Exams: the worst form of assessment apart from all the others. Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty
Our public examination system is a resilient beast. During The Second World War some exams were held in air raid shelters while bombs rained down from above. Records exist of children who, having had their homes destroyed in raids, endured an entire exam season despite being without accommodation or spare clothing. Decades earlier The First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic saw innovation taking place to keep formal assessment on track. Boys and girls were examined together for the first time, and women were allowed to fulfil invigilation roles. The strong desire to carry out exams, come what may, suggests that we see them as a vital part of the natural order of things.
Where the bombs of the Luftwaffe failed, however, Covid-19 succeeded. As it became clear towards the end of March that schools would be closing, attention turned quickly to the cancellation of exams and the thorny question of how qualifications could be awarded without the traditional process. Administrative bodies across the four nations opted for a system of ‘centre assessed grades’, whereby schools submitted estimated grades for students in each subject. The exam boards have been subjecting these grades to a process of moderation to try to ensure a level of fairness in the outcomes and protect against grade inflation.
For a minority of committed progressive folk, this unprecedented situation provided the glimpse of an opportunity. If a teacher-assessed system could be shown to be effective, it could hammer the death nail for the examination-based approach that they view as archaic and oppressive. As Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian in May “There are some blessings to Covid-19, and one may yet be to liberate education from the dictatorship of ‘the test’’. The idea that exams are a constricting distraction that obscure the joy of learning has been the focus of recent research which recommends teacher assessment in both the UK and the US.
It would appear that the teacher-assessed model is, however, dying before it has had the chance to be born. The moderation process that was employed in Scotland by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) to compensate for apparent grade inflation by schools led to the downgrading of students and affected most those in deprived areas. Following accusations of unfairness and the risk of numerous appeals and contestations, Education Secretary John Swinney yesterday announced that downgraded students would have their results revoked and replaced by the raw teacher-given grades.
Seemingly panicked by this, in a last-minute policy shift, the DfE has announced that downgraded students in England would be able to use previous mock exam results if they exceeded the grade awarded by the exam boards. This eleventh-hour move has been chaotic for schools and its logic has been heavily criticised by school leaders. It is no surprise that exams will be back in October; the sooner the better as far as the authorities are concerned.
Many of the criticisms levelled at exams as a framework for learning and a means of assessment have validity. There have been valiant attempts over the years to provide a balance between formal assessment and coursework-based, teacher-assessed learning, and this trend rightly continues in many vocational and technical courses. However, despite their drawbacks, exams do encourage and promote a much wider set of skills and values than is often acknowledged by their child-centred opponents. And these qualities appear to be important to both students and their parents. Preparing for exams requires prioritisation and planning skills, emotional resilience, self-reliance and discipline. Succeeding in an exam environment requires a cool head under pressure, determination and persistence. And above all, the acquisition and retention of knowledge is viewed as of paramount importance.
What is obvious and striking about these skills and values, is the extent to which they scream social conservatism. It is not hard to see why some progressives may recoil at this system. It hardly seems focused around the values of creativity and individuality that they view as central to their identity. The 2015 British Election Study demonstrated that conservatives were more likely to prioritise attitudes and behaviours within the overall value umbrella of ‘conscientiousness’, which seem a perfect fit for an exam-based education system. Progressives tend to value ‘openness’ which is linked to creativity, and are more prone to ‘neuroticism’ and ‘emotional instability’. It’s not hard to see why the exam hall might be educational kryptonite for them.
So here’s the paradox. Exams seem to fit the bill of a hot culture war issue, particularly in these febrile times. And yet when Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings set about reforming GCSE and A Level qualifications from the Department of Education in 2011, there was little more than a grumble. Opposition seemed to be more focused on the precise content of the History and English curriculum, than the fact that project-based, teacher-assessed components had been reduced to an afterthought. Exams were front and centre again, and more demanding and stress-inducing than before, but there was seemingly very little desire among the most avowedly progressive members of society to seriously challenge the method of our assessment system. Why this is the case is worth some consideration.
To my mind, the answer to this conundrum lies in two places. The first is with a shared concept of justice. Having worked in examinations for a number of years, I have heard exams derided and disparaged in many different ways. They are ‘cruel’, ‘damaging’, ‘joyless’ and ‘tedious’. But I have rarely heard exams called ‘unfair’. Exams provide an impartial and independent judgement on the performance of each student.
Conservatives and indeed many liberals favour them because they appear to conform to a meritocratic standard, and are not prone to corruption or cronyism. Maybe the scope of what they test is limited, but no system is perfect. For progressives, a teacher-assessed system may be more just in egalitarian terms and more inclusive because it does not prioritise such a particular set of skills. Convincing the majority of people that it is robustly meritocratic, would, however, be a huge uphill struggle.
Here the Scottish affair is instructive. Despite its apparent bungling of the matter, SQA was aiming at fairness by trying to bring 2020 attainment into line with previous years. It’s clear that it is not an easy job to create an algorithm that would be rigorously meritocratic in this situation. But one of the reasons formal exams are seen as fair, and many feel the SQA approach was unjust is because the exam system treats each candidate as an individual. There is something morally cold about the collectivism of a general, aggregate moderation process. As Stephen Bush pointed out succinctly “government forgetting life not lived in the aggregate. In aggregate, yes, moderated results are more ‘fair’. But that’s not how it feels to anyone…whose results are downgraded.”
