'School examinations do not test intelligence.' Express your views either for or against this statement.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 340 words) — arguing FOR the statement

School examinations test many things. They test memory, they test handwriting speed, they test whether a student has guessed the pattern of the paper correctly. What they do not reliably test is intelligence.

Begin with what an examination actually measures. A student is given two hours, a fixed syllabus known months in advance, and a set of questions drawn from a predictable range. Success under those conditions depends on recall under time pressure and on familiarity with the format. Both are skills. Neither is intelligence, which is the capacity to reason about problems one has NOT seen before — and an examination is designed, deliberately, to contain no such problems.

The evidence for this is the coaching industry. If examinations tested intelligence, it would not be possible to raise a student’s score by forty per cent through drilling past papers, because drilling does not make anyone more intelligent. That it demonstrably does raise scores tells us precisely what is being measured.

There is also the matter of what is left out. A student may be exceptionally good at building things, at arguing, at understanding people, at music, at noticing what others miss. None of these appears on a mark sheet. Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences made this point forty years ago and school examinations have absorbed almost none of it.

The fair objection is that examinations remain the most practical instrument we have. Thousands of candidates must be assessed by strangers, quickly and comparably, and no alternative yet proposed scales as well. That is true, and it is an argument for keeping examinations. It is not an argument that they measure intelligence.

The honest position, then, is this: examinations are a reasonable test of preparation and a poor test of mind. The damage is done not by the examination but by the belief that a low mark means a dull student — and it is that belief, not the system, that ought to go.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The instruction is "either for OR against", so take one side and hold it. State it in the opening paragraph.

THE KEY MOVE in this particular question is to DEFINE INTELLIGENCE early. The statement turns entirely on what the word means, and a candidate who never defines it ends up arguing past the question. Notice that the model separates intelligence (reasoning about the unfamiliar) from what examinations reward (recall of the familiar), and every subsequent argument follows from that distinction.

EVIDENCE: the coaching-industry argument is the strongest available and is worth learning, because it is a genuine piece of reasoning rather than an assertion.

The counter-argument paragraph is compulsory in practice, and the model concedes something real — that examinations scale — before answering it. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.