essay on should exams be banned

Should exams be abolished?

F or young people, exams, like death and taxes, were once certainties of life. That was the case, at least, in a society that couldn’t have imagined a pandemic shutting it down and forcing it to adapt as radically as it has. The alterations coronavirus has forced us to make have allowed us to see what is possible that we previously thought impossible, and that includes a world without exams.

Even before the pandemic and the forced cancellation of both GCSEs and A-Levels for two years in a row, there was a growing consensus that the examination system is broken and unfit for purpose. Particular concern has been expressed about the relationship of more rigorous exams, introduced by Michael Gove under David Cameron’s coalition government, to the decline in young people’s mental health in recent years. A recent survey revealed that young people in Britain are the unhappiest in Europe, with only 64% of them experiencing ‘high life satisfaction’ (the happiest young people were found to be Romanians, of whom 85% reported high life satisfaction). More troublingly, research conducted in 2018 revealed that 20% of girls and 10% of boys had self harmed or attempted suicide at some point in their lives. Gus O’Donnell, formerly head of the civil service, blamed this, in a report by The Guardian , at least partly on an “addiction to exams”.

After the cancellation of exams for the second year in a row, the voices calling for their abolition grew louder. The idea in particular of abolishing GCSEs is gaining a great deal of momentum, especially among journalists, social commentators and teachers. The Times reported in November 2019 that heads from the Girls’ School Association had said that GCSEs “belong in the Victorian times” and are “outmoded and draining” . While government officials have not commented on the dilemma quite to the same extent, Robert Halfon, MP for Harlow and chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, described GCSEs as “pointless”, calling for them to be scrapped and A-Levels to be replaced with a baccalaureate-style system containing a mixture of arts, science and vocational subjects.

Critics have pointed out that the UK remains out of step with its European neighbours with GCSEs still in place, since it is the only country in the continent to test pupils at 16 and then at 18

Even more significantly, Lord Kenneth Baker, who was Education Secretary when GCSEs were introduced in 1986, has called for them to be scrapped. He has argued that they have become redundant now that pupils must legally stay in school or training until they are eighteen. Critics have also pointed out that the UK remains out of step with its European neighbours with GCSEs still in place, since it is the only country in the continent to test pupils at 16 and then at 18. Adding SATs for pupils in Year 2 and Year 6, they argue, makes British children some of the most over-tested in the world.

By contrast, the Department for Education has shown no sign of supporting calls for GCSEs to be scrapped. In response to Halfon’s comments, they defended GCSEs as ‘gold-standard exams’ . Similarly, Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector of Ofsted, rebuked claims that children are overtested in the UK, dismissing the argument as a ‘myth’ and suggesting instead that examination is good for both students and teachers.

The outcome of cancelling GCSEs and A-Levels last summer was far from adequate, with an algorithm used for moderation downgrading grades given by teachers by up to three grades, especially in deprived areas. This was taken by some as a reason to rethink criticisms of the exam system, evidence that exams were in fact necessary and the only fair way to determine the qualifications pupils leave school with.

This is a meritocratic argument, but the flip-side of this is that exams were never truly fair to begin with. The attainment gap between pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers speaks for this, as well as the variation in results from pupils who go to schools in affluent and deprived areas. Pupils from wealthier families are also afforded more support with their exams – their parents can afford to hire tutors or buy expensive revision books. They are also more likely to have sufficient study space and time.

Recent research from King’s College London found that teacher assessments are equally as reliable as standardised exams at predicting educational success

Many oppose the abolition of exams because the potential alternatives are not up to the same standard. One option could be to make the temporary system of giving pupils grades permanent – teachers would decide, from the performance of pupils in the classroom, their final grade (though obviously without an algorithm to interfere with their judgments). Recent research from King’s College London found that teacher assessments are equally as reliable as standardised exams at predicting educational success.

The major concern that arises, of course, could be bias.

Concern has been raised by students over negative relationships with their teachers affecting their grades: an anonymous student writing for the Independent mentioned a friend declaring “My life is over,” after mitigation measures for exams were announced during the reveal of the third lockdown.

Coursework as an alternative removes some of the stress and anxiety of exams by allowing pupils to spread their work over a period of time

Another option could be to replace exams with coursework. Although not favoured by the coalition government that reformed exams and removed much of the coursework, it potentially removes some of the stress and anxiety of exams by allowing pupils to spread their work over a period of time. It could also be argued that it is better preparation for further or higher education, where coursework is used far more frequently, especially for humanities subjects. It is also much more similar to tasks that would be expected in the workplace, with the obvious expectation that pupils won’t find anything resembling exams awaiting them when they enter the world of work.

However, part of the reason that coursework has been removed for the most part from exam syllabuses is concerns about cheating, through copying another student or even through the use of essay mills. By contrast, there are far fewer possibilities to cheat in an exam, and invigilation remains incredibly strict to prevent this from happening.

Scrapping exams permanently would also have implications for schools. These could be positive, on the one hand, especially from a financial perspective. Exams are expensive for schools, especially for subjects that are less popular, and without them schools could be afforded a greater budget – potentially vital as ten years of austerity have left them overstretched. If only GCSEs were scrapped, a question mark hangs over the schools that don’t have sixth forms, which would mean they would not offer any exams at all. University admissions would also potentially be affected without GCSEs, as universities will have no record of a student’s exam performance if they have not taken any AS-Levels in Year 12.

With the government preoccupied by the vaccine rollout and decisions over lockdown measures, it is unlikely that any more radical reforms to the exams system will be implemented in the short to medium term, especially not when barely half a decade has passed since the last ones. Regardless, though scrapping A-Levels is harder to justify, the calls in particular for an end to GCSEs are unlikely to go away. Unless the school leaving age is lowered, which is also unlikely, there will always be an argument that they are no longer relevant and thus the stress they cause both pupils and teachers is unnecessary.

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Persuasive Essay Example on Should Exams be Abolished?

What is your opinion on exams? Many people may agree with exams, but many more people disagree… including a lot of teachers- An article by the guardian states “60 percent of teachers… said they did not think exams were necessarily the best indicators of a pupil's ability.” So really, what’s the point in exams? Well, examinations were invented to check student’s overall knowledge in subjects, though they have since become more of a memory game, which the world has become obsessed with… So much so that you are allowing children to suffer over them. We need to change that.

Examinations put so much pressure on pupils, it’s truly shocking. I believe the pressure comes not only from the actual exams themselves, but often a lot more… think of all the pressure these poor students must feel, from all the studying and preparation, to actually sitting in the exam hall participating in their many exams, to awaiting the exam results. Students are expected to do too good which is causing them to suffer. “Child Line results from the past few years show that 11% more students have been coming to them for counselling sessions (information from the NSPCC website) because of exam stress and pressure that is put on them from their parents and schools.” Earlier in this paragraph, it also states “statistics show that students facing exams in 2019 are likely to face over 9 hours more of exams than in 2016 (information from the Independent).” (williamfarr.lincs.sch.uk). Shocked? Of course, you are. This shows the appalling amount of pressure students face every year, the stress it causes not only leads to more students attending counselling sessions but also may affect many of their mental and physical health. The second quote, although from 2019, tells us the eye-opening, surprising amounts of time that the pupils spend simply sitting exams. We are now in 2022, so how many more hours do you think have been added since? In my personal experience, I am sitting around 12 hours of exams this year. That’s half a day, plus that’s not counting any study time. I think it’s about time we do something about this.

Sadly, students are often forced to deal with a range of mental health problems, which are commonly caused by these loathsome examinations. So, how can exams cause mental illness? Well, the stress, pressure, and worry of exams can all lead to extreme anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and many, many more. “Over half of mental health issues in the UK are in students from the age of 14 onwards, and that 75% of mental health issues will appear by age 18.” This is the time where students are likely to be preparing for, and eventually sitting, exams. We can clearly see from this, that exams are affecting students’ mental health, yet nothing is being done about it. Think about how many people sit exams each year, and how many people are burdened with a mental illness of some sort because of it. I think this is totally unfair. We should at the very least be offering more support to struggling students.

