Ce n'est pas un examen

When the government announced in January that exams in 2021 would be “cancelled” it was clear within minutes that they were not actually cancelled - they were simply going to be outsourced. Instead of exam boards doing the job they are paid for (a job which, by the way, education would be better without) we teachers would be roped into creating, administering, marking and recording our own assessments. A whole bunch of extra work with no extra compensation - financially or mentally - after an insane year reinventing our entire profession digitally and learning on the job how to translate lesson plans into remote teaching, or rethinking how to physically teach our subjects in the new “Covid-secure” classroom.

At first though, I was encouraged by the sense of liberation that came with the idea. After all - exams are bullshit. At least they are for my subjects (Religious Studies and Philosophy). By reducing the rich subject areas I teach into easy to regurgitate chunks of rote memorisation we are forced to spend as much time training students how to jump through the relevant hoops of a “4 mark question” compared to a “5 mark question” as we are actually engaging with the course content. This is especially so for philosophy, where the AQA exam really does limit student engagement in actual philosophical thinking to mere repetition of historic ideas (mostly from a stale list of dead, white men). Freed from having to sit those old fashioned exercises in ranking and sorting students for the job market perhaps we could actually do something interesting with their knowledge this year? I imagined verbal assessments - free-ranging discussions that showed their wide range of philosophical thinking? Or perhaps an extended essay on a subject far more interesting than the tripartite view of knowledge? But just as soon as it became clear that exams weren’t really cancelled, it became clear that whatever we would be doing in schools to replace them would merely replicate normal examination. Instead of embracing the potential autonomy and radicalism of throwing out these stale assessments, schools were told to follow the instructions of the exam boards, rely heavily on materials provided by the exam boards, and rigorously “quality assure” the assessments so that they, well, basically mimicked the exams that were no longer taking place.

All thoughts of creativity were tossed aside as we were told to stop teaching students new content and plan how to amass “data” on all the things they had been taught across the last two years of their respective GCSE and A-level courses. Data meaning examined questions we had marked, or could mark, and thereby “support” decisions about final grades.

The weird thing here was that the so-called “cancellation” of exams was because of COVID 19, yet in the guidance from the DfE, and school conversations, very little is discussed about what that means. Basically sitting large cohorts in shared indoor halls for long periods is not tenable, yet in a bid to replicate the “cancelled” exams, schools are packing students in together anyway and giving them internal assessments in their stead. Papers are being passed around, rush-marked to keep up with the increased workload, and very little, if anything, has been said about safely quarantining such papers or how to administer “not exams” in a “Covid-safe” way. And then there’s the whole issue of why, given the obvious likelihood of Covid causing problems for the 2021 exams way back in 2020 when the schools first closed, the exam boards and Ofqual didn’t come up with a digital solution that would have - if they so desperately want our students assessed in this retrograde way - allowed students to safely sit their exams remotely, freeing up already over-crowded schools to be less risky transmission sites of the virus and allowing teachers to give more time to their underserved non-exam classes? Basically - all anyone in secondary education can think about right now is assessment, and specifically how to do it in such a way that all the boxes given to us are ticked so that everyone’s back is covered when the inevitable appeals come in from students who don’t get the grade they hoped for. No one cares about whether the process created to get such work done is “Covid safe”. Covid, if it is mentioned at all, is merely discussed the way actors discuss “Macbeth” in the theatre: a curse whose name should not be spoken lest it tempt a positive test result and the self-isolation of a year group before their assessments are complete.

So since March 8th, when we re-opened the schools, I have not been able to teach either my Year 11 or Year 13 classes anything new, and have instead had to revise content with them and devise multiple examinations to “gather data” on them before we send them home again in a few months time. Even once my “not exams” are finished, there are exams in other subjects they need to do, which means my timetabled lessons with them are either used for those other assessments or time in which they need to be revising for them. I am merely a babysitter and invigilator for my colleagues to gather their data, as they are for me to gather mine. And as the papers come in, my other classes suffer too, being as I have no time to mark their work or think too much about what I’m teaching them. In fact, to help with the workload, thankfully, we have even been given a few days off to do paperwork and get marking done. Which is great and necessary - but means those other classes aren’t getting any teaching and instead of doing anything useful we teachers are just doing the jobs of the exam boards when the job itself is unnecessary.

Because no one needs to be examined in this way. If schools cared about education we would trust our day-to-day interactions with our students as indication of their learning or lack thereof in our subjects. We would not ignore everything but the arbitrarily timed tasks done in silent rows under watchful eyes and without resources; we would credit all the hundreds of instances that their understanding and interest was clearly there in the classroom. And we wouldn’t rank them. A simple “yes they understand” or “no they don’t” would suffice. And the universities would know they could do their chosen subject when they leave us by talking to them rather than waiting for some exalted certificate that shows only on one particular day, in one two hour period, they happened to be quite good at memorisation. The jobs they compete for could have their own in-house ways of determining suitability that would surely make more sense than assuming the random numbers or letters they got in geography, religious studies, maths and biology told them anything of importance about how good a bank manager they’d be.

But we live in a myth. We know the world is unjust, unfair and unfit for purpose and that many live in poverty and many do not have the basic necessities of life. And so the only way we can sleep at night is to tell ourselves that there is a hierarchy. A meritocracy no less! That those who work hard, get good grades, get into good universities and get good jobs and those who don’t fail because they just weren’t good enough. Even as we know that this isn’t true, we tell ourselves that it is because the truth is just too painful: that we have devised a system which requires some to fail so that others may succeed. That success is not based on merit but based on who you know and what advantages and privileges you happen to have.

So we pretend exams are important and their judgements fair. We bend over backwards to ensure our made up, subjective and arbitrary letters and numbers we give are “rigorous” and “meaningful”. We lie to ourselves and we lie to our students.

Like the lie that exams were ever cancelled.

Or the lie that the government cares about our students’ wellbeing.

We lie, lie, lie…and we come up with new ways to categorise and sort our students into a ranked hierarchy of success or failure, condemning some to lives of purposefully designed misery even as we offer others keys to the unfair kingdom.