The environment in an exam is highly unnatural and stifling because

1. students cannot talk to themselves, to other people, refer to resources, use computers, or interact with other people (which are important and natural human activities in general and in academia)

2. students are physically constrained; they cannot take a walk, turn their heads, nor even move to a more desirable location in the exam room. For some people, freedom of movement is very important and without it, they become paralysed. I've lost count of the number of times I've been stumped on a question in an exam, only to immediately realize the answer 10 minutes later while walking in Kensington Park.

3. The environment in an exam is intimidating. Many times I have had to contend with the lecturer almost breathing down my neck; has this got anything to do with my ability in the subject? Half my brainpower was consumed in an endless for loop, which contained nothing more than the wish to leave the exam room and complete the test elsewhere.

An exam culture is tantamount to teaching by the threat of failure and disgrace. Humans have the capacity to learn and become better people by other incentives; for example, the incentive to solve real world problems, to contribute to society, competition, and intellectual curiosity. Therefore, the exam culture is demeaning and pointless.

Humans learn by making mistakes and learning from their mistakes. The concept of an exam completely contradicts this; in an exam, mistakes are punished with a bad mark. There is only right and wrong, and no forum for discussion and debate on the issue. This is extraordinarily complacent and hypocritical of academics, whose greatest successes are the fruits of many years of mistakes (and some, like penicillin, were almost discarded as mistakes).

Passing judgement by means of an exam on a human is wrong because

1. humans change, but a mark is permanent.

2. Humans are far too complex and there is no such thing as a level playing field. Not enough is known, either about mathematics or about the human brain, to make an assessment on the quality of an individual's academic talents or their capacity to contribute or their intellectual capacity. And why make one anyway? What's the point?

3. If it is an indication of anything, the mark reflects nothing more than the student's talent at sitting an exam.

Psychological effects

1. The mark is therefore fairly meaningless (4.1, and 1.), but has an emotional impact on the student, which can encourage complacency if it is good and be damaging, intimidating, stigmatising and off-putting if it is bad.

2. The exam culture encourages obsessive and compulsive behaviour because it demands tremendous amounts of emotional and intellectual energy that is focussed towards a two hour ejaculation, which, while the student cannot claim ownership of it, contains within it the latent threat of failure and disgrace.

An exam is cold and impersonal. There is no opportunity to correct one's mistakes and there is no access to the marker. All one is given is a two hour window in which to perform.

Probably the biggest problem facing young people in our post-industrial age is to find their identity and place in society; curiosity, self confidence and open mindedness are therefore important.

An exam culture does not foster self-confidence because

1. it does not accurately reflect the individual

2. it demands a great deal of energy (which could otherwise be spent gaining real-world experience, being open minded and exploring)

3. it is a very unnatural enterprise and the emphasis is on the exam itself rather than the individual.

4. Because of 2. and 3., an exam culture actively discourages open mindedness and curiosity.

It is widely conjectured that the problems facing society in the future will only be solved by interdisciplinary means, which require open mindedness and unconventional thinking; therefore, an exam culture is not appropriate to this task.

Exams are off-putting and intimidating to people. One of the objectives of Imperial is to encourage young people to study science and mathematics. But these subjects are intimately tied to exams in people's minds. And the only route to doing funded research in these subjects is by passing lots and lots and lots of exams.

There are alternatives to an exam culture. Off the top of my head: a project culture and an apprenticeship culture.

Sometimes people say that doing exams helps to foster intellectual stamina. This is not true. There are examples of people with intellectual stamina who shine less brightly under exam conditions. The classic example is Hermite.

People sometimes say that exams are a 'necessary evil'. Maybe they are a throwback to a more impoverished age where a library of a thousand books cost half the gross national product, communication and travel were difficult and expensive and there was some practical value to exams and their constraints. But now the challenge is not so much the distribution of information but the analysis of it. In addition, our government aims for 50% of the population to have tertiary education. But exams were designed to discriminate and to act as a filter for a small intellectual clique. The slightly romantic position that they now enjoy is the unfortunate by-product of this discrimination; that they came to be seen as an initiation into academia.

So the exam system was conceived for a different society and with less than 5% of the population in mind. What is the impact of subjecting 50% of the population to the exam culture for most of their childhood years and how expensive is this to society?

While I hear lots of talk in the press about exams, the basic assumption of their existence is seldom questioned; we've grown up with them, take them for granted and even sometimes entertain the idea that we are privileged to have them. The debate almost always focusses on how to modify the exam system that I have argued is comically out-of-place in our society and fundamentally flawed. And the trend right now is more exams from an earlier age.