Now, not only do exams cause mental illness in students, but they can also cause physical illness and pain. From vomiting to self-harming, all sorts of physical sickness and suffering can be caused by exams. “More extreme reactions to exam situations included headaches, insomnia and vomiting.” (theguardian.com). Another website, independent.co.uk, states “The poll carried out by the National Education Union (NEU), found that more than half (56 percent) of school staff said youngsters had been self-harming or thinking of self-harming.” Although many people will only experience problems such as having ‘butterflies in their stomachs’, others end up becoming ill. Although things such as vomiting and headaches aren’t extreme illnesses, the fact that students are still forced into sitting exams when it is known that they make people physically (and of course mentally) unwell is appalling. Plus, on top of this, some students cause suffering for themselves as they feel like they need to hurt themselves… do you really think this is acceptable?

Exams affect some pupils so badly, that they decide to take their own life. Imagine feeling the need to kill yourself because of exams. People are quite literally dying because of exams and yet, we still do nothing about it. “Almost half (49%) of education staff say secondary school pupils have been suicidal because of the stress they’re under.” (markinstyle.co.uk). Information from another source states “With 29% of the 201 teen suicides in 2014 taking place whilst waiting for exam results, or the exams themselves, (information from a report on the BBC website)”. In the first quote, we are warned by teachers that exam stress is causing students to become suicidal. I don’t know how it can become any clearer. The second quote may be from 2014, but, I believe, exams are only becoming harder and more stressful, and so it is likely that the numbers have increased since then. Now let’s talk about the 2nd quote… in 2014 there were roughly 58 suicides caused by exams (29% of 201=58). 2014 was around 8 years ago now, so if we assume that there are roughly 58 exam related suicides per year, we would get 464 teen suicides caused by exams. 464 suicides in the past 8 years. That’s actually frightening. And unnecessary... by simply putting an end to exams, we can quite literally save lives!

So why should exams be abolished? Well, clearly some students seriously struggle because of them, for many reasons: they add way too much pressure; they cause both mental and physical illness; they cause people to self-harm; and most importantly, they cause people to die. On top of all of this, there are many more which weren’t covered in this essay… But yet we are still forced to sit exams. So yes, exams may have some benefits and are good in a way, but the bad seriously outweighs the good.

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Speech Writing /

Speech On Should Exams be Banned

Updated on
Dec 15, 2023

According to NCRB Data, 864 out of 10,732 youngsters under the age of 18 years died by suicide. This life ending, out of peer pressure, rose to 13,089 in 2021. These statistics do not reflect the numbers, but they remember how uneasy it is for children to face pressure just for the name of studies.

In the world of technology, when things are just a few seconds away from every human, testing knowledge and skills is no longer theoretical. Academic institutions focusing more on hands-on experience celebrate success and give a different perspective to the present and the future in real-time.

But as every coin has two sides, the same here is the heated topic of exams being banned or not, which is just not one-sided. On the one hand, old traditions still hold books and bags firmly, and on the other hand, some people believe in a practical approach without any mental stress and anxiety.

In this writing, we will try to understand whether the big and all-time hot topic, whether exams should be banned, still holds relevance or whether people have grown smarter to know that there is life beyond learning from books.

Also Read: Top 6 Effective Classroom Teaching Methods

2-Minute Speech On Should Exams Be Banned Speech

‘Hello and welcome to everyone present here. Today, I will be presenting a speech on ‘Should Exams be Banned?’ One of my friends with a twelve-year-old daughter was scrolling down on Netflix. As it was March, the peak time of pre-board examinations, I asked her about her preparation out of curiosity.’

‘She smiled back at me and asked me to chill, as the school doesn’t support examinations and goes for fun learning via classroom practical experience. Since there was no peer pressure of any review, she also planned a vacation with friends.’

‘Although the example was fictitious, it cannot be denied that some schools do not support pen and paper for examination; they believe in fun learning and remembering.’

‘Are school bags becoming so heavy that students cannot see the bright future? Can´t testing of studies cannot be turned on with practical learning, which turns off the pressure and makes learning fun?’

‘There might be people who will support examinations, as according to them, bookish knowledge cannot be replaced with practical and real-time learning. But what if we helped tests with adventure, like in Australia, Finland, Shanghai, and Canada?’

‘In the words of Thomas Edison, “Tomorrow is my exam but I don’t care, a single paper can’t decide my future.” Examinations are just a way to test your knowledge, and doing it with a pen and paper is unnecessary. Replace everything with expertise and practical experience and build a new world of learning.

Thank you.’

10 Lines on Should Exams Be Banned

1. No examination leads to exploration of real-world scenarios, which helps the students to learn with real experience.

2. Some students are born brilliant and do well in classrooms because they utilize their potential by removing the anxiety of last-moment examinations.

3. Interactive sessions create a broad definition of success, which is beyond classrooms.

4. Examinations are no guarantee, as there is a distinct and dynamic future beyond academics.

5. No examination creates new learning styles and easy-to-go practical methods.

6. Without examinations, creating a cooperative learning environment is healthy for students.

7. If discussed with no peer pressure of examinations, children’s chances of comprehensive understanding raise the bar.

8. No examination is the door to creativity and logical thinking.

9. As there will be no static examination pattern, the chances of creative learning styles will be enhanced.

10. No examination with more creativity and hands-on experience will lead to more potential preparation for challenges.

Also Read: Importance of Education in Development

Examinations could be more effective in terms of creativity and exposure of talent. Moreover, tests stress students, sometimes leading to disinterest in studies.

Henry Fischel, an American businessman, invented examinations in the 19th century.

Examinations calculate grades and marks, setting a benchmark for numbers instead of fun and learning. When there is no fun in education, students cannot figure out what interests them; hence, it kills their creativity.

Examinations have a set of standards that lead the students on the way, followed for years.

Many students cannot handle the peer pressure of the examinations. Due to this, their health gets affected, leading to depression and mental health issues.

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For more information on such interesting speech topics for your school, visit our speech writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Deepika Joshi

Deepika Joshi is an experienced content writer with expertise in creating educational and informative content. She has a year of experience writing content for speeches, essays, NCERT, study abroad and EdTech SaaS. Her strengths lie in conducting thorough research and ananlysis to provide accurate and up-to-date information to readers. She enjoys staying updated on new skills and knowledge, particulary in education domain. In her free time, she loves to read articles, and blogs with related to her field to further expand her expertise. In personal life, she loves creative writing and aspire to connect with innovative people who have fresh ideas to offer.

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Blog post – Should we ban final exams?

For centuries, exams have played a central role in assessing student competencies. However, as the higher education landscape changes, there has been an increasing divide between educational practitioners about the benefits and drawbacks of exams.

In the first debate from UQ’s Higher Ed Debate series , we examined this controversy and invited staff and students to present their views on the topic That we should ban final exams . We followed the common debate style of having two teams of three members, with one team supporting (affirmative) and one team opposing (negative) the topic.

Debate recording

Debate summary

Affirmative team – arguing in favour of banning final exams.

The affirmative team argued that exams under the status quo are not an effective means of assessing student knowledge or employability as they prioritise breadth over depth, test students’ ability to recall facts rather than prepare them for future employment, assess students by their penmanship and ability to write neatly rather than deep knowledge and assess students under time pressure without access to world knowledge (i.e. Google search), which is rarely the case in the real world.

They further argued that exams provide a poor learning experience as they encourage cramming which is an ineffective way of studying, carry an excessively large weight of the final grade which introduces a harmful level of stress and anxiety, lack inclusivity as they unfairly disadvantage those who are neurodivergent or have disabilities and lack accountability in terms of quality of marking and providing feedback. In addition, they argued that proctoring online exams introduces data privacy concerns that students should not have to bear.

As a strategy to address concerns raised by the use of exams, they suggested the use of low-state, authentic, bite-size assessments that assess content at the end of each week or a short module.

Negative team – Arguing against banning final exams

The negative team responded that most of the points raised by the affirmative team relate to poorly developed exams rather than exams by nature. For example, it is possible to create open book exams that test your ability to authentically solve problems and apply knowledge, use oral exams to test employability factors beyond recalling facts or use a digital assessment platform to avoid issues related to poor handwriting and to increase marking accountability and provide feedback. Additionally, they outlined the importance of testing breadth in relation to recall-based questions. They also argued that even though industry-specific knowledge is widely accessible, as the expert in a domain, you're expected to know the content when you meet with a client rather than having Google open in front of you to search for answers. They highlighted two benefits that exams carry over bite-sized assignments:

Final exams can critically assess your ability to apply knowledge from across all parts of the course rather than content related to a specific module.
Exams enable students to develop the ability to work under stress under tight timelines, which gives them an employability advantage.

