Towards a better sorting hat
Record grades will encourage exams to return, but couldn't we do better?
In a normal year I’d have written a template column for exam results to be published every August, a few dates and stats tweaked. Alas, we’re in the second year of pupils getting grades without doing exams, so you’ll be waiting until 2022 for the first in my exciting series.
It is of course bad practice to get caught recycling copy, but arguments about education tend to be circular. People argue that exams are getting easier or harder, that there’s too much focus on them or too little, or that kids are studying the wrong things.
With 44.8% of this year’s A-level grades being As or A-stars – around 10% above pre-pandemic levels – what we’ve learned is that as a country we are better at not doing exams than doing them. It’s the kind of policy win that puts Tony ‘Education, Education, Education’ Blair to shame.
Even so, by this time next year we’ll presumably have gone back to testing kids before sending them off to university, the workplace, or whatever the new equivalent is of a dole queue. As the educationalist Daisy Christodoulou argued in The Rest is History podcast, exams are flawed but they are better than the alternatives.
I suppose it depends what you consider the point of the tests being. One criticism of the made-up grades is that poorer pupils have done worse by them. “This is further evidence that they do worse under systems that do not use blind marking on standardised tests,” as another educationalist Sam Freedman tweeted.
This hints at the main subtext to education debates in this country: social mobility. The main way of justifying inequality is, in effect, to divide the country into deserving and undeserving. If those at the top merit it through their ability the system is fair.
Genetic science, the paltry case for free will, and the pointy elbows of the middle and upper classes have done little to damage this story. The political left has taken to denying genetics a role it life’s outcomes, while the right is reluctant to shut down private and grammar schools to prevent richer and better organised parents from exploiting them.
Further downstream we might wonder whether too many kids are going to university. The plethora of top-graded students this year will reignite this debate, as unis are forced to turn away those who might have squeaked in, or offer incentives to students to enlist elsewhere.
You can’t blame Westminster for having noped out of the exam crisis we saw last year, where an algorithm – essentially some generalisations – led to some kids feeling unfairly marked down. But while the workaround this year is plainly ridiculous, it’s not much more ridiculous than the education system when it runs normally.
British education is pulled between a bunch of competing desires. At the grubbier end, it’s a system for putting kids into work once they’ve reached adulthood, ideally with some skills that are relevant to the modern economy. At the more idealistic end it’s about creating ‘well rounded’ adults.
This is at least partly why we have a system where one’s suitability for a career in banking can be assessed on the quality of your essays about Wuthering Heights. Much as the Chinese civil service tested for familiarity with Confucianism, we’re still quizzing people on what amounts to general knowledge.
There are exceptions. We tend not to let surgeons operate without some passing familiarity with medicine, nor civil engineers build bridges without some physics knowledge. Most things that have a straightforward story about success or failure rely on technical education.
Much as I laugh at the blaggers’ occupations of journalism, politics and senior management, there is a need in life for soft judgements that can’t amount to a set of instructions. One can see why academic success in the humanities has served as a proxy for measuring who might be good at this.
Christodoulou may likewise be right that exams are the best system we have. The downside is that our education system elevates a certain smooth-talking, plausible blowhard into positions of authority, where a more technically-minded person might have learnt their judgement on the job. I don’t know how, but perhaps we can do better?