One of the most wonderful things about walking around Oxford at this time of year is seeing hordes of young people celebrating the end of exams: finals, A-levels. GCSEs. Hundreds of miles north in Scotland, younger students may soon have another reason to celebrate altogether: the end of National 5 qualifications.
An imminent review of secondary Scottish assessment is widely anticipated to recommend ditching exams for 15 and 16 year olds, and replacing National 5 qualifications (the Scottish equivalent to GCSEs) with a new system. Under the new proposals, students would be judged on coursework alongside a Scottish ‘diploma’ which recognises extra-curricular activities, sport and volunteering. The review was announced in October 2021 after a damning OECD report found there was a ‘lack of robust data for assessing school performance’, no clear leadership on curriculum development and a narrowing of subject choices offered to pupils.
Exams are the closest thing we have to a social leveller: it is just you and your pen in the exam room
If the review does propose such a radical change, and the recommendations are accepted, then this will be a disaster for Scottish schools. Coursework has already proven to be impossible to moderate: wealthier pupils can rely on parents and private tutors to polish and proofread their prose. Meanwhile, the rise of AI makes plagiarism increasingly difficult to spot and therefore increasingly tempting for students. I can’t tell you already how many hours I’ve wasted trying to work out which parts of essays are authentic and which are appropriated.
Coursework therefore arguably only works under direct supervision, which we tried already in England with controlled assessments. They were scrapped because they took up far too much lesson time which should have been dedicated to teaching and learning. It also added to teachers’ workload and put pressure on them to be overly generous with their marking whilst also trying to navigate all of the logistical challenges of circumnavigating cheating. Clearly though the SNP will accept no lessons from anything the Engish have taught them, and will insist on making their own mistakes.
Some may welcome the move away from high-pressured, stressful exams which too often rely on rote-learning regurgitated answers. But my cynicism suggests this decision is more to do with avoiding comparison than it is about broadening students’ knowledge and skills. Across the board, standards in Scottish schools are falling, and a report found that their education system is the weakest performing in the UK.
The SNP has already abandoned its plan to eliminate the poverty-related attainment gap in schools by 2026 after it was revealed that literacy in the most deprived primary school pupils was at its lowest level in six years. There has been a persistent decline in the number of pupils studying STEM and other more ‘difficult’ subjects; meanwhile, behaviour has become so terrible that a teacher is attacked or threatened every three minutes. Removing exams would not raise these standards, but it would help the SNP to avoid scrutiny: you can’t judge on results if there are no results to judge.
I just hope that this review doesn’t reignite the conversation in England around scrapping GCSEs too. Our exams system is far from perfect and I agree with many of its critics: there’s too little opportunity for collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. GCSEs focus on analogue learning and assessment in a digital age, and could better equip pupils for the world of work. It also goes without saying that, AI will fundamentally change the educational landscape and force GCSEs to evolve anyway sooner or later.
There is plenty of room for improvement, and we should not let our own system stagnate because ‘that’s the way it’s always been’. However, ultimately, exams are the best form of assessment we have – or, at the very least, the least worst. They give clarity in expectations and attainment standards; they motivate students and schools; they support fair admissions; they offer quality assurance; they are marked objectively and leave little room for discrimination. Finally, and most importantly, exams are the closest thing we have to a social leveller: it is just you and your pen in the exam room, no one else can take it for you.
Call me sentimental (I am an English teacher), but there’s a beautiful poem by Rupert Brookes called ‘In Examination’ which describes the transformative power of exams. In it, the speaker describes ‘hunched’, ‘dull’, ‘blear-eyed’ ‘scribbling figures’ suddenly becoming illuminated by a shard of sunlight. In that moment they become transformed into ‘kings’ and ‘gods’, ‘haloed with holy light’, ‘young and wise’.
Now whilst I’m not saying exams turn teenagers into ‘archangels and angels’, they do show young people how much we expect of them, how knowledge is power, how immensely invigorating and satisfying it is to have achieved something. It shows them what it is to have worked hard for something, to have tapped into an intrinsic drive in a world full of extrinsic desires. Exams are not the be-all and end-all, but scrapping them altogether would be a real failure of imagination.
Comments