Opinion | Doing away with exams, ushering in assessments

The new directive from the government of Nepal to replace internal written exams from grades 1 to 5, citing stress relief among children, is a great promise. Stress alleviation is only a small gift of this new proposed reform. If we can get it right and assess what truly matters, we can change what Nepal becomes. At this moment, when the country is going through a transformative political change, we should all be asking ourselves: What do we want the future Nepali citizen to be? If we want our children to grow into adults capable of solving real-life problems, we need to move beyond traditional examinations towards evaluations designed to achieve that outcome. When I first arrived at Harvard, I performed poorly in almost all my classes. Despite a clear assignment description, I was always confused about what I was expected to include in my submission. Evaluations here were different. What did ‘good work’ look like here? It took me nearly a whole year to understand what my classmates, teaching teams, tests and assignments were even asking of me. I realised that the coursework did not demand that I reproduce concepts through tests, rather it called for me to build: To communicate the construction of my knowledge through evidence and to demonstrate what I could create with my learning. I now realise that those experiences have changed my ability to create and to live a learned life. This experience brought something into focus for me. It was clear that my learning experiences