Examinations 2021: Maintaining Integrity, Transparency and Fairness. Give everyone Hope for 2021.

We can get out of this mess. This is the central message of this little article, and being the optimist that I am, one which I hope examination boards throughout the world will listen to and act upon quickly to restore faith and trust in our assessment systems on which we all rely.

The start: Public exams 2020. Let's face it: what a mess. I am so glad I am not a GCSE, A level or IB student this academic 'year' wondering what grades they will be given, how these grades have been fairly (transparently?) arrived at, and on which next steps (e.g. tertiary education, job (ho ho) ) may depend. Equally, I also feel very sorry for admissions people or employers trying to allocate places at College or university or in the work place based on data which is not going to be as accurate as it needs and must be. Never mind about fairness, either. It really is a monumental mess, dare I say it: unprecedented. How we sort out the mess this year ( and I am sure some lawyers are licking their lips at the tsunami of forthcoming litigation?) is not the subject of this post: our exams next year is.

There is no question that all students have had their education this academic year severely disrupted and everything I have read has said that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have been disproportionately adversely affected. This is not right, not fair and we need to sort it out. Those students in Years 10 and upwards (grades 9+) will feel particularly aggrieved at the moment, and who can blame them?

I think the solution is actually rather simple but it is one requiring the Powers That Be (in government etc) to be flexible, rapid in decision making and clear in their communication with schools and the wider community. Is my optimism seriously misguided?

Given the undoubted and unequal disruption to all students' learning during this Covid crisis, why not make the exams next year far more flexible and choice driven to take into account this disruption? There needs to be no axing of papers or the overall syllabus as schools will of course sequence their teaching differently. The necessary flexibility comes in the final assessment: Keep the same papers but give students more choice in them to reflect Covid disruption. Easy! Instead of saying answer two questions from section B, say answer one but from the same number of questions. In two year syllabi that GCSEs are, IB is, A levels are, for example, then greater choice of which questions to answer, but answering fewer of them while maintaining the same high standards of assessment and Job Done. We need to tweak how we assess our students: is it that hard? I honestly do not think so. We could also include some teacher assessed, but externally moderated, Internal Assessment in all syllabi?

I think everyone will be a winner from such a flexible approach. Teachers will know what's coming and what's needed as will students and universities, employers. In fact everyone will? There is plenty of time before the 2021 exam season.

The trouble is that such an approach requires one of 2020's buzzwords: unprecedented. Decisions need to be made really quickly and it is the holiday season. Gulp. But these decisions must be made, and now, so that from the Start Up in September, it is clear what's going to happen next year, in 2021. Our students above all deserve that.

We must adopt a Can Do attitude in and for the "new normal".

If there's any minister or exam board out there wanting some help, advice, then contact me (!).