The team further argued that the affirmative team failed to provide any evidence of why alternative assessments to exams are any better. For example, if their argument is that academics are creating poor exams, why would the quality of alternative assessments they make be any better? In terms of anxiety and stress, turning exams into bite-sized assignments means many more overlapping deadlines across courses for a student, which itself is a source of anxiety. Accountability of marking is also a problem with assignments as tutors might be under time pressure to read and provide feedback on a long essay with very little given time. The use of team-based assessments may disadvantage students that are stuck in a bad team or might give an unfair advantage to free-riders. Oral presentations may also introduce stress and are unscalable, plus they take up a lot of students’ contact time. Work-integrated learning may introduce overhead funding for travel and attire and raise fairness concerns as the quality of the experience may vary significantly depending on the placement.

Finally, they raised the important point of academic workload and viewing academics as a finite resource. Exams are a time-effective way of establishing how well a student has achieved learning outcomes, which have academic integrity embedded into them. While it is possible to replace them, alternatives would generally require significantly more time commitment, which maxed-out academics would find challenging to achieve.

Do you think final exams should be banned?

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All members of the UQ Teaching Community are welcome to contribute a blog to be published on the ITaLI website and shared in our UQ Teaching Community Update newsletter. Contact [email protected] to contribute or for more information.

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Why Standardized Testing Needs To Be Abolished

“If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee you that.” — Michelle Obama

The amount of time students spend taking standardized tests during school has grown significantly in recent years. America’s youth are required to give up valuable class time to take federally-mandated assessments that are used to compare them, their schools and their states to others. Standardized tests are generally multiple choice and focused mainly on English and math, though sometimes social studies and science are included in the tests, as well.

The point of standardized testing is to determine the average score of schools, states and the nation and to compare and contrast them. This is to see where help should be provided and to decide what should be done for America and its education system to progress.

However, it is appropriate to consider whether all these tests are actually helping, if these assessments students must take so frequently really will help our nation’s educational systems and the students they serve to make progress.

Standardized testing started off with seemingly innocent intentions, but today it has grown destructive to America’s public education system. Big companies that create the tests won’t stop making tests even though they cause harm in our school systems, because they profit and grow wealthy from those school systems using their tests.

According to evidence, one of the many problems with the tests is that the tests, for one, have no evidence supporting the idea that they are in any way beneficial. Many consider the No Child Left Behind legislation to have lowered the national success rate in education. A study by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “available evidence does not give strong support for the use of test-based incentives to improve education.” Scholars agree that a single test score or a set of test scores don’t really measure what students have learned in a test or at school. The tests don’t cover many skills and leave out material.

Additionally, standardized tests do not accurately measure how much a student has learned or his or her aptitude. The tests are used solely for many important decisions, so if you have a score that is below excellent, there could be serious and unintended ramifications that were not even meant for you by those who designed the test.

Test scores are used for many decisions. For instance, they were widely used to label schools. Schools tagged as “failing” can diminish teacher and administrative pay, encourage parents to move their students to another school and ultimately lead to the schools’ closure. Standardized tests are also used to determine how effective teachers are, whether a school should be stripped of certain freedoms and be placed under purely Common Core standards, without electives or fun, and whether a school should lose funds. On the other hand, the schools that have better test results often receive rewards, such as more funding.

Schools spend great amounts time — not to mention money — to secure assessments and make sure there is no cheating, but students are more likely to cheat as more pressure is placed upon them to perform well.

Tests do not provide any insight to what should be done to improve the scores and to help the students succeed, so they serve no true purpose or benefit to schools or their students.

These tests generally do not contain enough material to really be able to evaluate one’s strengths and weaknesses. According to the National Academy, the left-out information is most often “the portion of the curriculum that deals with higher levels of cognitive functioning and application of knowledge and skills.”

Standardized testing leads to less time learning, a more narrow curriculum and more time overall taking tests. This disrupts school routines, lessens time teaching and learning. Class time is spent on teaching to the test, practice tests and learning test-taking strategies.

The tests have been said many times to stifle creative thinking, to fail to effectively measure the achievement gap between social groups, and to demean one’s love of learning and self-confidence.

Schools spend great amounts time — not to mention money — to secure assessments and to make sure there is no cheating, but students are more likely to cheat as stakes rise and as more pressure is placed upon them to perform well.

Evaluations of teachers and decisions to close schools that perform poorly use test scores as the main source of judgement. Schools that receive budget cuts from the government based on test results are forced into firing teachers, raising class sizes, and losing programs of value. This process is harmful, but unfair decisions based on test scores alone continue to be made.

A proposed bill in the recently concluded state legislative session, House Bill 2730 , would have restricted standardized testing in public school, a critical step in the right direction for education in Hawaii. The bill would have limited “public school student participation in standardized tests, prohibit(ed) the use of standardized tests scores for evaluation purposes, authorize(d) standardized testing exemptions, and require(d) the Board of Education to provide notice of the right to opt out of standardized testing.”

Unfortunately, the bill was killed after passing only one reading. Why?

Restraints on these federally mandated assessments is necessary for Hawaii and our entire nation to move back up on international rankings of student knowledge and application.

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Opinion: Standardized Testing Should Be Abolished

In recent years, colleges have been under fire for the many faults in their admissions process. The 2019 college admissions scandal was a criminal conspiracy involving bribery, money laundering and application fabrication, with notable people such as Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin, that worked to sway admissions decisions at the top universities in America.

The scandal is one of the most recent proofs of how college admissions is an unfair playing field. Whether it be because of legacy students or huge family donations to a school, wealth and power play a vital part in the game that is the college admissions system.

Standardized testing is the latest component of the college admissions process to be criticized as it has proven to be an outdated and inaccurate assessment of one’s level of college preparedness.

One of the first things many tutors and teachers say to their students when preparing them for their upcoming test is that the SAT and the ACT are not measures of your intellectual abilities; they measure your ability to take a test.

What do college admissions officers gain from knowing how well you can take a test?

In theory, standardized testing is a pragmatic way to assess what one has learned; however, it does not take into consideration external factors and conditions that may affect the way a student tests. Tests lack diversity, and they do not take into consideration the different types of students that will be taking the test. English learning students, unconventional thinkers, students with anxiety and simply bad test takers all suffer because they assess students homogeneously.

Because these exams are so imperative in the world of education, it actually hinders the learning experience as people start “teaching the test” instead of fostering a challenging and critical learning environment. Standardized testing has only created a bunch of anxious students and teachers scrambling to master a test that they most likely will not find use for in the “real world.”

One test should not be the determining factor of a student’s college preparedness or intellect, especially when the origins of college admissions testing are inherently discriminatory towards marginalized communities.

According to the National Education Association (NEA) , many white Anglo-Saxon nationalists in the 19th Century were worried about the infiltration of minorities into the American school system as more immigrants came into the U.S. Psychologist Carl Bringham, who claimed that African-Americans “were on the low end of the racial, ethnic, and/or cultural spectrum,” was one of the main developers of a test used to assess the aptitude of U.S army in World War I that segregated soldiers into units based on race and performance. This aptitude test heavily influenced the development of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or the SAT that we know of today.

The SAT can be seen to have displayed evident bias towards minority groups from its very beginning. Years of research prove that even as the test evolved throughout the decades, the race and class barriers that the test inflicted withstood throughout the span of time. According to Fair Test research, students of color performed significantly lower on college admissions tests, preventing them from getting the merit scholarships they needed to attend a good college, thereby contributing to the drastic racial gaps and inequities in college acceptances and enrollment.

The average score nationwide on the reading section of the SAT was 429 for Black students last year–99 points behind the average for white students. Some may argue that these low scores for people of color are a result of lack of commitment, a racist viewpoint, or incompetence. However, a lot of other factors play a role in the different performances between races. Black and brown students often come from lower-income families compared to their white counterparts, preventing them from being able to afford private tutors and SAT and ACT classes.

