In Defence of Examinations

One of the clichés of our time is that examinations are unjust. It is, perhaps worth having a look at any cliché to see what has happened to the truth in it - has it survived repetition or not? I feel particularly strongly about the confusion that is generally involved in the attack on examinations. First of all, there is not just one set of examination which is under fire, but at least two: the school-leaving and university-qualifying examinations of GCE A-level, and the final examination at the end of the university undergraduate course. It may be that both of these kinds of examinations are bad; but if so they may be bad in different ways.

And then the examination system, itself, is attacked for two separate faults. One is that the existence of examinations necessitates a syllabus, and that this has a narrowing and restrictive effect on teaching and learning. The second fault is quite different - namely, that the examinations themselves are unfair, and this again in two ways. It is said that the standards of the examiners cannot be made uniform and that equally good candidates may get widely different results: secondly, it is said that the three-hour written paper is in itself unfair to those candidates who have bad memories, bad nerves or are otherwise to be labelled "bad examinees", but yet who may be just as good as other candidates in some respects.

Is there any way out of this? For there is no doubt that it would be very agreeable to have an end to this particular kind of complaining before very much longer - if for no other reason than that candidates and their families get extremely worried and depressed, not so much by the examinations themselves as by the whole atmosphere of gloom and terror which is coming to surround them.

The first thing to decide is the fundamental question, whether we need examinations or not. The obvious answer to this is that if some people are cleverer than others, and if it is of interest to universities or future employers to discover who is cleverer than whom, then we need examinations, because there is no other equally efficient way of distinguishing between what people can do. But this may be too superficial a view. It is true that at present (and for the foreseeable future) we live in a condition of scarcity, so that there must be competition for available jobs, and at an earlier stage for available university or polytechnic places. But since this situation does not exist of logical necessity, it might be worth, even now, working out a system of selection which did not involve examining people on a particular occasion, but rather keeping records of their achievements which could be computerised, so that the most suitable further training or job could be found.

The difficulties in the way of such a scheme are, however, very great. Many people might prefer even the distasteful business of examinations to the somewhat sinister sense of being under observation from the cradle to the grave, or at least from entry to school to departure for a job. But it seems to me that, difficult though this solution is, if there is enough evidence against examinations, then even in our present situation, we should try seriously, .and not as mere fantasy, to discover an alternative to them.

Let us assume, though, that there is no alternative, and that as long as people need to be selected for things, examinations are necessary. The next question is: are our present examinations intolerably bad tools of selection? First of all, are their syllabuses too restrictive? It seems absolutely necessary, at least at school to have agreed syllabuses of some kind if one is going to have external examinations, common to groups of schools and examined by common examiners. In principle it would be possible for at least part of every examination - even at school - to be a paper on a subject chosen by the candidate. In practice the difficulty of achieving fair examining on this scheme would be insuperable.

Complaints about the syllabus tend to spill over into complaints about the methods of examining. For those who dislike the one tend also, to dislike the other. The great educational contrast today is between, on the one hand, the more accumulation of facts, where the pupil is a passive recipient of pre-digested material and on the other hand, project-work in which the pupil finds things out for himself. So those who think that the syllabus of the GCE is restrictive also think that people should be examined, if at all, on what they have done for themselves rather than on (to use the cliché phrase) what they can "churn out" of the pre-digested material.

The very same demand is made at university level. Examinations at the level of finals should, it is sometimes said, be more like examinations for doctorates. They should offer candidates the chance to show what they have been able to do on their own, in the way of original research. There are at least two serious objections to this proposal, at whatever level it is made. One is that, desirable though it may be for everyone to be enterprising and inquiring, there is in fact a very limited number of subjects on which undergraduate - to say nothing of schoolboys - are in a position to do research.

At primary school level it is excellent to see the children projects, because you are thereby teaching them how to find things out, and how to observe and to record. No one would demand that their findings should be original. Real - as opposed to pretended -research cannot be undertaken except on the basis of a wide knowledge of what other people have done in the same field. It is this knowledge which has to be acquired at school and at university.

Children can, of course, criticise the findings of their elders, and will do so increasingly as their knowledge increases. But there is a pre-posterous lack of scholarly humility in the suggestion that it is a waste of time to read what others have thought -whether about chemistry, history or literature.

The other objection to examination on "project work" is a practical one. But the work and the examining must be cumbersome and extremely time-consuming. It is possibly all right for some pupils at secondary schools to go out with their notebooks to question dockers or miners about their day's work or their average earnings. But, alas, what would happen if everyone did it.

And, to return to the question of fairness, how would these exercises be assessed? FOL part of the question the examiner would have to ask would be: was it a sensible subject to undertake? How good was the advice he got in carrying out such research? and so on. I feel a deep scepticism about the possibilities of examining children, or undergraduates, when there are so many incomparable factors in their work. I also doubt the value of such work. Is it really a good training for the future to allow children to base general conclusions on just their own investigations?

Nonetheless, if examinations are to remain tests of knowledge and of ability to think about what one has read, there may still be ways of making them less nerve-wracking. But the method of giving candidates three weeks or a fortnight to write their extended essay (a method now in use in some universities) is, in fact, I suspect, just as productive of nervous strain as the old system of three-hour papers.

What people seem to dread most about the three-hour ordeal is that they will, just at that moment suffer a total failure of memory and forget even the date of the battle of Waterloo. I personally see no reason why all examinations, while lasting the statutory three hours, should not permit the candidate to bring in with him a text, a dictionary, a list of dates or formulae - whatever would help him to put aside this particular fear .The weaker candidates would write less than they do now in three hours because they would spend more time looking things up. But the really good candidates would do just as well or better than they do now. The examination could become less a test of memory and more a test of understanding. The particular nightmare fear which now leads some candidates to breakdowns and others to cheating (usually pathetically incompetently) would be done away with. I wish very much that some university or some GCE examining board would try this for a year.