Will the impact of COVID-19 bring positive change to the UK exam system?

Two months ago, none of us could have expected the huge changes coming to all of our lives – and that includes young people preparing to take their GCSE and A-level exams. As a result of the current crisis, students will not be gathering in school halls to take exams this summer. They’ll instead be awarded grades by their teachers, based on accumulated marks from coursework, mocks and other evidence. For some, this might be a huge disappointment – for others, it’s going to be a massive relief.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s about time. To me, the exam system seems to frequently fail the people forced to go through it. It’s a rigid and inflexible way of assessing pupils that won’t ever be reflected again in real life, with far too many people walking out of them feeling like a failure. In fact, you’ll never again be locked into a crowded hot room with two hundred other people and some prowling regulators, and expected to think of something intelligent that could (supposedly) impact on all your future life prospects.

Life will rarely ever come down to a couple of hours. All of us have our job performance assessed in one way or another, but it’s an ongoing and flexible process, not an intensive trial. You can have a bad day, week or maybe even month, and still pull it back and prove yourself. Many kids have a hard enough start in life, without being compared to each other in this way. Had I paid attention to my school results and listened to what I was told those results would mean for my future career prospects, I wouldn't be where I am today.

And then, what we all realise, a few years later, is that hirers in many industries won’t care about your GCSE or A-level grades anyway: they become totally superseded by what you go on to achieve afterwards. Even those that do require a specific level of education – like doctors, lawyers and engineers – will still increasingly leverage their job experience and networks to get promotions, pay rises and new roles.

This makes the pressure put on the kids expected to do well, and the loss of interest in those who aren’t, seem even more harsh. One failure, one bad hour, takes on way too much importance. It also shapes teaching itself, putting the pressure on learning how to pass an exam, instead of anything useful. Teachers are passing on skills that become useless as soon as you walk out of the room, and many would agree.

Psychometric testing is becoming very popular in recruitment – and I think it’s highly relevant here. From an employer’s point of view, it’s about assessing capability for a certain role – but I don’t see why the same methods couldn’t be used in reverse, to assess an individual’s particular strengths against the broadest possible range of future careers. There is an incredible range of components available that flex to the individual being assessed and what they’re being assessed for, instead of expecting a random group of people to all prove themselves in the same way.

For instance, when Capita’s exec search and assessment arm Veredus assesses candidates for grad schemes, they use group exercises, role play, a case study exercise with a presentation element, and an interview. Other factors can include different reasoning tests, such as numerical, verbal, abstract and critical thinking, to assess a candidate’s ability to process and evaluate complex written information, as well as hard data and problem solving. Some of this is done as written work or online testing, but a lot is conducted as in-person or phone interviews. While there do seem to be some online providers offering psychometric testing of young people, there’s no current set-up that fully integrates with today’s education system. None of it, though, looks like the kind of exams I sat through when I was sixteen.

Although assessment of students this year will be based on previous work, they will basically still be working under the assumptions of our current system. Teachers will be guessing what the students would have achieved had they sat their exams. While educators can’t be expected to reinvent the wheel right now, hopefully they’ll factor in in-class contributions, practical work and coursework, and not make assumptions about how they think students would have done in an exam scenario. It’s a step in the right direction, but there’s still a longer journey ahead.

Of course, the current situation will also have broader negative effects on pupils’ education, that we’re going to have to find a way to reckon with. No matter how hard teachers and parents are trying, there’s no substitute for really good, in-person teaching, that responds to kids’ needs on the spot. Teachers who are passionate about their jobs and committed to their pupils are often equally frustrated at the boundaries put on their teaching and the lack of resource to teach kids as they need. The kind of really good teaching that expands students’ minds, instead of restricting them to the exceptionally narrow markers set by once-yearly exams.

So, why do we put students of any age (SATs are first taken by 7-year olds) through it when we know that they’ll never be measured in this way again? I suspect because it’s easily replicated and is considered the fairest (or easiest) way of comparing students. It allows us to rank schools top to bottom across the country. And for a certain number of students, it genuinely gives them something to show for years of hard work, that opens doors to impressive careers. But for many, it just slams a door in their face, instead of sending them off on a far less interesting and valued path.

What works for one probably won’t work for another. It reminds me of an old cartoon, where a bunch of animals – including a monkey, an elephant, and a goldfish – are all required by an examiner to climb a tree. The problem is obvious. The differences in teenagers may not be as visible; you probably wouldn’t expect one to have gills and another to be covered in fur (except maybe a few). But if we don’t expect adults to all have the same strengths, why would we demand it of people who are only just starting to prove themselves?