A somewhat more cynical possibility is that there is a second, less noble reason that exams get an easy ride. Those who would be most likely to challenge them on the basis of a more progressive view of education often have little material incentive to do so. There is a reason why constitutional theorist Vernon Bogdanor has labelled the progressive middle-classes the “exam-passing classes“. The writer Nassim Taleb puts it less generously but more colourfully in his most recent book, Skin In The Game, when he talks about the “Intellectual Yet Idiot” who ‘can’t find a coconut on Coconut Island…their main skill is to pass exams written by people like them’. In other words, exams provide a veneer of meritocratic justice which is useful to those who benefit from them materially the most.
It is not unusual in the Anglosphere for the progressively-minded to quietly practise values and lifestyles that are very different to what they preach, as Ed West argued in UnHerd. “Think progressive, live conservative” or “social liberalism for thee but not for me” is a common hypocrisy. In their approach to their children’s education and accomplishments, progressive middle-class parents often employ a Hobbesian ethic whereby stability and security are viewed as the indispensable precondition of individual flourishing. Exams provide a good structure for this via the socially conservative norms and behaviours they promote. They also have the added bonus that they can be justified to oneself in moral terms, in a way that coursework and teacher-assessed systems can’t. A well-defined meritocratic framework allows those at the top to believe that they are deserving of their success, while viewing those at the bottom with less sympathy. Progressive valorisation of child-centred learning and pedagogical experimentation then becomes something that is largely for show, a way of acquiring status among the in-group.
In the end it appears that exams are going to survive Covid-19 relatively unscathed, as they have survived threats in the past. Our commitment to exams appears unshakeable. This is partly because, as Winston Churchill said of democracy, they are the worst form of assessment apart from all the others. But it is also because those who, given this unique opportunity, might have been expected to challenge the status quo hardest are also those who are wisest to its benefits.
John Gaston is an exams and data specialist working in secondary education and a former teacher of Government and Politics.
examscreen 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeExcellent and illuminating article which is packed with insight. The author is too serious a person to have taken the easy shot that the continual teacher assessment method favours the children whose parents can and will help them.
“Preparing for exams requires prioritisation and planning skills, emotional resilience, self-reliance and discipline. Succeeding in an exam environment requires a cool head under pressure, determination and persistence. And above all, the acquisition and retention of knowledge is viewed as of paramount importance.”
Quite so.
I doubt I’m the only one to be both depressed and angry at the main photo – of dozens of students wearing masks which will reduce their oxygen intake, likely causing a mild headache or fuzziness in their thinking – at a time when they need to be as clear-headed as possible.
They are well separated. What stupid person thought they needed to be muzzled as well? Their grades ought to be adjusted upwards in compensation!
Perhaps someone could carry out a controlled trial to see if there is a discernible difference in performance between masked and unmasked students sitting an exam.
These are young people and their susceptibility to the alleged virus is virtually zero.
It is wicked.
There was no suggestion of upward adjustment for the poor sods like me who had itchy eyes and runny noses from hay fever when we did our external exams. Oh, the misery!
As I posted elsewhere on this site, we now have a situation where the Scotland’s result will show a large jump in scores.
This in a time where the schools were closed for months.
I think that in the present mindset of Governments, if schools were closed for ever the results would show a 100% pass.
Reality has lost out to “fairness” again – this woolly thinking can only increase the speed of relative decline of this country to more realistic countries.
Ha ha, yes, not even the Soviet tractor production figures were as fake as this.
For me the whole sorry confusion was starkly illustrated when Nicola Sturgeon said, and I paraphrase, “We will ensure all pupils are properly rewarded for the work they’ve done”. Exams don’t reward you for the work you’ve done, they reward you for the answers you give at the time of the exam, nothing else. Rewarding for the endeavour, the effort, may be an approach dear to teachers and many others, but it is not what exams do.
Could not agree more.
She might as well been at a fairground and said, “Every time a prize and every prize a winner”
You have perfectly described modern education.
Exams have a more important function. They tell pupils what they don’t know and how much more they have to learn. School pupils and university student should welcome exams and protest at not being able to have them, but of course they prefer to protest on other issues, only showing how little they understand.
Spot on! Many feel betrayed at having their moment to shine (or not) ripped away only to be replaced by sexist : pro girl continual assessment. Many are hopping about it.
What you seem to be suggesting is rewarding people for being there rather than accomplishing something. Exams mark the work of the pupil. Course work may mark the work of the pupil, his/her parents, friends or google.
Of course teachers are never biased either.
Your comment reminds me of an end of school year report from my history mistress (back in the 50s): ‘…an unusual pupil whose test marks are always better than his homework marks’.
It was her way of tellng my parents that, whatever they thought I was doing, it wasn’t my homework.
I passed History ‘O’ level. No grades then.
