Introduction
A practical exam is an examination where the practical knowledge of a student or a group of students is assessed on the basis of a real-life scenario or experiment that they can do using that knowledge. Practical exams are usually conducted in the clinical, field, and/or laboratory settings to get the most accurate results.
Importance of Practical Exams
Practical exams are essential to academics, especially today. In this fast-paced world, what employers are actually looking for is not fancy degrees but rather whether or not the person is employable or not.
Improving Your Skillset
Practically learning something has the unique ability to help students apply what they have learned in an environment outside their classroom. While it is important to learn the theory of a subject or topic, getting out there and applying that theory to a practical situation helps the person build on their existing skills. A practical exam also helps apply technical knowledge in a particular field which is extremely beneficial in every subject but particularly in subjects like medicine, horticulture, engineering, etc.
Gives a Better Understanding of The Subject
A practical exam strengthens the comprehension and understanding of a particular subject. Even though theoretical education makes use of textbooks and research papers, applying that knowledge in the real world and having a first-hand experience with it will help understand it much better.
Better Knowledge Retention
It has been proven time and time again that practically understanding something and having your hands-on experience with it will undoubtedly help remember things better because you have done it yourself.
Real-World Implications of Preparing For a Practical Exam
Preparing for a practical exam is a very good way of learning a particular subject because it is a complete detailed account of the same in a physically doable format. However, preparing for a practical exam has much more real-world implications than you would think. Given below are a few real-world implications of studying for a practical exam.
Applying Theory Effectively
The main point of studying something is so that you can apply it in the real world. Therefore for example a doctor who knows the theory cannot treat a patient unless they have practically practiced their profession effectively. An engineer cannot be entrusted to build a bridge or create a computer application without practical knowledge of the same. The same applies to students as well.
Enhancing Creativity
When discussing the importance of practical exams, people often overlook how much it can positively affect the brain. As you might already know our brain is made up of another number of connections within the body known as the nervous system. All the parts of the body are connected to the brain through small fibers known as neurons. An interesting aspect of neurons is that a group of neurons can be trained to perform a particular set of tasks and then those specific tasks can be executed almost automatically by the brain when required with enough practice. So when a person learns something new through experience for this purpose, they create a new set of connections inside the brain again. This can be understood with the help of an example.
If you are right-handed you probably brush your teeth with your right hand every day. However, if you try to brush your teeth with your left hand, the action will suddenly feel odd because your brain is trying to process doing the same action you do with your right hand now being done by your left hand. This will create a type of functional dis in the brain which will result in the brain forcing a new set of neurons for this purpose with enough practice, the brain will start to recognize this action better and better and make it less odd to do.
This is essentially what is happening inside your brain when you are preparing for and writing a practical exam or, for example, applying maths in daily life. There are a lot of concepts that we learn in our respective subjects that we think we do not need in daily life, but these are the skills that enable us to learn better.
Problem Solving
Problem-solving skills are one of the most important skills that a person should have in the 21st century. Preparing for a practical exam definitely helps you in improving your problem-solving skills because you will use your practical learning experience to create solutions to problems that you would not have learned in theory.
Communication Skills & Teamwork
Practical knowledge also helps you understand how to communicate with other people to get something done and hence impact the way you work with people. For example in the case of a doctor, it is essential for them to work with other doctors in the case of an emergency or a complicated case. This can only happen when these doctors work together in a practical real-life scenario and apply this with respect to their field. So preparing for a practical exam also helps you improve your communication skills and also brings to light the importance of teamwork.
Conclusion
As you can see, practical knowledge is very important in any field and so students need to give importance to a practical exam as much as they give importance to their theory exams. So give importance to practical training and prepare better for all the practical exams that will come your way eventually because they are the real-world test of your knowledge and capabilities.
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