64. THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS WORTH LIVING - Why An Emphasis on Exams Misses The Point of Education

Exams have never made sense to me.

As I tell my students, the absolute worst way to judge how good a philosopher you are would be to take away all of your books and resources, isolate you so you cannot speak to anybody else, and set you an arbitrary chunk of time in which to answer a really big question. Philosophy – like most other academic disciplines – is about collaboration and discussion.  It is about building on the work of others, not hiding it away.  And it is about letting good ideas simmer and develop at their own pace, not rushing them to a time-limit.  Exams really only assess memorisation – an increasingly irrelevant skill in a world of the expanded mind where the bulk of our collective information is a finger-tip away on our phone - and are completely contingent on how the person taking them happens to feel on that day, so they are a terrible way to judge ability across one or more years, let alone the end of a topic.

Exams are not the same assessment, which can take many valid forms. Assessment of learning is useful for knowing if you are ready to move on to the next stage in your current field of study or if more time is needed going over the same area, but consider a competitive television show like The Great British Bake Off or The Apprentice.  There would be no drama if we simply watched decent bakers and business people do what they can do as competently as possible. So arbitrary limits are placed on them.  Budgets.  Time constraints.  Limited resources or instructions.  The reason a baker who has baked the same cake a hundred times before will suddenly bake it badly on TV is not because they are now a bad baker but because they have never before baked that cake in just ninety minutes, in a tent so hot it affects all the cooking times, using different equipment than the stuff they have at home.  The same is true of examinations.  In reality you may be able to master your discipline and speak or write on a wide range of issues, but give you a particularly worded question to answer in a specific amount of time, in intimidating silence, with the pressure of make-or-break failure hanging over your head, and the words simply will not come.

Yet this farcical system is how we have decided to assess the abilities of every child in the country.  SATs, GCSEs, A-levels…  At least some universities have woken up to this and started to find alternative approaches to assessment, moving away from the simplistic “finals”-based approach.  But not all.  And although a global pandemic should not be needed to expose the stupidity of examinations, one of the few silver linings in the dark cloud of COVID 19 is that they have made at least some exams untenable.  In a world where there is a need to socially distance and not pack large groups of people into crammed, unventilated rooms, crowded halls filled with students sitting two to three hour tests was deemed a health risk in 2020, with alternative teacher assessment models used for school leavers instead.  However, as with the general trend across the world to get things back to “normal” as quickly as possible rather than reflect and learn from the changes and adaptations the virus has forced on us and perhaps do things differently in future, even as Wales last week cancelled their 2021 GCSE and A-levels, here in England the traditional examinations still loom.  And with them, looms the resulting stress of year groups who have been told repeatedly since March that they have “lost” months of education (despite schools never actually closing and remote learning being provided the whole time), returning to schools in September and being told to carry on as if everything were normal even as they “lose” further fortnights of their learning every time a confirmed COVID case forces them into two more weeks of self-isolation, or causes their regular teacher to stay home.

I have put “lost” and “lose” into quotes because the idea of losing education here is entirely predicated on examinations, and curriculums devised around them.  The fear that students have “lost” education is the fear that they will not know everything that is needed to pass an exam at the end. The “loss” is a construct and could easily be reconceptualised as simply learning something different from that which was originally intended.

Consider – at GCSE I teach Religious Education.  In that subject we get to pick the religions and topics studied from a selection offered by the exam board.  In my school students will not study Hinduism or Buddhism to the level other schools might, and students in other schools will not study Islam to the level our students do.  In the “Themes” paper on the course, my students do not study Religion and the Family, or Religion, Peace and War, but other students who study them elsewhere will not study two of the four topics my students do in their place.  Because learning never ends and content selected by teachers is always limited and incomplete.  A snapshot of something greater and never the whole.  Students are forever “losing” learning, and they are gaining learning too.  We only lament the learning “lost” right now because that “loss” has been quantified as a set of exam results.  We are not mourning the so-called “lost” learning, we are mourning the future statistics and pass-rates likely to be affected by a rigid exam structure which has not adapted to the new learning which has taken place instead of what might have previously been prescribed.  We are mourning the associated life chances that use that same arbitrary data set to determine who can and can’t enter certain next stages of their life. But this is a failure of the data, of the exams and those who buy their snake oil, not a failure of education.

When schools and teachers talk of “catching up” after COVID and “closing the gap”, they are talking about exams.  While many schools have done audits on their students regarding what has and hasn’t been missed from the curriculum during periods of lockdown or self-isolation, so as to plug those holes before this year’s assessment, I wonder which schools have actually asked students what things they have learned instead during this time and found ways to reward and credit them for that?  When Dorothy Gale thought she’d lost her heart’s desire, it turned out she had it all along.  I feel that for many students currently suffering a COVID-corrupted education, the same is true for their supposedly “lost” learning.  Stuck on the treadmill of exams and their preparation, we are forgetting that there is more to education than passing a test at the end.  Moreover, we are forgetting that when the test itself becomes our focus, we have forgotten what the purpose of the test was supposed to be: a way to check our students’ learning.  If all they are learning is how to pass the test, then we have failed to provide a real education. We are facilitators of grading, not openers of minds.

Teachers – especially at secondary schools – are running around like headless chickens trying to figure out how to get accurate data on their students so they can give them a grade.  How to do an exam with social distancing and masks?  When to schedule them in with whole year groups being sent home at a moment’s notice?  If to schedule them if, as happened in Wales, England’s 2021 exams are scrapped and an alternative approach is devised.  Would there be anything worse than marking two hundred mock papers only to be told a few weeks later that a new exam was needed to ensure parity across all schools and you would now have to mark another two hundred papers with the original mocks contributing nothing towards the final grade?  Meanwhile students are bearing the stress of not really knowing how to prepare for a future which has no agreed destination yet.  Are they revising for the traditional memorisation tests of normal exams, or will they have to learn some new, hitherto unknown, teacher assessment format rolled out at the last minute?  Will hard work pay off now or be seen as a waste of time later?

None of that confusion, concern, stress and worry has anything to do with our students’ education at all.  It is worry about the administration of an artificially imposed hierarchy of arbitrary ranking.  The competition at the heart of social inequality and the preservation of a system – both economic and academic – which has never truly been fit for the purpose of demonstrating learning.  

So I end this week with a plea to the powers that be:  Cancel the 2021 exams.  Cancel them now.  But don’t just replace them with a different sort of exam and don’t just stop at 2021.  Cancel all exams.  Replace them with something better.  Something collegiate and collaborative.  Something which acknowledges the debt we pay to those who came before us – the resources, the references, the writing – and which doesn’t just seek memorisation and regurgitation but active, creative application of ideas and skills.  Something which assesses a whole period of learning and not simply the ability to retrieve certain, arbitrary things on a single day where you may not be at your best.  Something which credits you for thinking for yourself and for bringing in ideas which are not specified explicitly on the exam syllabus.  Something which is less about hoop-jumping and more about rethinking the very nature of the hoop.  

Something which stops schools merely being exam factories and can transform them, at last, into places of actual learning.

Author: DaN McKee

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