In every area of life if you are required to present information you will 1) look it up, and 2) ask other people. The challenge facing the world, not just in education is not just knowing facts but being able to process information coming from a wider range of sources than ever. Exams belong to the past
Totally agree. If you don’t know the answer to a question you get you phone out of you pocket and ask Google (or Siri). Work done throughout the world is done on computers and information is disseminated in an instant to all corners of the globe. And yet for 3 hours, at the end of 2 years of study, you get a piece of paper and a pen and you are graded on your memory skills.
No, it is someone’s capacity to make a persuasive argument. That alone singles out the well educated from those who spew (always unargued)opinions on social media.
Fair point – but why does that persuasive argument have to be made under exam conditions? We don’t expect Graduates or Post-Graduates to write their theses from memory.
To make it fair.
“If you don’t know the answer to a question you get you phone out of you pocket and ask Google (or Siri).” When you do this, you often get an oversimplified standard response.
A few weeks ago, a friend was on the phone and asked me a question about the great composer Janacek. Normally, I’d have done just as you say and relied on Google. But for Christmas, I happened to have been given a book of Janacek’s letters (published in the 1980s, when people still knew how to do research). It was truly fascinating to discover just how much information there was in that book that I couldn’t have tracked down online. There’s a rather alarming sense in which the effect of the profusion of information online has been to marginalise the often more interesting and sophisticated body of information which is still to be found only in books.
Spot on. Today’s folk don’t want the hard graft of proper research with no “google” suggestions, only those coming from one’s own lonely brain. Hard work is singular; people have lost the self-confidence to think indepedently
I’ve sometimes wondered if schools and universities should be internet-free zones – with the exception of subjects like Computing where the internet is an obvious requirement. I’d love to see how a school would perform if pupils were required to surrender their phones when they arrived each day and couldn’t have them back until they left.
Unfortunately the local redbrick university’s library is now chock full of “students” poring over their laptops such that you can hardly find a space anywhere to sit and read the actual books.
Additionally, Google, and by extension – Siri, are so heavily politicized that any answer received will only touch upon the truth in a tangential sense.
What you say is true of Yes/no or multiple choice exams, which are not reflections of real life encounters. Hence the birth of the University level essay tests, which required a demonstration of thought processes.
In arts A levels and Arts degrees you are asked a question that draws upon your areas of study which expects you to think on the spot. If you regurgitate a coursework essay, you get a low mark. If you show you understand the question and have an independent mind, you get a high mark. Once you have done enough revision of course material, you are cool about the weirdestly put questions. If you have not done enough revision, when the oddly phrased question presents itself, in the exam, you panic and do not answer it closely enough. That is how to get high marks in Arts subjects. It is actually all about how hard pupils are prepared to work. Hard work is also the best antidote to anxiety, not less exams. This Gov were wrong to replace exams with algorithms. It’s brought anxiety to fever pitch levels because it cannot possibly be fair.
Rubbish – unless you know what question to ask all you do is gather garbage. You only know what question to ask if you have some understanding of the subject.
Look up
A Millennial Job Interview
on YouTube and you’ll get some idea of what I mean
If you do as you suggest you are given partial and biased information – often based on your previous searches – and it is sometimes difficult to find anything more than a generic response to questions – especially in more arcane areas of study.
No. Being able to make your case on paper demonstrates your capabilities. Can you make a point and back it up with evidence?! If not it is just opinion; you have not persuaded anyone to your view.
No. In life you will not make much progress unless you can remember things, construct persuasive cases and arguments under pressure, write clearly and accurately. An exam is not the only way to do this, and pupils should be marked on a blend of class work and exam results. Class work as an indicator is also prone to unreliability – depending on the skills and diligence of the teacher – and indeed, having teachers that are willing to go to school and teach!
And a quiet environment in which to do homework! Even if you had a bad teacher, homework is a time to sort out what you think about what was taught. My history teacher liked hurling the blackboard rubber rather than teach. After lessons i could read though. Today’s young do not read; they pick up their phone and go on social media. If every village and town hall offered themselves as phone free homework centres, we’d all be fine. If you lived in poor, noisy housing, you could have a chance to get on? How else do you stand a chance? If you read, you develop an open mind and the opposite if you don’t. It’s too easy to blame teachers. I blame the internet alongside poor housing.
Plenty of exams can be open book, in circumstances where applying knowledge is more important than having it. Exams can still ask questions about poets or styles of poetry without asking for a rote memorisation of the poems. In fact a lot of STEM exams are open book.
Problems still need to be solved using the knowledge in the books.
That’s not to knock rote. Lawyers and doctors and others need to prove their ability to learn facts, and a geography professor who needs to always look up why an ox bow lake formed wouldn’t be much good. Maybe he could critically think about the environment instead?
Education is in fact, in part, about knowledge acquisition.
Take the quiz show university challenge- generally agreed to be one of the few “institutions” that hasn’t dumbed down. Given that the winning students in University Challenge tend to be from the multitudinous Oxbridge colleges it seems that the progressive elites are, as mr Gaston suggests, as hypocritical on rote or knowledge acquisition as they are on Exams.
