Exams and exploration

It is not often I agree with this man, and I don't entirely here either, but I did think something about this observation of the old exam culture was something I think it is a pity we seem to be losing:

"Exams enable students to put off their work until the end of the year and that strikes me as an immensely valuable thing...if you [have] a system of continuous assessment...you have a pretty hard life. I like for the Faculty of Arts the idea that you sit around for a long time discussing things in coffee shops and pubs and quadrangles and anywhere else that you can get some seating and, finally, towards the end of the year you've got to get some work done... That's a good way, I think, to conduct an Arts education; students educate each other in the course of this."

David Malet Armstrong, Oral History Interview, National Library of Australia