… and could coronavirus trigger an end to futile and educationally damaging testing?

My apologies for this apparent frivolity at a time when there are obviously more serious things to think about. In other circumstances, poking fun at our system of public examinations and what it means for examinees would probably be dismissed as contentious and futile. But covid-19 is forcing us all to re-evaluate things we have long taken for granted, and this is an issue which certainly shouldn’t escape without, well, closer examination.

At the time when it was announced that schools would have to close as a measure to limit the spread of coronavirus there was a huge outcry from the education establishment. It was still possible then to expect the normality of school exams to take precedence over what was already manifestly a lethal global pandemic.

We were told that it was “unjust” and “threatening to the life chances of young people” that school closures would debar students from taking GCSEs and A levels  this year. Since then the unjust impact of disease and damaged futures have come to be a reality for many millions of other people in Britain.

So it’s easy to overlook the fact that within days of learning that public exams were off the agenda, there were comprehensive plans in place for alternatives ways to assess and grade examination-year students. They will be rated by their teachers on the strength of course work and internal school tests including mock GCSEs and mock A levels. As if no one had ever thought of doing this before!

A barbaric rite of passage into adulthood

Surely the young victims themselves would be delighted by this news. Could youngsters, who must in all other years submit themselves to torture by the malicious grown up world, possibly regret escaping this barbaric rite of passage to adulthood? Would any right-thinking person (and hopefully the examine system is to some extent looking to identify right-thinking people) want to submit to futile high-octane tests of memory in order to demonstrate the range of their talents and abilities? Do students on the threshold of adulthood really need the gross distortions of the exam room to tell them what any teacher knows only too well, that life after school is never going to be fair?

Astonishingly: yes, yes and apparently yes.

Nothing illustrates the brainwashing power of our education system better than the bright young people who were wheeled out in front of TV news cameras to protest in favour of the inanity of external exams which the virus was going to deny them.

The students are of course entirely innocent in this mass deception. Most of them have passed two thirds of their lives being told by teachers and parents that they should pass their exams. The teachers are largely blameless too. They are not on the whole enthusiasts of testing because they know how much of their own valuable time and energy is frittered away by government tests for the schools themselves. And many openly express dismay at so much time being devoted to achieving examination success at the expense of a more rounded educational experience for the kids.

Exams for recruitment, not education

The evil geniuses who have so successfully deceived the country for so long are our universities and our employers. It was the bosses in the higher education industry who suddenly realised in March that, once school was out for summer, they might have to work harder to select September’s university intake. Their protests were loud, carefully argued and largely specious.

Employers were also alarmed. They expect schools and colleges to stage examinations so they won’t have to bother with most of the heavy work involved in recruiting staff. In fact, they are more used to an annual routine of criticising “easy” exams and blaming schools (which are preoccupied with pursuing pass rates) for failing to deliver the fully rounded, work-ready employees they want.

In my experience the best universities and the best employers are those most likely to use a range of assessment mechanisms when selecting people for courses and jobs: school records, teacher appraisals, personal interviews, interests, social interactions and so on, as well as exam results. The worst of them admit everyone with an apparently appropriate grade and later boot out the poor sods who later don’t live up to expectations. This may efficient for recruiting, but it’s catastrophically wasteful for the lives of young adult cast-offs.

Exams measure how good students are at taking exams. They’re much less effective at telling us how good schools are at educating their students. If exams really had any intrinsic value perhaps post-graduates students and staff applying for professorships would also have to take them!

Examiners are NOT better than teachers

And if my ridicule seems overly antagonistic, have a look at what Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham Professor Anthony Seldon said in a BBC radio interview when he was arguing for 2020’s exams to be reinstated. He was speaking up for the “hundreds of thousands of students who have been preparing for five years in the case of GCSEs and two years in the case of A-levels for the most important test of their academic ability in their lives”.

So that’s what someone regarded as a senior educationalist thinks is the aim of education for our young: seven years of schooling not for learning how to be rounded human beings, not for discovering themselves, not for realising their potential in whatever fields of activity they might excel, not for acquiring the skills to be valued as citizens, not even for becoming effective economic units. Evidently what’s important to him is that they spend seven years preparing to have their academic abilities tested. What dangerous enervating nonsense from one of the presumed experts who will determine the course of so many lives for much of the rest of this century.

Contrary to what Professor Seldon says, it’s perfectly possible to devise accurate alternative systems for appraising students, and they would have been in operation already if the same resources had been devoted to them as have been wasted on a century of external school examinations. His accompanying suggestion that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds can only be assessed fairly by subjecting them to written tests is fatuous. It stinks of academic laziness and arrogance.

Examiners are certainly no better as assessors than the people who directly teach the students. I was educated for more than a decade by people who could and did accurately predict what grades my peers and I would eventually achieve. When their predictions were wrong this was likely to be due to something like their inability to foresee that I would go to bed late the night before the paper on Shakespeare, or that I would have a painful high jump accident the day before a French exam. They knew perfectly well how good and how bad I was – the examiners didn’t.

So here’s a suggestion to test the real motives of those who are fanatically wedded to the primacy of academic examinations. What if we keep exams, but adapt them so that they became useful tools in a broad system for properly educating young people – and not just a lazy cop-out to make it easier for someone else to select candidates for life’s next competitive trial?

Let’s test to discover need, not failure

Systems that reward success unavoidably and equally also stigmatise failure. Personally I’d like to do away with school and university examinations altogether.

But if we must have them, let’s use them constructively when we are starting something new, not when we are finishing a course and it’s now too late to change how successful we’ve been. This could involve taking some carefully gauged exams when we arrive at a new school or a new stage at school or college, like an A-level course (and definitely not at the end of every term). We could take more papers in the first term at university, and a final exam after we start work, geared in part to the skills and knowledge we are going to need – as bus driver or an accountant or whatever.

That way it would be perfectly clear to the educators and trainers what further instruction and support is needed by each examinee, and they could gear courses and support realistically – specifically to encouraging everyone to do and be better. Wouldn’t that be useful?

It’s no good screaming that students wouldn’t know anything they could be tested on. These exams would be about what they should have been learning (and understanding) in the previous phase of our educational career, with a slant towards the approaches they will need in the next.

We are hearing all the time now that the life will not be the same for any of us after coronavirus, and that we will all have to adopt to a new world and new ways of doing things. Now we have established that exams are after all dispensable, why shouldn’t one of these be a more humane, rational and educationally rewarding approach to testing the abilities of our students?

And in the meantime, while prospects in so many aspects of our experience seem so bleak, let’s celebrate 2020 when just for once we will absolutely have to do without exams.