In any case knowing stuff rather than critically opining on a subject you don’t know, is what marks out the educated. Education is about a transfer of knowledge and skills, the educated man knows things.
That’s not enough, he should be able to apply his knowledge, it is however a necessary if insufficient condition.
Sorry, Richard, without an internalised body of knowledge you can’t put the information you look up into context, let alone judge whether or not it is credible. Creativity also builds on what you know, not what you Google.
And frequently you will need to organise yourself to, in the very simplest of terms, know where are starting from, define where you want to end up and then work out how you are going to get there.
I’m certainly glad that I was not due to be doing any exams this year. The current compromise system in England seems to be a best of three from the teacher predicted grades, mock exams or sitting in the Autumn, which definitely is not a recipe for fairness, although I don’t have a better suggestion.
As usual, the Newsnight interviews on this subject last night were pretty lame. The Labour spokeswoman was not asked directly what she’d do instead (honest answer: it’s all an inevitable f*** up, so maybe this is as good as anything). When she suggested the appeals process should be given more prominence, the interviewer did not ask whether this wouldn’t further favour children with pushy, middle-class parents, at the expense of those who are less able or willing to navigate the appeals system, even though there is a lot of evidence that this is how appeals work.
Mocks exams are set by the school depending upon the focus they want for pupils; some are marked hard to make pupils work harder for the exam proper. If they were set externally then it’d be ok to include them. But that is not happening; instead it is insult to injury. The whole system this year sucks unless you are a Scot in a poor area, the effect of which dumbs down the whole cancelled exams cohort. I feel v sorry indeed for anyone, anyone, any age who suffers disproportionately more because of Corona. The process needs Judicial Review and it will not be fair till this happens.
In effect, the SQA algorithm was designed for a status quo the existence of which is now disputed and clearly needs testing. The idea was that the normal distribution of the results of pupils presented by individual schools doesn’t vary beyond assessable boundaries from one year to the next over quite long periods of years, and that that is also true of the normal distribution of the results of all presenting schools taken together. Statistically very convenient and easily administered. It works better for some subjects than others. In some there are no ‘right answers’ and a mark in maths is a very different beast from a mark in English. But what the Scots have now done – effectively – is to lay the nice tidy assessment system they believe they have cultivated open to the winds, and, incidentally, cast doubt on the others in use in the UK. If the notion of ‘fairness’ is going to be saved, or restored, it can’t be done in this atmosphere. Government is gambling that science, or big pharma, will get them out of a hole from which they can then claim they have saved us. The chances of that coming off in the next eighteen months are very slim. We are only just beginning to realise just how fragile our current state (in every sense) is.
Thank you for this thoughtful response. What the Scots have done is unforgivable. The whole system now favours those who do better at continual assessment and not exams, girls over boys. It is so depressing.
Cancelling exams favours girls who have always been far more diligent about the details of continual assessment than any level-headed lad, with his eye on The Bigger Picture. So often, boys only look as if they are foot-dragging throughout term, but then rally last minute doing “”better than expected” in exams. The way GCSEs and A levels are assessed in 2020 grossly favours girls over boys. Legally, it is called “Indirect Discrimination”. Normally, (post 2011)only 20% of coursework goes towards final marks and no one has complained. This year, all that coursework was merrily scrapped and goalposts moved with gay abandon. I look forward to plenty of crowd funded Judicial Reviews. Social progressives or conservatives can watch from the wings.
Personally, I’d rather my doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, bricklayers, carpenters and politicians developed their skills in an education system that rewarded people paying attention throughout the year rather than on a last minute rally when being formally assessed.
More boys get A stars than girls. More boys this year got A stars. Despite what Political Correctness drones on about, We are not the same. Boys can teach girls not to get overly bogged down on details and try to keep the bigger picture/end goal in mind. And vice versa. Girls have much to teach boys, take less risks with the capacity to rally last minute e.g. and work harder in term time on the more detailed stuff. The system at the moment has sneaked in inequality. That is the irony of the politically correct elites: They don’t want equality.
As touched on in the article, I’m sure we’ve all met the highly qualified dimwits who seem to have been promoted beyond their competence. And as for being able to ‘work under pressure’ I am reminded of my favourite management quote [by the one-time head of Avis I believe] “Don’t ever employ anyone who says he is good in a crisis – or you will always be in one” A mix of skills is what should determine good grades – not just a good short term memory.
But exams test an awful lot more than short-term memory? I thought they were fun till just outside the examining hall when everyone else was bricking it. I used to rock up v v last min. When i had not done the work i got poor grades; the opposite when i had brushed up. Today, with so much pressure on all roads leading to university, and all league tables published within schools and nationally, the choice for pupils is way, WAY too narrow. Pupils are taking a year out less & less because they feel just far too pressured. It is all wrong. We learn best not under immense pressure but just enough.
About a century ago, John D. Rockefeller famously said – “I don’t want critical thinkers, I want obedient workers.” He then spent many hundreds of millions to take control of universities and medical schools. Many decades later, very well credentialed, but entirely vacuous “academics” walk about most of the schools, universities and worst of all, the nation”s capital, inside the United States. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the world actually listen to what they have to say.
