The Great Exams Rip-off

So, not only are school examinations so easy these days that they could be passed with some comfort by a plate of processed cheese, but the exam board people give the kids the answers as well. This is but one reason why our school leavers are, in the main, pig ignorant. When the Education Secretary Michael Gove angrily insists that there will be a full inquiry and that he intends to ‘maintain’ British exams as being the ‘best in the world’, he is presumably speaking from a rift in the space-time continuum which has transported him back to 1957. English education is, these days, a joke.

However, one way to stop exam boards from revealing the answers in advance to schools is to end, immediately, all competition between exam boards. Indeed, have but the one exam board. Competition has been fetishised by successive governments, but it is not always a good thing. In the case of private bus companies, for example, it means that resources are poured into profitable routes and the less profitable routes are neglected. In education it means — among other things — that exam boards tout for business by attempting to convince schools that their standards are more lax than all the others, and even, as we’ve seen, to bunging them the answers in advance.