Adnan Masood, solving a question quicker is actually more likely to harm us than benefit us, as it promotes laziness in our cognitive processes. Moreover, the inherent process of studying for a timed test promotes cheat codes and rapid memorization without genuine promotion of conceptual understanding. Albeit the merits of memorizing cheat codes, which is really just being able to solve questions quicker, we have to understand why we take tests in the first place. Is it to see if a student is able to memorize more cheat codes, have a faster pace, or to test the depth of a student’s understanding of a context? Schools and organizations claim the latter, but don’t realize the hypocritical contradiction of doing so.

So what kind of tests should we be taking?

According to the National Institute of Health, non-timed tests in relaxed environments bring out the most accurate and unfiltered measurements of a student’s knowledge, as anxiety can also bring inaccurate measures of knowledge. However, schools and organizations can help with this. A relaxed environment would be one that allows the student to minimize their anxiety, necessitating the absence of timed measurements, removing things like when the teacher says “5 minutes left. I acknowledge that giving an unlimited amount of time could be unrealistic and have limitations in itself, as class time can only be prolonged for so long, as well as the time given in other such testing centers. Nevertheless, these limitations can be solved by allowing time extensions to a feasible extent, dividing the test into multiple sessions, or even after-school testing centers where students can take the option to take the test with more time.

In conclusion, it is now past time to realize that the misconception that timed-tests bring exclusive benefits and are a good measure of a student’s knowledge is utterly false and start implementing non-timed tests that allow students to take tests with ease, taking sufficient time and thoroughly solving each and every question and understanding the concepts.