Except those academics are the result of a totally different process – the very rise of progressive education itself. It is the post modernists, the gender non critical feminists and the sociologists who engage in “critical thinking”. And your quote is a good example of why the internet isn’t a replacement for personal knowledge – it’s false.
Something that I have discovered at my (advanced age) is that exams are vital. It isn’t about reasoned argument, it is all about memory. Or I should say memory muscles. Having had over 100 young people here to help us at our small holding over the last 6 years, almost all are graduates, and from all over the world, we have found very few have a decent memory, and whilst you can Google about Kafka or Orwell, about Fjords or Ox bow lakes. You can not Google the instructions you were given at 9 am on Monday which you need to still remember 24 hours later. Actually, not even 5 hours later.
Most have never exercised their memory muscles to the extent that they can retain information for even a few hours, and I am talking about simply instructions like cleaning out chicken sheds, or duck houses.
Depending upon how “young” those young people are, you’re doing it wrong if you’re issuing multiple-step instructions …
I think you do not want graduates for small-holding chores. They are an impractical breed.
There is no such thing as “memory muscles”. The recent generations memory difficulty is caused by the HUGE epidemic of mercury poisoning which is described in Chapter 3 of Experts Catastrophe (search for it). As I myself have been all too personally aware, memory difficulty is one of the most classic mercury poisoning symptoms. Another classic mercury poisoning symptom is getting violently angry at people merely because they say things you disagree with. Yes, the “snowflake” epidemic (with consequent hostility to free speech) has been yet another consequence of the change to non-gamma-2 dental amalgams in 1976, which the “experts” have never bothered to tell you about let alone ever do any safety tests on first.
I appreciate that this is a very difficult concept for many to learn but social changes can be caused by changing use of brain-altering chemicals. Just because you weren’t taught that in your postgrad classes does not make it any less true. Cheers.
Here’s the link to Experts Catastrophe book and chapter. I put it separately because it appears that Unherd delay comments that include links. http://www.pseudoexpertise.com
Chapter 3: http://www.pseudoexpertise.com/ch-...
I have one question. How long did it take you to write this article? I’m betting that you didn’t do it in an hour.
If I’m right about that, I wonder if you could explain the advantages of forcing people to write essays in a way that is not remotely like the way professional writers produce them.
If I’m wrong, can you point me to the other two essays that she wrote in the subsequent two hours? What, you didn’t write another two essays? Skiver.
It’s always possible the writer has a stock of half finished pieces broadly criticizing ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ views ready to change slightly to accommodate the issue of the day – a bit like exam prep. That way it would be relatively easy to knock out the above with it’s references (which are largely to other opinion pieces) quite quickly.
No evidence at all provided to support the following statement: ‘It is not unusual in the Anglosphere for the progressively-minded to quietly practise values and lifestyles that are very different to what they preach. “Think progressive, live conservative” or “social liberalism for thee but not for me” is a common hypocrisy.’
I’d pass this essay at A level for demonstrating a superficial understanding of the question and surrounding issues but mark it down for lack of rigour and tendency to make unsupported statements of opinion as fact.
The student would benefit from taking a more collegiate approach to his studies.
In Oxford, where I am a professor, this would beregarded as illegitimate ‘downloading’ of pre-prepared work.
Did he know the question in advance?
I completely agree with you. Outside of academia I’ve never written an actual essay. Not sure why we have to inflict them on our students. I’m an English teacher and I try to make the essay writing process as painless as possible for my students. They get time to write in class and I never give homework unless it’s only to finish something off. If they fail an essay and submitted it on time, I go over their work with them and they can improve and resubmit it.
Saying that, I do believe students need to be able to express themselves eloquently and professionally, but I’m wondering if essays are the only way to do that. I don’t know. English teachers have been struggling with this question for years.
My favourite subset of English Language was precis. That stood me in good stead when I was in business and latterly when reviewing historic documents.
I don’t think the essay per se is the important thing – but writing them trains students to be able to marshall an argument and express it clearly. It doesn’t really matter whether such expression is verbal or written; the training’s the thing.
People who can express themselves well on paper do not waffle when give air time. The opposite is true in reverse.
You realise he wasn’t actually taking a test?
Keep up !
Brilliant.
Funny. I have several books in my head desperately waiting to get out on to the page (or at least screen). They are “pre-prepared” in the sense that I have thought the thoughts and spoken to myself the sentences. They just haven’t yet been typed out. But is that such a big deal?
By the way, my soon forthcoming book Experts Catastrophe (search on web for it) is highly critical of Oxbridge for reasons of grossly excessive false equation of exam grades with “excellence”.
There’s plenty of evidence of that claim. One is the propensity of liberal and left commentators to criticise educational inequality while sending their children to elite schools. The other is the fact that diverse areas are generally poor. If people loved diversity as much as is claimed then as an area got diverse it would get richer.
Not sure what you mean by collegiate.
You’re right, there is absolutely tons of evidence and research on ‘thinking progressive, living conservative’ particularly in relation to people’s preferences for their children. Ed West has written a lot about this and there is now a link to a piece by him in the article.
