system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Academic exams should either not be timed, or have far less tight time limits.

Full disclosure, I may be biased on this topic as I have just been rejected from the university of my choice because my grade in one subject was not high enough, but this is an opinion I have virtually always held.

I have always struggled with time in exams, during my GCSEs and A Levels (exams usually taken at 16 and 18 in the UK) I was deemed to require extra time, but I still struggled to finish exams within the time limits, mostly due to writing speed.

All of my chosen subjects were essay-based, which made the time constraints seem bizarre to me. No historian would ever write an essay in an hour and half without access to sources, for example. Since high school and college level education is meant to be a stepping stone into university, it baffles me that such significant a constraint is applied with little to no relevance to actual academic practice.

In one of my exams I had to write two essays as well as answers a few shorter questions. I was barely able to even start one of the essays simply because I couldn't write fast enough, which caused my overall grade to drop from a predicted A to a B. In essays I wrote for homework I almost always got an A or A*, since I was not required to finish them in 45 minutes. Indeed, finishing an essay in a short time is not usually a sign of proper a proper intellectual process in actual academia, so the time constraints seem entirely arbitrary and unnecessarily punishing. 

I can sort of understand why STEM subjects might require timed exams, since answers are usually either correct or incorrect, and writing speed is far less of a factor, but why should written essays in which the quality of the argument is what is being assessed treated the same way? They are fundamentally different skills. 

Time management is important in academia, but this is not on such a micro scale as in exams. Time management is usually most important for the planning of research and such, and meeting deadlines, not banging out a thesis within an hour.
gpt
Usually, high school and even undergrad level courses don’t aim to give you anything more than knowledge and familiarity with the subject matter. They want you to know the basics off the top of your head. 

For this, it’s actually helpful to have a time limit because it ensures that whatever you wrote is something you *do*, in fact, know off the top of your head, and can probably say during a casual conversation about the matter. You’re absolutely right that it doesn’t translate well towards actual academic work, but it’s not meant to. It’s meant to assess whether or not you have enough of a grasp on the material to recall it quickly and accurately when asked—like what you’d have to do if someone verbally asked about your thoughts.