Standardized testing is an outdated, inaccurate and unrealistic test of aptitude that does more detriment to the high school learning experience than help. The University of California Board has already unanimously voted to not require the SAT or ACT on student application as a lawsuit claims they are “deeply biased and provide no meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed.”

This has inspired many other schools like George Washington University and Hampshire College to follow their lead. Standardized testing is one of the many ways systemic racism still exists in society. It creates a huge barrier preventing applicants of color from achieving the education they deserve and perpetuates the prejudiced conditions that they live under today.

Article by Kristal Maimo-Fokum of John F. Kennedy High School

Graphic by Khanh Nguyen of Richard Montgomery High School

Why we should abolish the university exam

Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University

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The time has come to abolish university examinations. Just because something has been around a long time there’s no reason to assume it’s outdated. But in the case of exams that assumption would be right.

We’ve all been through it. You sit down in a room for two or three hours and answer questions from memory. Now we’re wedded to the idea that’s how you should test someone’s knowledge.

But research shows that examinations don’t develop questioning, self sufficient learners. So why have universities, by and large, chosen to retain them?

The case for examinations

People deploy a number of arguments in defence of examinations: they represent a gold standard of assessment to combat grade inflation; they guarantee the requirements of professional bodies; they provide a sea wall against the rising tide of plagiarism.

These reasons have varying degrees of merit but none of them, in themselves, provide a complete defence of the examination system.

It’s true that grades have apparently been improving for a few years now. As the content of degrees has remained relatively stable during that time I assume that degrees have not got easier but that it is easier to do well – and maybe the students simply work harder and do better.

But the improvement is really down to offering students alternatives to examinations. When tested in other ways students get better marks. So the “gold standard” argument comes down to a choice to test a student in a way that depresses their capacity to get a high mark. I am not sure why any teacher would want to do that.

Highlighting that exams can ensure a common professional standard has some merit, but what is a university for if it is simply delivering the requirements of a third party?

The case that exams save us from academic malpractice has most merit, albeit as a counsel of despair. And is the problem of plagiarism really as big as people fear?

Most experienced university lecturers would agree that there seems to be more plagiarism around than there used to be. Whether this is because of improved detection via software like Turnitin or more malpractice is hard to tell, probably a bit of both.

A different era

We have to remember that students today face different pressures to those of previous generations. They have to balance study and work in ways that most of us didn’t.

They are entering a mass higher education system designed for an educated citizenship not an elite system for a small number of professionals, managers and intellectuals. Their schooling is different. They have computers.

Gen-Y doesn’t have a mystical relationship with the virtual world but it is probably true that the difference between physical and virtual reality, between face-to-face and mediated communication, is less marked for a 20 year old student than it is for a 50 year old professor.

One symptom of this blurring is different attitudes to the idea of originality. It’s clear that many of our students genuinely don’t know when they are plagiarising because they don’t recognise originality as necessarily privileged.

OK, I know this looks like post-modern ideology but nothing could be further from the truth: what I am saying is based on my experience as a teacher.

Don’t be afraid of changing the culture

Can universities address all this? Can they guarantee standards without grade inflation? Can they encourage good study habits without using examinations as a policeman?

They can and do. Many parts of many universities already assess imaginatively and creatively and the world has not come to a standstill.

Much of our academic culture is driven by an anxiety-based conservatism. Students are not like academics: they work and achieve in different ways. We should celebrate this difference not fear it or try to compensate for it.

Students coming to university give us a great gift of trust: we should repay that trust by trusting and giving the opportunity to develop the knowledge, the skills and the opportunity to excel. Scrapping examinations is just one step towards that.

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A Case for Abolishing High-Stakes Exams—This Year and Every Year

Recommended.

Education policymakers the world over are tackling the question of what to do about high-stakes exams this year. With schooling disrupted for months, many have cancelled exams or are implementing changes to their timing and means of administration.

But beyond this year’s cohort, the COVID-19 shutdown is drawing attention to high-stakes exams and opening up discussions around their fairness as a way of filtering children through the education system.

In this blog post, we suggest that governments adopt fairer policies to manage transition from one level of education to the next and design these in ways that can equalise educational opportunities for all children.

COVID has thrown exam plans into question for 2020

Last month, Kenya cancelled its 2020 primary and secondary leaving exams —the KCPE and the KCSE. Students will return to schools in January and repeat the grades they left when schools were closed, before sitting their tests. The current Standard 8 cohort will begin their preparations after almost a year out of school and with highly uneven learning, economic, and psychological experiences in that time.

Thousands of miles away, the Colombian Institute for the Evaluation of Education (ICFES) is trying to avoid an exam cancellation. Students in the country’s Quindio department sat for a virtual, practice version of the Saber 11 exam in June and another ICFES test, designed for 100,000 technical students, is scheduled to be held online next month. ICFES has confirmed that private school candidates will be taking the exam in person, although there is still no exam or registration date for the remaining 85 percent of candidates. A switch to an online exam—given only 53 percent of households have internet access —threatens to widen the gap between poor and rich children at secondary and tertiary levels in Colombia.

There may be no government response that can fully mitigate COVID-19’s impact and maintain fairness for 2020’s exam candidates. But high-stakes exams are unfair every year, not just during a pandemic: large differences in home support and access to resources are not new. The exams reinforce income inequality, create perverse incentives in the classroom, and limit the number of students who could benefit from more education.

Filtering on exam scores reinforces income inequality

Exams were introduced in the 19th century as a supposedly fair and transparent way to allocate scarce educational benefits, by selecting the most able and by removing opportunities for nepotism. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about child development and how early life experiences make selective high-stakes tests anything but a level playing field.

Children from the poorest backgrounds are more likely to be exposed to poverty and malnutrition and accumulate developmental deficits from their first years, showing up in indicators such as stunting before age five . When children begin school there is also a clear tendency for those from wealthier backgrounds to go to better quality primary schools and to access private tuition .

As a result, socioeconomic status (SES) has become a reliable predictor of exam performance. When an exam is then used to filter students from one educational level to the next, it reinforces intergenerational income persistence . Data from household surveys, public exams, and large-scale assessments help to show this.

Across low- and middle-income countries, poorer students who reach the final grade of primary progress into secondary at much lower rates than their peers (Figure 1). Lower transition rates are due to a combination of school-fee and school-location barriers, along with filtering on exams.

The primary leaving exam is a genuine hurdle that constrains access to secondary in the low- and middle-income countries that release these data (also Figure 1). The height of the hurdle is not universal—some countries are highly selective at the end of primary whereas others barely filter.

The likelihood of passing an exam rises with SES. Large-scale assessments in exam subjects and grades routinely show a steep “social gradient” in performance , beginning from EGRA in early grades to PASEC , SACMEQ , and PISA-D in upper primary and later.

Figure 1. Poorer students progress to secondary at much lower rates than their peers (left); and part of the reason for this is that the exam is a genuine hurdle in most countries (right)

A pair of charts showing that poorer students pass school leaving exams at much lower rates than richer peers in many countries, and that exam failure rates are extremely high in many countries

Note: shown for Sub-Saharan African and South Asian countries for which we can obtain information on public exam pass rates and primary to secondary school transition.

Combining exam pass rates with data from PISA-D (a large-scale international assessment) on performance and student background, it’s possible to move closer to the direct impact of exams on transition (Figure 2 for Zambia). This is only an approximation: it’s nationally representative but does not use national exam data; it’s sampled on age rather than school grade; and SES is estimated within school-goers so it excludes children who have dropped out. But it still captures an important relationship between SES, performance, and the relevant exam threshold.

Figure 2. Estimating who an exam excludes, using PISA-D data

Scatter plot showing positiverelationship between pass rate and socioeconomic status in Zambia for math

Under this approximation, 15 percent of the poorest students will fail the exam compared with 7 percent of their richest peers, which would explain around half of the difference in primary-to-secondary transition between these groups in Zambia. Beyond pass/fail, the richest quintile also supplies half of the top performers, who will have better access to performance scholarships and for placement into selective secondary schools , which may impact longer-run outcomes .