V funny!
Hi Diane. I share quite a lot of your scepticism about the merits of exams and as I said in my piece “Many of the criticisms levelled at exams as a framework for learning and a means of assessment have validity.” It’s not so much a defence of exams as a consideration of possible reasons why they endure and why the kinds of criticisms you are making don’t gain more traction. I hear what you are saying a lot in my job but I rarely hear it outside of education and even within education it isn’t something that people are prepared to make a lot of noise about.
They endure mostly because of inertia and because they are cheaper than all of the better alternatives.
My late father was fond of saying that the main point of exams is not to test the pupils, but the teacher (and by extension the school)
Which is why it was so wrong to cancel them.
I don’t know. A friend of mine works as a middle-school teacher in South Carolina. She and her fellow teachers were told that if grades improved they would each receive a $8000 bonus that year. For some reason, most of her students failed her first class exam, but then did wonderfully in the last one she gave out.
Well, isn’t that just part of the modern mindset, where schools are judged to be successful if more students pass? In reality, of course, a truly successful school would be one in which those pupils who deserve to pass pass, and those who deserve to fail fail.
I remember a newspaper cartoon somewhere depicting a school parents’ evening in 1970 versus one in the present day. In both, the pupil had got bad grades. In 1970, the teacher and the parent were both berating the pupil. In 2020, the pupil and the parent were both berating the teacher!
Education today is becoming increasingly meaningless. I’m studying again and hoping to pursue a career outside of teaching. The kids are great, but management is hopeless. I’ve worked at three different colleges, have always received excellent student and performance evaluations, but always end up clashing with the leadership. Many college administrators are an expensive waste of space. The lockdown has really exposed their obsolescence.
Today’s young would rather be on the internet than get down to the hard graft and actually read. If you do not read alone, how do you learn to think for yourself? All you do instead is spout off unargued opinions and be part of groupthink. We are letting young people down by making actual work optional.
Dianne Purkess has made a fair point below. But what do school-age exams really tell us about young people? Especially as we live in a class-divided society where white working -class boys are currently at the bottom of the educational pile?
What ought to happen is every village hall and civic centre set aside every evening as homework centres, run by volunteers who would invigilate attendees. Most of us learn the most by homework which is where classroom teaching is consolidated. How can any pupils from noisy, cramped residential circs hope to give homework his/her best? At independent schools the only real difference is in quality homework – which is insisted upon. Pupils are no brighter and nor are they “given” higher grades for free; they work miles harder because an environment is provided for them to consolidate everything taught. If folk want to get on but live in a noisy house, they need a quiet venue for homework. It is a no-brainer.
Hi Betsy, your suggestion would be a welcome step forward for many kids. My stepfather would have felt threatened if I had such an opportunity. That would have resulted in more unpleasantness for me.
That is v sad, horrible for you. Too many ‘step’ parents and half siblings around do nothing for homework. I would have loved a bolt hole at the time. Instead i took A levels at night classes in my mid twenties.
I think this is a great idea Betsy although , you can imagine accessibility might be the issue, in that whilst you’d hope most parents would invest in this, I suspect that those students without the parental guidance to attend just wouldn’t, or couldn’t…however, again this doesn’t mean this shouldn’t be an option.
Schools could promote it. So many kids live with loud half siblings, annoying step parents. Teachers could promote nice neutral homework venues. Many pupils would love an excuse to get out of their unhomework-friendly residential set up.
This is a very good point. My work brings me into contact with, almost exclusively, middle class corporate types with degrees. They are unimaginably stupid. One of them told me that she loved reading serious fiction, only to reveal that the only book she had read was ‘Eat, Pray, Love’.
At least my social life i.e. watching football in the pub, brings me into contact with a few ‘working class’ men. They tend to be smarter and much better informed than the corporate types.
I think most teachers are the same way.
I’m a teacher myself and used to be a barman. I can honestly say that my experiences working behind a bar made me a better teacher than any kind of formal education or training. The ones in charge of education are even worse.
They are living in the real world and not an elitist bubble.
It always strikes me as odd that a simple pass fail, say for dilligence in course and then another for exam, is not the case.
After all a grade for non life threatening history course will follow you for ever but all you need to drive and keep driving, perhaps poorly, is to have heard the words. ‘I am pleased to say that you have reached the minimum standard.’
I wish your last sentence also applied to parents, public footpath users and cooks.
Those are the standard words used by UK driving examiners to announce success.
No A to E grades. No understanding by new drivers that they might need more training. ‘I passed I’m great’, no understanding that it’s dangerous and that further training can reduce danger to all.
And if I get you, so much the case for a lot of life.
Whilst I accept the inevitably of the argument, the tragedy of the Gove/Cummings reforms has been the marginalisation of the less able, the double whammy being their results likely being downgraded in the current round. Tiers removed, coursework substantially removed, and exam question literacy pitched at a level most likely to favour the more able.
