Can a slow writer win?

Having just finished a final examination for a Law Degree, I find that the education system has never changed a bit. It remains as always an imperfect system for deciding which students shall be allowed to pass. Well, as we all know, not always the brightest, most creative or not even the most hard working will be selected by the examination system. Usually those students who knows the rules of the game and are willing to play by them will be rewarded by the system. I remember I once read a book about Rhectoric in which the author has spent some pages on the examination system. I can remember that he said somehting like this: the rules of the game are parroting, regurgitation, conformity and medeocrity. Applying Darwin's rule, the fittest students in an examination have to be those who know these rules of the games. Writing an essay to criticize the examinations seems as boring as attending one. However, has any one, any educatinalist ever thought about devising a more reasonable system than the conventional written examinations.
Taking law for instance, the conventional three hours papers require the students to answer about four questions out of a total of eight to ten questions. For each question, there is an average writing time of about 45 minutes including planning, organising and reviewing. What can the examiner desire from the students apart from reciting about eight hundred to a thousand words for each question to write as much as they know to be relevant to the question. Will there be arguments and counter arguments to reflect the pros and cons of a legal problem? Can tehy make a thought provoking conclusion? My answer is impossible unless the student has already made a speculation on the questions and have prepared all these necessary arguments and conclusion in advance and just recite them without any thinking at all as he writes along. Well, that happens all the time and these students are usually generously rewarded. However, how much do they know about the questions which they have not prepared, how much do they know about the whole subject? More often than not, that would be far less than what one can expect from the grade they have been awarded.
Nowadays, some universities adopt the system of assessment by coursework hoping that the negative side of the convention written examination may perhaps be set off to a little extent. I agree that in courseworks there is no problem of undue time pressure on the students, but on the other hand there is another problem of the tempation of plagiarism which has become more and more serious in colleges and even High schools. Courseworks like written examinations also have the problem of lack of interaction between the examiners and the examinees. The examiners do not have the benefit of making judgment and assessment of the candidates by reference to the candidates' instantaneous responses. I always believe that interviews should also be adopted as an assessment method to supplement if not replace the conventional written examinations and by so doing the academic assessment of the students will be closer to perfection. To achieve this end, the interviews have to be be conducted in a well structured manner where the examiners apart from the main examination questions shall have some guidance on the asking some linking questions to test the genuine understanding of the subjects on the candidates' part. In essence, it has to be thorough and yet flexible.
We should always bear in mind that we are testing how well the students understand the subject but not how fast they can write on it. We shoiuld also try to devise a system to discourage the students to speculate on the examinations and get penalised for studying the subject too thorough.