FEBRUARY 11 — It is exam season again.

You can feel it on campus before you see it. The slightly heavier silence in corridors and hallways. The way students walk faster, eyes lowered, shoulders tense. Lecturers move differently too. Less small talk. More emails. More deadlines stacked on top of each other. Everyone is tired, just in different ways.

People often assume exam season is stressful mainly for students. It is. But it is also stressful for lecturers, although for reasons that are rarely spoken about. It is not just the volume of marking, although that alone can be overwhelming. A friend of mine is handling close to four hundred students this semester, with exam scripts arriving only days before final submission deadlines. That kind of load takes a toll. But what weighs on me most during exam week is something quieter. 

It is the uncomfortable thought that my way of teaching may not have worked for everyone.

Some students learn well through lectures. Some through discussion. Some need time. Some need examples. Some need repetition. Some need reassurance. In a real classroom, learning happens unevenly, quietly, and often invisibly. And yet, at the end of the semester, we gather all of that complexity and ask it to reveal itself in a two-hour exam.

That compression has always troubled me. Yes, an exam can tell us something. It can show whether certain concepts landed. It can reveal patterns. It can highlight gaps. But what it cannot do is tell the whole story. And the danger lies in forgetting that.

When a student performs poorly, our minds typically rush to explanations. Did they not study enough. Did they not pay attention. Did they not take things seriously. These thoughts come easily because they give us a sense of control. If the reason is simple, then the system still makes sense.

But life is rarely that neat.

In the 2008 Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell reminds us that performance is never just about individual effort. Timing, background, opportunity, and unseen support all matter more than we like to admit. Exams flatten all of that into a number, and we often forget what was lost in the process.

We do not know what happened the day or the night before the exam. We do not know if a family member fell ill. If a parent passed away. If a pet died. If something small but emotionally heavy broke their concentration in a way they could not recover from in time. We do not know if anxiety tightened its grip just when they needed clarity the most.

Because exams, for all their usefulness, ask us to do something we should approach with great humility. They ask us to evaluate people with incomplete information. They invite us to mistake performance for potential, and results for worth.

I say this not to dismiss standards, or to suggest that effort does not matter. It does. Assessment has its place. Structure matters. Accountability matters. But so does restraint. So does the ability to say, I do not know as much as I think I do.

In many parts of life, not just education, we are rewarded for sounding certain. For having answers. For offering confident conclusions. But certainty can be misleading. Especially when it closes the door on curiosity and compassion.

This reminder does not make the work easier. In fact, it makes it heavier. Because humility is not passive. It carries responsibility. It asks us to pause before forming conclusions. To leave room for what we cannot see. To resist the comfort of neat explanations.

And that, I think, is where the real lesson lies.

Being humble is not about doubting ourselves endlessly, or lowering standards until they disappear. It is about being honest enough to admit that our view is always partial. That an exam script, a performance review, a single conversation, or a single day rarely captures the whole truth of a person.

We are constantly interpreting outcomes without full context. We tell ourselves stories about effort, ability, intention. Some of those stories are accurate. Many are incomplete. Humility reminds us to treat those stories as drafts, not conclusions.

And when we remember that, giving someone the benefit of the doubt stops being an act of generosity.

It becomes an act of responsibility.

* Ir Dr Nahrizul Adib Kadri is a professor of biomedical engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, the Director of UM Press, and the Principal of Tuanku Bahiyah Residential College, Universiti Malaya. He may be reached at nahrizuladib@um.edu.my

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.