I’m a retired secondary geography teacher, now working as a part-time tutor to SEND and LAC children, teaching English and maths functional skills. In too many cases, the exam-confident world of the more advantaged is a light year away for the disadvantaged. We have failed a generation of socio-economically poorer children.
Whilst I know full well that teachers will have taken their grading and ranking responsibilities very seriously, government has seriously failed the secondary sector this year.
Perhaps this fiasco might prompt reform for the better, for pupils of ALL abilities.
Would you approve of homework centres in all civic halls in every village and town? If pupils had no homework, they could bring a book to read. I think the advantaged have been handed an environment to work alone. It all boils down to this.
More community support would be welcome but difficult to resource, bearing in mind councils have had, on average, a 60% reduction in government funding over the last 10 years.
It’d be good if effort was shown on all sides. Pupils need to start reading and get off their phones; Gov need to open town and village halls for 4 hrs a night as “homework centres” adjudicated by retired folk; and teachers need to be enthusiastic about their subject or be put on leaf blowing.
Prizes for all, eh?
How about a well resourced level playing field for all? It’s all about equality of opportunities. Surely all children would then have a better chance to obtain the results they truly deserve?
My father left when I was two and I have had not had any contact with him whatsoever, I haven’t even seen a picture of him. I was brought up in poverty, intellectual as well as material, and ended up with an abusive stepfather. Luckily for me I was able to join the Royal Navy aged 15, one of the last boy sailors (this escape route for 15 year olds living in dire circumstances ended when the school leaving age was raised to 16 in September 1972).
We 15 year olds went to HMS Ganges near Ipswich for nearly a year, living under a harsh and unforgiving regime but at least we were given some rudimentary education. The Officer class of the Royal Navy back then was dominated by the Public School educated, with RP accents. We Ganges boys were constantly reminded that we were at the very bottom of the food chain. Or as a former Commander of HMS Ganges put it:
“žThe principle upon which I have worked is that our job here is to turn out a disciplined young man who will keep his eyes and ears open when he gets to sea and above all, will obey. The technical instruction and the school work I regard as merely filling in time.”
In an unequal society equal opportunities and meritocracy is an illusion.
My Royal Navy days are long behind me and in late middle age, after a lot of hard work, I was awarded a Master of Science degree. Some kids, no matter how much natural intelligence they possess, will never do well at school.
It’s the ‘four nations’ that drives me up the wall. As currently constituted the UK is a nation state. England was a nation state for donkeys’ years and ruled in Wales and Ireland for centuries. Scotland, too, was a recognisable nation state for hundreds of years before, voluntarily, giving up that status in 1707, while keeping control of education and much of the law. Wales has never been a recognisable nation state, and acquired its present borders in a somewhat prosaic local government reorganisation in 1974. Northern Ireland exists as part of the UK because there had to be some sort of compromise to secure Irish independence. But a ‘nation’? Do they want to be a ‘nation’? Is there a NINP to match the Scottish and Welsh movements?
This author, and many others spouting the four nations nonsense, bunked off history.
And now the Government have bunked it off the menu altogether! V worrying
The separate nations nonsense has been a consequence of mass spectator sports on tv (footy and olympics). Before that we only saw the union jack. Now it’s all England v Scotland etc ad nauseam. A lot of people are simpleminded and respond to such superficial cues.
My father left when I was two and I have had not had any contact with him whatsoever, I haven’t even seen a picture of him. I was brought up in poverty, intellectual as well as material, and ended up with an abusive stepfather. Luckily for me I was able to join the Royal Navy aged 15, one of the last boy sailors (this escape route for 15 year olds living in dire circumstances ended when the school leaving age was raised to 16 in September 1972).
We 15 year olds went to HMS Ganges near Ipswich for nearly a year, living under a harsh and unforgiving regime but at least we were given some rudimentary education. The Officer class of the Royal Navy back then was dominated by the Public School educated, with RP accents. We Ganges boys were constantly reminded that we were at the very bottom of the food chain. Or as a former Commander of HMS Ganges put it:
The principle upon which I have worked is that our job here is to turn out a disciplined young man who will keep his eyes and ears open when he gets to sea and above all, will obey. The technical instruction and the school work I regard as merely filling in time.
In an unequal society equal opportunities and meritocracy is an illusion.
My Royal Navy days are long behind me and in late middle age, after a lot of hard work, I was awarded a Master of Science degree.
Some kids, no matter how much natural intelligence they possess, will never do well at school.
There’s a lot of talk about critical thinking in the comments section, most of which is guff. I believe that people should be trained in logical or scientific thinking, I’m not sure what critical thinking exactly is except a critical mind towards the existing system.
For instance – let’s say that the claim is made that there is white privilege in the educational system. To rebuff that it’s enough to show that the poorest performers are white working class boys. Exceptions don’t prove rules.
“Critical thinkers” don’t accept this though and generally claim that white privilege exists anyway but the working class whites are not taking advantage of it. This logic may be critical of the white privilege they have claimed to exist, but they haven’t proven it exists, and by not accepting that their ideas are false when the data shows it they are making them unscientific- ie unfalsifiable.
Critical Thinking isn’t the same as Critical Theory, which is what you’re describing. Other than that I agree with you completely.