A thorough investigation of exam impacts across countries will account for system-specific details, including: the mix of central and teacher-based assessments that determine the school-leaving grade; the nature of the wealth gradient in achievement; school locations and the clustering of achievement within schools ; policies for school fees & placement, especially where there are national “elite” schools or equitable access policies ; and so on. The extent to which these features influence the impact of an exam on social mobility is an important direction for future research. Watch out for more from CGD on this.

High-stakes exams encourage schools to ignore students with little chance of doing well

The theoretical benefits of high-stakes examinations are convincing—they may raise average student achievement by improving incentive structures for students and teachers ; and parents use exam information to monitor school and child performance. When centralised exams are used, they may function better as incentives than decentralised tests, and good grades in high-stakes tests can motivate students in the longer-term .

But when accountability systems and school reputations are based on the achievement of (some) students, we observe teachers targeting instruction to marginal students to push them over the line, leaving those who are struggling further behind or reducing progress among highest achievers . As part of this process, teacher effort may shift to test preparation sessions to raise short-run test scores , and we see negative incentive effects for lower-achieving students, particularly where exam thresholds are high . Another approach to increasing passers is the manipulation of scores around the pass mark, observed even in low-stakes assessments (and perhaps rendering data on student achievement useless as an indicator of system performance).

The use of high-stakes exams also affects how schools teach students. Resources are invested in tested subjects, teachers prioritise the exam syllabus as they “teach to the test” and students improve test-specific skills and transitory effort . However, this shift narrows the content and cognitive range covered in schools and can have negative consequences for learning where the exam is geared towards selection, while the curriculum prioritizes content mastery.

A more sinister dynamic is the systematic exclusion of low-achieving students before they reach high-stakes exam hurdles. Evidence from Tanzania , Chile , and Burkina Faso shows exams force dropout and repetition as a “washback” effect on low-achieving and low-SES children with a result being lower total enrolment, bulges in exam grades (or the one before ) and fewer test takers .

Using exams to filter prevents poorer students from making human capital investments with high returns

Before removing an exam threshold, it would be helpful to know not just that the average returns to schooling are high but that they would be equally high if more marginal students were admitted. It is possible, for example, that academically marginal students lack the preparation necessary to benefit from more education so that the returns for these students are much lower than the average. The limited evidence that exists on this points in the other direction.

During the short-lived French “revolution” of 1968, high-stakes school exams were abandoned, dramatically reducing the achievement level required to enter university for that year’s cohort. We are likely to see many similar cases in response to COVID-19. Some 40 years later , it has been shown that this event increased the future wages of the relevant cohort and the educational performance of their children—despite the fact many would not have advanced in a normal year.

In less remarkable circumstances, evidence from Kenya shows that marginal admittees to secondary school acquire large human capital and employment benefits, reducing low-skill self-employment and weakly increasing formal employment. From research on access to college in the United States, impacts of the marginal college admission on earnings are large, particularly for poorest students . It’s unlikely that these findings would generalise to all students, but authors argue that a reduction in the cutoff required for admission at the next level would enable a decent share of currently excluded students to make human capital investments with high returns.

Many countries are concluding that it is unfair to sit high-stakes exams after a period of disrupted preparation. This makes sense, but data on the link between student SES and exam performance in “regular” years shows that the circumstances of 2020 are not exceptional. Wealth-based inequalities emerge in the early grades and persist into exam years, reducing the share of children from poorest backgrounds that are selected for the next level. An explanation is needed for why this level of inequality in selection is acceptable in non-COVID years.

Shortly before Kenya’s exam cancellation, Wilson Sossion, Secretary-General of the Kenya National Union of Teachers, pointed out that the “ KCPE and KCSE are not a ticket to heaven .” But there is no escaping that these exams are incredibly high-stakes for 2 million Kenyan candidates each year. Exam success largely determines opportunity to study at the next educational level : children being filtered out of the system because of their performance in a high-stakes exam cannot claim the substantial learning and income benefits of further education.

Using test scores to allocate scarce resources is one mechanism that prevents education from being an equaliser of opportunity, with damaging effects in the classroom, particularly for low-SES students. Governments postponing or cancelling tests because of the COVID-19 shutdown should consider the permanent abolition of high-stakes exams and instead adopt fairer ways to manage transitions from one level of education to the next.

We are grateful to Susannah Hares, Justin Sandefur, and Lee Crawfurd for their helpful contributions.

CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions.

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Educational Assessment

Five Reasons to Stop Giving Exams in Class

February 18, 2022
Donald A. Saucier, PhD, Noah D. Renken, and Ashley A. Schiffer

It is a common, but not universal practice to administer exams to students in class (e.g., Rovai, 2000). Traditionally, students come to class and take exams silently and independently without any resources. They have a time-limit that is usually the length of the class. The exams may be multiple-choice, matching, short answer, essay, etc., but even if there are multiple versions of the exam, all students basically do the same thing in the same way. We believe there are several compelling reasons why we may want to stop giving exams in class. We acknowledge that many instructors have valid reasons for giving exams in class (e.g., alternative assessment plans require time and effort, concerns about academic dishonesty; Cramp et al., 2019; Still & Still, 2015), and we urge instructors to use the practices that best fit their teaching philosophies and needs of their specific classes. However, we wish to address the limitations of doing so and offer five reasons to consider to stop giving exams in class. We believe these recommendations may increase the engagement of instructors and students, which may enhance the success of our teaching and learning (Saucier, 2019a; Saucier, Miller, Martens, & Jones, in press).

1. Exams in class are unduly stressful.

Exams given in class are stressful for students (e.g., Zeidner, 2010) and instructors (Madara & Namango, 2016). The instructor and/or teaching assistant proctor the exam, which includes patrolling the classroom in search of signs of students cheating. There is a time limit. Students may not be able to sit in their regular seats if more students take the exam than regularly attend class (which is particularly troubling given potential effects of environmental contexts on students’ exam scores; Van Der Wege & Barry, 2008). The exams are often high stakes, making students anxious about the outcome. And, while some may argue that giving exams in class prepares students for the stress of real life (e.g., Durning et al., 2016), it does not seem like the in-class exam experience readily generalizes other contexts. In real life, we often get to look up information from outside resources and double check it before we use it. While we support challenging our students, we believe this type of stress may not be directly helpful.

2. Exams in class are not equitable.

While exams in class are generally stressful, they do not impact all students in the same way. Individuals may experience differing levels of test anxiety (Zeidner, 2010), which may be affected by their experiences of stereotype threat (e.g., Danaher & Crandall, 2008), the imposter phenomenon (e.g., Kumar & Jagacinski, 2006), and/or their general struggles with anxiety (e.g., Zunhammer et al., 2013). The added pressure of the testing situation and the potential high stakes of the exam may cause some students to systematically underperform. Further, some students may have circumstances that require testing accommodations (e.g., extended test time, distraction-free environments). It may be stigmatizing for those students to be unable to take the exam with their classmates and they may feel their absences are conspicuous (e.g., Timmerman & Mulvihill, 2015). Simply put, the ways that we traditionally administer in-class exams may not be fair for everyone.

3. Exams in class are logistically difficult to administer.

The process of administering exams in class may be unnecessarily convoluted. The physical act of passing out exams, particularly if there is more than one form of the exam, is difficult and time-consuming. If the class is large, some students may get their exams several minutes earlier than other students and thus have the advantage of having more time to take their exams. Students who come late may disturb their classmates and may not finish on time. Similarly, students who finish early may distract those who are still working. Proctoring the exam to monitor signs of academic dishonesty and to maintain exam security is a difficult and imperfect process. The subjective experience for instructors and teaching assistants who proctor the exams is aversive. Personally, we are possibly more anxious than our students when we administer exams in class, as we watch them silently and intently, and both worry about cheating and that our students will not do well.

4. Exams in class are not empathetic.

We believe that in class exams are not empathetic, student-focused, or inclusive. We have discussed areas of inequity above, but we also believe in-class exams traditionally do not provide the support or understanding of our students’ potential personal and academic challenges that allow them to successfully demonstrate their learning. Additionally, in-class exams often fail to provide students with opportunities for personalization or creativity. We believe that in-class exams often do not achieve the goals set forth by inclusive teaching philosophies (Lawrie et al., 2017) and empathetic course design perspectives (Engage the Sage, 2021).

