1.     The educational model at UoPeople places a great emphasis on examinations.  Does your culture or country have the same emphasis?

2.     Do you personally agree with the emphasis placed on examinations?

My Point of View in Examinations of Taiwan
    In Taiwan, most students have to go through two national exams for their entrances to senior high school and college. The society also considers the schools and universities students graduate from paramount. The diploma students earn for their education becomes one of the crucial indicators for employers in Taiwan to determine whether the students are competitive and intelligent. From my personal experience, I had an arduous life in my high school. My classmates and I had been studying more than 12 hours a day for the last two years of high school. There was nothing but exams in our lives. The single goal is to get into one of the promising universities in Taiwan. However, this test-oriented education system has been criticized that it hinders students’ critical thinking and fail to boost students’ interest in learning (Taiwan’s Education System is Failing Its Youth, 2016).
    I partially agree that exams can be a good way to evaluate a student’s progress. It is a standardized method for all students. It would be valuable for instructors to know the progress of each student. Also, exams would encourage students to learn in order to pass the exams (Paul A. M., 2015). While preparing for exams, students will learn more and try to organize notes in order to comprehend the ideas written in books or taught in lectures. However, it would be insufficient to know how much a student has learned and achieved by exams. I would suggest using peer assessment and projects to further evaluate a student’s overall academic performance. Peer assessment would help them to know how other students interpret a question and how they provide answers to the question. In the process of assessing each other’s work, they will learn from the differences between their works. Additionally, doing projects gives students a hands-on experience to use what they learn in courses. Students would have better chances to understand and memorize information in textbooks by implementing those tasks themselves.
    However, if the learning environment is online courses. Exams would be more suitable when it’s compared with traditional classrooms. Since discussions on the Internet becomes more difficult, so project work would be more demanding and inconvenient. UoPeople does introduce peer review to further help instructors keep track of students’ learning curve and performance. For the past 6 weeks, I’ve enjoyed my learning on UoPeople and will continue to earn my Bachelor Degree in Computer Science.
References
Taiwan’s Education System is Failing Its Youth. (2016). In TheNewsLens. Retrieved August 1, 2018, from https://international.thenewslens.com/article/46431
Paul A. M. (2015). Researchers Find That Frequent Tests Can Boost Learning. Retrieved August 1, 2018, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/researchers-find-that-frequent-tests-can-boost-learning/
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