Define: examinization
You may have had the experience of being in a class where a teacher is describing, in excruciating detail, the structure of an upcoming exam paper. You can't help but feel something has gone incredibly wrong. This is because you're being examinized
.
Examinization
is when exams feed back into people's behavior around the year. They make it socially acceptable to purchase guides to exams and spend time reverse engineering test structure. After the exam, for at least a week, parents, students, and teachers are found squabbling to improve grades.
Why does it happen?
The bureaucracy responsible for your education works really hard to [[reduce variance]] between students across the country. It conducts exams at a national level with a well defined syllabus, and a standard set of textbooks that all students are required to use. The exams ask a very predictable set of questions, and are graded in a standard manner according a rubric distributed to examiners.
For example: if you have the ability to memorize all solutions to the NCERT math textbook, you'll be able to pass without doing much math.
A metric used to compare similar schools is how well their students have fared on the central exams, on average. This is precisely what schools work to maximize. School life transforms around these exams, particularly in high-school. In the classroom, teachers move fast to complete the syllabus. Once that happens, the classroom degenerates into exam discussion.
We start overfitting
for the exams. That's a statistics term, abundant in Machine Learning, where a neural net trained to the idiosyncrasies of sample data fails to work with new data.