5. Exams in class are not fun.

We acknowledge some students do enjoy taking exams (admittedly, one of us loved to take exams as a student), but many do not. When our students tell us about the most meaningful things they did in our classes, they do not talk about exams (nor do we when looking back at our experiences as students). Instead, our students tell us about activities, projects, missions, creative products, and research studies. These are the fun and more meaningful ways that students demonstrate and apply their learning. We fear traditional in-class exams may take the meaning out of the wonderful things we teach and learn and our classes.

What should we do?

We have provided five reasons why we should consider not giving exams in class. For some instructors, exams may still be necessary. If so, consider redesigning the exam experience to at least partially resolve some of these issues. For instance, you could permit your students to take them when and where they want during a predetermined time span (e.g., online via your institution’s learning management system). Moreover, allowing your students to use resources like their textbooks and class notes may ease test anxiety (e.g., Parsons, 2008) while helping them provide deeper answers to the questions (e.g., Green et al., 2016). This may also alleviate issues of academic honesty—it is not cheating to use these materials if you allow them to. Another option would be to have your students write and take their own exams (i.e., “Exams By You”; Saucier, Schiffer, & Jones, under review). At the very least, consider lowering the stakes of your exams so that one assessment does not have an exaggerated impact on your students’ overall semester grade.

But maybe we don’t need to use exams at all. We would rather infuse empathy into our classes (Engage the Sage, 2021) and bring PEACE (Preparation, Expertise, Authenticity, Caring, Engagement; Saucier, 2019b; Saucier & Jones, 2020) to our students, and perhaps we can offer professional development to our colleagues to help them do so (Saucier, Jones, Renken, & Schiffer, in press). Maybe we can focus our assessments on allowing our students to demonstrate their learning in ways that are applicable to (and fulfilling for) them. We can provide our students with the opportunity to apply the information in more sophisticated ways than mere memorization. We can empower them to demonstrate their learning through projects, papers, videos they create, podcasts they record, and other creative products. We can provide them with guidelines and rubrics to support them. From our own experience, we have been more excited to get the products of these projects than to grade monotonous exams. Everything we assign comes back to us. Let us allow our students to demonstrate their learning in ways that are less anxiety-provoking, more equitable and inclusive, less difficult to administer, more empathetic, and more fun. Using these ideas, we can make assessment more meaningful and more enjoyable for our students and for us.

Donald A. Saucier, PhD (2001, University of Vermont) is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar and professor of psychological sciences at Kansas State University. Saucier has published more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles and is a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and the Midwestern Psychological Association. His awards and honors include the University Distinguished Faculty Award for Mentoring of Undergraduate Students in Research, the Presidential Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Teaching Resource Prize. Saucier is also the faculty associate director of the Teaching and Learning Center at Kansas State University and offers a YouTube channel called “Engage the Sage” that describes his teaching philosophy, practices, and experiences.

Ashley A. Schiffer is also a doctoral student in the department of psychological sciences at Kansas State University. Her research often pertains to morality in relation to masculine honor ideology and/or military settings. She also works at Kansas State’s Teaching and Learning Center with Saucier and Renken to promote teaching excellence and contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Noah D. Renken is a doctoral student in the department of psychological sciences at Kansas State University. His research interests center on individual difference factors related to expressions of prejudice. Renken’s recent work has examined masculine honor ideology and the manifestation of attitudes towards stigmatized events (e.g., sexual violence, trauma). Noah also works in the Teaching and Learning Center at Kansas State University, where he collaborates with Saucier on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects.

Cramp, J., Medlin, J. F., Lake, P., & Sharp, C. (2019). Lessons learned from implementing remotely invigilated online exams. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice , 16(1), 10.

Danaher, K., & Crandall, C. S. (2008). Stereotype threat in applied settings re-examined. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38 (6), 1639-1655. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2008.00362.x

Durning, S. J., Dong, T., Ratcliffe, T., Schuwirth, L., Artino, A. R., Boulet, J. R., & Eva, K. (2016). Comparing open-book and closed-book examinations: a systematic review. Academic Medicine , 91(4), 583-599.

Engage the Sage. (2021). Engage the sage: The empathetic course design perspective [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/-79FHyNd128

Green, S. G., Ferrante, C. J., & Heppard, K. A. (2016). Using open-book exams to enhance student learning, performance, and motivation. Journal of Effective Teaching , 16(1), 19-35.

Kumar, S., & Jagacinski, C. M. (2006). Imposters have goals too: The imposter phenomenon and its relationship to achievement goal theory. Personality and Individual differences, 40 (1), 147-157. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2005.05.014

Lawrie, G., Marquis, E., Fuller, E., Newman, T., Qiu, M., Nomikoudis, M., … & Van Dam, L. (2017). Moving towards inclusive learning and teaching: A synthesis of recent literature. Teaching & learning inquiry , 5(1), 9-21.

Madara, D. S., & Namango, S. S. (2016). Faculty Perceptions on Cheating in Exams in Undergraduate Engineering. Journal of Education and Practice, 7(30), 70-86.

Parsons, D. (2008). Is there an alternative to exams? Examination stress in engineering courses. International Journal of Engineering Education, 24 (6), 1111-1118.

Rovai, A. P. (2000). Online and traditional assessments: what is the difference?. The Internet and higher education, 3 (3), 141-151.

Saucier, D. A. (2019a). “Having the time of my life”: The trickle-down model of self and student engagement. ACUECommunity. https://community.acue.org/blog/having-the-time-of-my-life-the-trickle-down-model-of-self-and-student-engagement/

Saucier, D. A. (2019b). Bringing PEACE to the classroom. Faculty Focus: Effective Teaching Strategies, Philosophy of Teaching. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/bringing-peace-to-the-classroom/

Saucier, D. A., & Jones, T. L. (2020). Leading our classes through times of crisis with engagement and PEACE. Faculty Focus: Online Education, Philosophy of Teaching. https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/philosophy-of-teaching/leading-our-classes-through-times-of-crisis-with-engagement-and-peace/

Saucier, D. A., Jones, T. L., Renken, N. D., & Schiffer, A. A. (in press). Professional development of faculty and graduate students in teaching. Journal on Centers for Teaching and Learning.

Saucier, D. A., Miller, S. S., Martens, A. L., & Jones, T. L. (in press). Trickle down engagement: Effects of perceived teacher and student engagement on learning outcomes. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

Saucier, D. A., Schiffer, A. A., & Jones, T. L. (under review). “Exams By You”: Having students write and complete their own exams during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teaching of Psychology.

Still, M. L., & Still, J. D. (2015). Contrasting traditional in-class exams with frequent online testing. Journal of Teaching and Learning with Technology , 4(2), 30.

Timmerman, L. C., & Mulvihill, T. M. (2015). Accommodations in the college setting: The perspectives of students living with disabilities. Qualitative Report, 20 (10).

Van Der Wege, M., & Barry, L. A. (2008). Potential perils of changing environmental context on examination scores. College Teaching, 56 (3), 173-176.

Zeidner, M. (2010). Test anxiety. The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology . https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470479216.corpsy0984

Zunhammer, M., Eberle, H., Eichhammer, P., & Busch, V. (2013). Somatic symptoms evoked by exam stress in university students: the role of alexithymia, neuroticism, anxiety and depression. PloS one, 8 (12), e84911. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0084911

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Let's seize this rare chance to abolish school exams and league tables

The regime of perennial assessment so beloved of our politicians is an absurdity that actively damages young people

H ope springs eternal. The government was this week pressed to cancel school examinations for a second year in a row. One in six state secondary schools are not fully open, and thousands of pupils are being excluded under quarantine measures – even those who are well. So the government should ease the exam burden and let schools catch up. As the Sheffield educationist Sir Chris Husbands puts it, “Let schools teach and children learn … learning is more important than assessment.”

This plea has been met with blank incomprehension by the education secretary, Gavin Williamson. To Whitehall, learning is assessing, and education is about exams, testing, data collation and league tables. How else would teachers know what to teach? When this spring it was clear that exams would fall victim to coronavirus, a panic-stricken government grasped for quantifiable data – past records, mocks, guesses, predictions – to feed their voracious algorithms.

