Although conceptually, schools should cultivate people with all-round development, in fact, even in the primary school stage, the phenomenon of taking exams as the center is very common. Examination propositions correct knowledge details by rote, ignoring high-level ability evaluation outside memory, thus contributing to the study style of rote learning to a certain extent. The consequence is that students have a heavy learning burden, which affects the development of various abilities.
2. One-sided pursuit of scores
Scores become learning goals, which is not conducive to stimulating students' intrinsic motivation for knowledge. From the perspective of educational psychology, there are two kinds of students' learning motivation: internal motivation and external motivation. External motivation is the learning motivation inspired by external rewards, such as studying hard and getting high marks. Intrinsic motivation is the enthusiasm for learning caused by likes, interests or activities themselves. Examinations make many students study for exams, which inhibits the development of intrinsic motivation for knowledge. It is also easy to dampen the enthusiasm of students with difficulties by evaluating students only by their exam results. Foreign studies show that the smarter students are, the more active they are in graded schools, while the slower students are, the more active and effective they are in non-graded schools. In the lower grades of primary school, the bad influence of scores on poor students is particularly obvious.
3. Affect students' mental health
When schools evaluate students, academic performance is often the main evaluation criterion. Some teachers will criticize students in public and even humiliate them because of their poor grades, which will greatly hurt their self-esteem. Many adults can't forget a teacher's praise or an unexpected encouragement when they recall their primary school life. At the same time, what can't be forgotten for a long time is the teacher's contempt or ridicule. It is often the case in life that students who get high marks are regarded as good children and rewarded. If you don't do well in the exam, you will be scolded by your teachers and parents. Examination pressure brings heavy psychological burden to students, causes examination anxiety and damages children's mental health. Examination competition is not conducive to mutual assistance and cooperation between students, but also leads to some bad habits, such as plagiarism, lying and being too aggressive.
4. Restrict the teaching reform
Because testing plays a guiding and controlling role in educational activities, any educational reform will be difficult to achieve results without changing the concept, content and methods of testing. Under the unreasonable examination system, some good educational ideas, good teaching materials and good teaching methods cannot be implemented in practice. If the school carries out the "happy learning" teaching reform, but the evaluation still focuses on the students' achievements in traditional exams, the reform will inevitably be blocked. Because the reform means taking new measures, the early stage of the reform may have an impact on conventional teaching, which not only can not guarantee students to get higher test scores, but sometimes lead to the decline of some students' grades because of the pursuit of some quality development. It is for this reason that some schools are afraid and unwilling to reform.