Anything a Tory Government does will be be “heavily criticised by school leaders.” If I were Education Secretary, I’d take that as a badge of honour.
Mrs U was a school leader once, so I’ve met many of them. Few filled me with confidence, to put it mildly.
Q1. To what extent is society, business and politics now controlled and determined algorithms? In your answer explain what an algorithm is, and how sociological biases are built in to them. Give examples from your own personal experience. In your opinion do you think the algorithmic society can be stopped?
If i could answer in an algorithm, perhaps writhing around in pain, i surely would. It has the ring of the Gerund about it.
No it cant. But the “shit in shit out” society surely fills with us all with horror
Exams are a severely defective means of assessing and selecting. Some such as Maths and languages are probably not so bad. But the problem with just about all exams is that they strongly favour a mentality of mindless parrotting and dutifully going along with what is taught.
This has the consequence of very strongly discriminating against the greatest creative minds. Isaac Newton, probably the greatest mind in history (and ironically underlying much of the maths and physics curriculum), was “found deficient in Euclid” – in other words he failed his maths exam. Fortunately talent was judged in other ways at the time and so despite being a flunking student the then professor at Cambridge stood down to make way for the rising star who had made the awesome connection between the falling apple and the circling planets.
There is zero chance that any current Newtons would even be allowed into Cambridge, or any of the other “universities” for that matter nowadays. Because you have to excel at mindless parrotting to get in.
Having been much involved in scientific research myself, I have read countless papers by “highly qualified” professors and PhDs. My experience is that there is a very high level of severe mental disability among such “highly qualified” people, precisely due to their total inability to UNlearn the rubbish they parrot-learnt in their “education”.
Anyway, I will close here by pasting in some relevant parts from my forthcoming book Experts Catastrophe, about the catastrophic consequences of the exam-obsessed system of pseudo-meritocracy. Cheers.
~~~~~
In my experience, the predominant intellectual shortcoming of the human race is not deficient ability to learn, but instead is deficient ability to unlearn that which has already been learnt in error. Once your brain has got a faulty notion etched into its neurons, it can be much harder for that faulty notion to be removed and a corrected notion to be substituted in its place. And the education and selection systems of exams strongly favour uncritical learning unencumbered by too much inefficiency-creating doubt giving capability for unlearning.
There probably hasn’t been any research on the question, but it seems rather self-evident anyway that a disposition towards questioning and doubting of information would tend to interfere with the headlong rush of hyperactive memorising which has evidently become a prime preoccupation of those in the business of supposedly nurturing the world’s greatest intellectual excellence. It’s a bit like a cycle race going up a mountain pass, in which having no brakes on your bike would give you a faster time up the hill. And yet in a real world which includes the corresponding downhills your bike without brakes would soon result in your death rather than any time records.
Thus the extreme relentless selection of supposed excellence falsely defined in terms of hyperactive learning would also be extremely selective against any talent for unlearning.
And it is arguably that unlearning ability which is the path to wisdom and to competence as a great researcher and discoverer, and hence a great true expert. I see so many persons of high intelligence who have taken one or more intellectual wrong turnings early on and consequently ended up far from the truth they thought they were heading towards. Their “super-bike” without brakes left the road to reality on one of those downhill bends.
One of the most important wrong turnings appears to be that “fact” which we learn first and most persistently. That is that the experts, namely the more “qualified” more senior people, know best and that any less-qualified inferiors who challenge them can be dismissed as wrong. All through childhood and formal education we get reinforced in that notion. And those of us who are awarded degrees and the like are all the more strongly reinforced (effectively bribed) into this cultist belief. All this time we lack a proper appreciation of the flaws in the Ladder of Knowledge pointed out in the preceding paragraphs here. The thing is that some of what we learnt from our teachers may have been wrong, because the researchers or discoverers it came from were wrong in the first place.
In conclusion then, there is reason to believe that our academic selection procedures, far from selecting the most suitable intellects for research careers, ironically instead block at every turn those most talented to be researchers and discoverers. Producing even a great discovery does not in the slightest require being able to read at the highest speed, learn “facts” at highest speed, recall at high speed, wake up and attend a course or exam before 10 am yesterday, or stick at completing a rubbishy boring thesis with sufficient tenacity.
The greatest genuine creative geniuses would be particularly unlikely to be found getting firsts in such centres of hyperactive parrotting excellence as Oxford and Cambridge medical schools.
A few years ago, at this time of the year, the press were concerned that girls performed better than boys. I can’t recall that, twenty years or so before, they had been concerned that boys did better than girls. I wonder if the underlying reason for the change was to reverse the trend towards girls occupying the majority of further education places.
I have only been involved in Mathematics where it is easy to see how marks are awarded. How can you make judgements on English language, literature, Art and several other subjects. Would say an author such as J P Donleavy be marked down for his idiosyncratic use of style or even marked up?
There is far too much emphasis on exams. The pressure on this generation of children and teenagers is much greater than mine. I remember a fellow student getting disastrous A levels, two Ds and E. he went on to read Medicine and is now a highly respected plastic surgeon.