The predictable shambles resulted in another of Boris Johnson’s climb-downs. Now the exam abolitionists are emboldened. The National Education Union’s Kevin Courtney is demanding that primary schools be liberated for ever from exams as “absolutely pointless” league table fodder. The same applies to GCSEs, costing each school thousands of pounds a year.

As for A-levels, they have long cursed secondary education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland with over-specialism at the bidding of universities. This year the universities had to find other means of judging applicants than an ability to recall facts and write in longhand. They turned to teacher assessment, which a survey from King’s College London in 2019 showed to be a perfectly robust alternative . It seems likely to be used again next year – so why not for ever? It would mean teachers and universities together judging a student’s prospects without reference to the fake objectivity of exam results and all that they involve.

As an alumnus of London’s Institute of Education, I still read a lot about the education system’s fixation on measurement. Books on both sides of the Atlantic carry such titles such The Tyranny of Metrics (Jerry Muller), Education by Numbers (Warwick Mansell) and The Test (Anya Kamenetz). Testing has not delivered more egalitarian schools. If anything, it has done the reverse. Tests demoralise pupils, and demean and disempower teachers.

Many are howling for less testing. Two years ago the former civil service head Gus O’Donnell savaged the government’s “ exam addiction … fuelling stress, anxiety and failure”. Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, has attacked schools that “ game the system ” to win higher league places, choosing exams that are easier to pass, narrowing the curriculum and “putting their own interests ahead of pupils’”. What does she expect? They are dancing to Ofsted’s tune.

Testing has clearly widened the attainment gap at 16, with almost 50,000 under-performing pupils now “vanishing” during secondary education, lest they depressed a school’s rating. British teachers spend just a third of their week on “teaching and learning with pupils,” with the rest of their time administering and setting, marking and reporting on tests – beyond all comparison with European counterparts.

Ever since Charles Dickens satirised his school “commissioners” in Hard Times, tests have been used by the central government to intervene in the classroom and diminish trust and personal responsibility in teachers. As education secretary, Michael Gove sought testing throughout the school experience, starting at age four. He tried to introduce exam performance-related pay for teachers (he did not suggest performance-related pay also be introduced for ministers). Pressure on teachers, parents and children became intense. Emergency admissions for teenagers with psychiatric conditions rose. So too did the dominance of rote learning and multiple-choice tests, at the expense of sport, art and any practical preparation for life.

I know that exams are seen as ritual markers in a child’s path through life. Some teachers regard the resulting mental stress as itself an education. But how well a child does at a school should be a matter between the school and its teachers, and parents, as it is in the private sector. If they want help from outside examiners, that is their business.

The task of assessing a pupil’s aptitude and ability and relating them to his or her future must be the most sacred trust invested in a school. It is like the GP and a patient. Teachers may err, but then so can any system. A friend who entered teaching 30 years ago tells me he simply does not feel like a professional educator at all, just an examination drudge. Teaching exam materials has bred the costly absurdity of parents spending a staggering £6bn a year on private tutors, a shadow industry created entirely by the tyranny of exams.

It’s more than 30 years since corporal punishment was banned in British state schools. The practice was considered “degrading and humiliating”, leading to trauma and mental stress. But ministers did not give up on discipline, replacing the cane with exams and league tables. There is now an opportunity to abolish these for good. If parents want to know how well their child is doing, they should ask the school, not the government.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Secondary schools

Education Secretary: Standardized Tests Should No Longer Be a ‘Hammer’

Standardized tests should be used as “a flashlight” on what works in education not as “a hammer” to force outcomes, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said during a speech last week.

The statement reflects a shift in thinking since annual testing became federal law more than 20 years ago, and it echoes past comments from Cardona, who warned states against using 2022 NAEP scores punitively when they showed steep drops in reading and math in September.

But federal policies stemming from the two-decade-old No Child Left Behind Act and its successor, the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, make it difficult for states to use standardized tests in any other way, policy experts say. And despite changing attitudes, there’s little indication that the nation’s schools will move away from the current form of test-based accountability anytime soon.

“It doesn’t matter what the sentiment is,” said Jack Schneider, an education professor and policy analyst at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell who is also an advocate for including alternative measures like school climate, teacher ability, and school resources in accountability policies. “The law is structured so that it really isn’t much of a flashlight.”

Cardona did not announce any new testing-related policies or plans for the Education Department in his Jan. 24 speech to educators , so it’s unclear if the agency plans to address concerns about test-based accountability through grants, waivers, or rulemaking. The department hasn’t announced any plans to revise standardized testing policy.

Still, his words reflect ever-changing opinions about standardized tests and what role they should play in evaluating school performance.

“He’s trying to bridge two eras,” Schneider said. “Right now, we are still very much in the era of test-based accountability because that’s the law. He also recognizes that’s not going to persuade very many people for much longer as a mechanism for school improvement.”

The lasting impact of No Child Left Behind

The debate over school accountability and standardized testing has been going on for over half a century, said Daniel Koretz, an education professor at Harvard University who has dedicated his research to high-stakes testing.

The original designers of standardized tests envisioned the tests as a way to measure individual students’ performance, not as an aggregate measure of schools’ performance, Koretz said.

They “were adamant that these tests cannot provide a complete measure of what we care about, what our goals of education are,” he said. “They’re necessarily incomplete.”

Despite that original intention, states and the federal government found standardized tests to be an efficient way to determine whether schools were performing to standards. And test proponents have said they’re necessary for ensuring English learners, students with disabilities, students of color, and low-income students don’t fall behind.

The government’s role in using tests to evaluate schools—rather than individual students—was solidified when former President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002.

President George W. Bush, left, participates in the swearing-in ceremony for the Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, center, at the U.S. Dept. of Education on Jan. 31, 2005 in Washington. On the far right holding a bible is her husband Robert Spellings.

The law, which had bipartisan backing and functioned as an update to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, required states to test students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school with a goal of bringing them all to a state-determined level of proficiency by the 2013-14 school year.

It also established sanctions for schools that failed to stay on track and make “adequate yearly progress” with test scores. The law gave states—among other measures—the power to shut down schools that missed achievement targets several years in a row. Waivers to the law during the Obama administration loosened some of these rules but also required states to set up systems to evaluate teachers in part based on student test performance.

“That enormously ramped up the pressure, particularly in low-achieving schools,” Koretz said. “At that point, teachers really had no choice. They really could either fail, cut corners, or cheat.”

The law was later reauthorized as the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 , which loosened the federal government’s role in K-12 schools, removed requirements that states evaluate teacher performance based on student outcomes, and gave states power to decide what should happen to schools that miss performance targets.

But the law maintained the standardized testing requirements established in NCLB.

“The heart of NCLB, which is test-based accountability, remains in place,” Schneider said.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona speaks with the press after the education department's “Raise the Bar: Lead the World” event in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 24, 2023.

Advocating for a balanced approach

Some who oppose test-based accountability aren’t against standardized tests themselves. Large-scale standardized tests are useful in measuring how students in a certain state or across the country are performing compared to their peers.

But they are also limited. Critics say they offer only a snapshot of a student’s understanding of core subjects, making it difficult to determine whether a student performed poorly because they weren’t taught the material or because of outside factors like their mood, health, or home life.

Instead, testing experts say they’d like to see a more balanced approach to standardized tests. That means having more coherence among the large number of state and national assessments so they build off each other and can better help inform instruction and curriculum, said Scott Marion, the executive director of the Center for Assessment, a nonprofit focused on improving assessment and accountability practices.

It also means measuring students’ progress over time and the skills they’ve acquired, not just changes in their scores from one test to another. Tests also need to provide feedback to teachers more quickly to be useful, Marion said.

“I don’t care that [a student] went up six points—that might be good,” Marion said. “But did she learn how to better organize her paragraphs, vary her sentence structure, things like that?”

States can help ease the burden of accountability on schools by using the more balanced approach, and some states have, Marion said. But unless there are changes to federal law there will always be pressure for schools to produce high test scores.

The political outlook

Cardona’s message indicates a shifting perspective on the role standardized tests play in society, but not much has been done to actually change the federal law that lays out standardized tests’ role.

