Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why the state should take charge of examinations

Michael Gove has said that ‘nothing is off the table’ when it comes to dealing with the revelations in today’s Telegraph that a chief examiner of the Welsh examination board, WJEC, steered teachers attending his board’s fee-paying advice session so flagrantly in the direction of what was likely to feature in the next examination, it amounted, as the man said, to ‘cheating’.

The irony of the thing is that those teachers who did not pay £230 a session for his assistance are likely to do much better by their pupils: the obliging examiner was telling the teachers about the cycle of examination questions — in other words, which bit of the syllabus was not going to feature in the questions. And I think we’re agreed — are we not? — that it’s preferable that pupils are taught the entire syllabus, not just those bits of it that will feature on exam day. Priming students to produce the precise wording that will attract the highest marks — well, it doesn’t make for independent thinking, now does it?

I was banging on about this years ago. Because, coming from Ireland, and having taken two state examinations there and then A-levels in England, I had no doubt that examinations are one area where a state monopoly is entirely desirable and market competition completely wrong. Look, you’re a commercially-minded examination board wanting to attract the punters, viz, the schools. Are you going to do it by driving up standards, failing more students and creating a more demanding syllabus? Are you hell.

Meanwhile, if you’re an employer or a university, how far is it in your interests that the candidates presenting their qualifications have taken exams from different boards, with different syllabuses and different standards of marking? How are you expected to know if one is ever so slightly less demanding than the others? You might lazily assume that the OCR, Oxford and Cambridge board, would be better than the Welsh one, or AQA or Edexcel.

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