The Education Department could establish waivers, giving states more flexibility to create pilot projects to improve testing systems. And Congress could rewrite the law to put less of a focus on accountability.

But ultimately improvement would require more respect for education, Koretz said.

“Education has a very low status in this country,” he said. “A lot of policymakers don’t respect teachers or any other educators. They don’t trust them. So, who are you going to trust to go in and evaluate schools if you don’t trust educators?”

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Exams should be abolished speech

Exams should be abolished

Exams – a word that many students dread to hear, a word that many students fear of, a word that seems to have the magical power to transform a happy and cheerful person into a frustrated and nervous wreck.

What are exams and should they been done away with entirely?

Exams are longer and more comprehensive versions of tests held every term. Initially created to monitor and check how a student was performing academically, they now have so much more pressure on them that students are burning the midnight oil to study for an exam. This results in some students becoming ill due to stress and lack of sleep. They have become more and more stressful and, even worse, a constriction to the ideal of learning.

It is a well known fact that when it comes to exams, students compete, not only with themselves, but with other students. They no longer want to see an increase in their knowledge, but want to beat other people to the top of the class. Even parents take exams as a race to see whose children are more intelligent.

Students shouldn’t be judged on their performance on one day when they might be ill. The exams might not be completely representative of the student’s skills as everyone can have a bad day.

They are a poor method of assessment as they don’t reflect the use of knowledge in a practical environment. They don’t reflect how well you’ll be able to use your knowledge in real world occupations.

This is a preview of the whole essay

Many successful individuals are bad at exams but can perform well under other methods of assessment such as essays and oral presentations which still prepare students in coping with pressure. Some people would argue that exams are not a fair assessment of intelligence and aren’t favourable to those with poor memory skills, those who suffer under pressure, and those who get so nervous in such situations that they shut down in exams. It’s very easy to know content but to completely fail an exam because you are nervous. They aren’t an accurate representation of a student’s knowledge as some people are just better at taking exams than others. If you happen to mess up in your exams due to stress or panic then your goals can disintegrate leaving you unable to reach your full potential and having to settle for second best. SATs are taking the pleasure out of learning for many students and pressurising teachers to ‘teach the test’ rather than teaching for meaning, understanding, critical thinking and pleasure. Should schools become exam result factories or institutions which create well-rounded human beings? This problem must be addressed to reduce the number of pupils who suffer from forms of neurosis or depression due to this country’s narrow minded approach to education.

Those students cramming in last-minute study will have to put aside their social lives, have to sacrifice their sleep and will be under great pressure and tension. Coursework is also a problem when you have exams and should not collide with exam revision.

In humanity subjects such as History, Geography and social sciences, analysis and application of what has been learned is important and cannot be assessed through exams.

If exams were abolished then students would have more time to learn new material instead of being tested and revising. Testing can be performed in many other ways than a 3 hour exam which decides your fate. The vast majority of exams are based on the student’s ability to recall, in the space of 2 or 3 hours, details of a subject which is generally vast in its scope.

The vital point is that those students who enjoy greatest success are not necessarily those who have the best grasp of the subject, but most often those who have successfully anticipated the questions which will appear on the paper. This is, of course, not the only problem. Exams create unnecessary pressure and the poorly planned exam schedules only add to this. Who would deny that they would rather have 5 exams spread over 2 weeks rather than 5 exams in the space of 4 days, leaving little time to readjust? Furthermore, exams aren’t adequate preparation for working life and test only your memory of a subject rather than all-round knowledge that properly conceived coursework can afford. It is undoubtedly important to test knowledge as well as all round skills, but this can be done much more fairly through methods such as essays and the appropriate use of coursework than through the traditional hellish world of end-of-year exams.

Fairer forms of assessment include more coursework, oral presentation, continuous assessments throughout the year and term papers as well as project work.

Education should be more about what is drawn out of people that what is drummed into them and this is not done through examinations.

In modern day education, familiarity with word processing, desktop publishing and powerpoint is a valuable asset and whilst essays and oral presentations allow the student to demonstrate these skills, traditional exams require students to write essays with a pen and paper – a very unnatural endeavour in the 21 st century.

Are exams a valid form of assessment of simply a memory test? You decide.

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There are some attempts to include persuasive devices in this piece of writing and these points are creative and imaginative. The piece needs a very clear plan so points move fluidly from one to the next without repetition. 4 Stars

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Should Students Be Monitored When Taking Online Tests?

Is surveillance necessary to prevent students from cheating during online exams, or does it violate students’ privacy?

By Nicole Daniels

Find all our Student Opinion questions here.

Has cheating on tests ever been a problem at your school? What about now that school has gone online? What steps do you think teachers and professors should take to ensure that students are completing online exams honestly? Is there a point when online surveillance impedes on students’ privacy — or even becomes “creepy”?

In “ Keeping Online Testing Honest? Or an Orwellian Overreach? ,” Shawn Hubler writes about universities trying to ensure academic integrity in online testing:

In an April survey by Educause, a nonprofit organization focused on technology and education, 77 percent of 312 institutions polled said they were administering, or planning to administer, take-home tests online with some sort of remote monitoring, ranging from human surveillance via webcams to software that lets a test temporarily take over a student’s browser. It is not only students who are cringing at the online monitoring. “There has to be a better way,” said Sue Escobar, a professor of criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento. Ms. Escobar said she would not use the webcam option the university added last month to its online testing software, finding it “invasive.” “Sure, we want to minimize cheating, but how far do you go?” Academic integrity is not a new concern in remote learning. In surveys, about one in three students say they have cheated in online tests — about the same as the proportion who admit to cheating offline. For nearly two decades, Respondus, an educational technology firm in Redmond, Wash., has been marketing a customized browser that prevents test-takers from seeking answers in a new tab while their exam is in progress. As online instruction and web access have expanded, the online proctoring market has become more crowded. Companies like ProctorU in Birmingham, Ala., and Examity in Newton, Mass., now offer remote oversight by live proctors who watch students take tests via Skype and webcams. Proctorio in Scottsdale, Ariz., uses artificial intelligence to monitor and flag body language and background noise that might point to cheating.

The article continues:

Social media has exploded with complaints and workarounds for cheaters. The University of California, Berkeley banned online exam proctoring, concerned that poor and rural students lacked sufficient access to high-speed connections and compatible laptops. Meggan Levitt, the assistant vice provost for technology at University of California, Davis, said the school was set to expand its live proctoring deal with Examity when the coronavirus shut down the company’s India facilities. Others simply report being annoyed and intimidated by the sense, even in the Zoom era, that they are being spied on. Thera Boonyamarn, a 20-year-old U.C.L.A. student who flew home to Thailand when her campus closed, said that every time she sneezed into a Kleenex because of allergies, the testing software would “flag” her for seeming to look away while holding what appeared to be paper. “It’s creepy,” said Hailey Arzaga, a 22-year-old psychology and criminology major at Cal Poly Pomona who worried about what the webcam would reveal as she took a recent quiz on qualitative research methods. “Like, we have you on video and audio and we’ll record you if you screw up.” Mr. McFarland of ProctorU acknowledged that the live surveillance “is something to get used to.” But the proctoring services say they do not sell students’ data to third parties and that they purge it after it is sent to the school unless a cheating investigation requires that they preserve it. ProctorU drafted and posted a Student Bill of Rights after the privacy concerns at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At the University of California’s campuses where proctors are being used, faculty generally have assured students that alternate arrangements can be made for those concerned about proctors.

Students, read the entire article , then tell us:

Have you taken any tests since transitioning to remote learning? Did you feel tempted to look up answers online or in your notes, or to compare your work with your friends’ answers?

Do you think students should be trusted to complete remote tests without cheating? Why?

Is it ethical for teachers or outside proctors to be able to see students on video or to monitor their computer screens while they are taking tests? Why or why not?

Has the coronavirus pandemic changed how you view testing? We asked students if they think schools should change how they grade students during the pandemic. Do you think the pandemic should change how schools use testing to evaluate academic progress?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

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Exams should be abolished speech
AS and A Level English. Exams should be abolished. Exams - a word that many students dread to hear, a word that many students fear of, a word that seems to have the magical power to transform a happy and cheerful person into a frustrated and nervous wreck. What are exams and should they been done away with entirely?
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