The review into reforming the high school exam system has now published its final report.

I’ve already spent a few minutes on the report itself, and if you haven’t seen that you can click the link to read it here, but have we maybe skipped a step?

We’ve got a 150 page report on rebuilding the senior years of high school and the way we give our kids some sort of certification or qualification on leaving school – but why do we even need exam reform in the first place?

I think this issue is best understood through three distinct, but sometimes overlapping, concerns about our current system.

Those concerns are:

  • It’s not relevant enough
  • It’s not efficient enough
  • It’s not accurate enough

Now, if you give me a few minutes of your time, I’ll give you a quick crash course in each of those problems and how they affect young people.

Relevance


This one is quite straightforward, and is often raised by people outside the education system. Basically, the exam structure we used is incredibly old and, to some, entirely out of date, focused on rewarding the ability to regurgitate information in a pretty unnatural setting – it doesn’t reflect the world in which it or young people exist.

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Obviously sometimes you just need to know things, but in a world of ubiquitous digital devices, internet connectivity and even AI, closed-book, paper-and-pen exams start to look like a bit of a relic.

The argument goes that it would, surely, be better to assess students using methods that are, themselves, relevant to the world the kids are growing up in, instead of clinging to what we’ve always done because we’ve always done it.

The exam system isn’t efficient enough


This one is about the use of time over fourth, fifth and sixth year of high school.

To figure that out we need to add up, roughly, prelim periods and exam periods in S4, S5 and S6. So if we say a school might spend 2 weeks on prelims, and we know that the exam period lasts about six weeks, and that there is often a couple of weeks of study leave before that – that means that over the course of S4 – S6 something like 30 weeks is taken up by the exam system.

And that’s just the formal stuff. You need to also factor in something much harder to pin down – the time spent not teaching a subject but rather coaching for an exam. It’s the difference between teaching a class a new poem, and then teaching them how to write a 45-minute essay on it that will tick the boxes a marker wants ticked.

Speak to high school teachers and they’ll often tell you that a lot of their time is spent on exam coaching.   And that’s all time that could be spent actually teaching young people, and helping them to develop skills that are far more relevant than “here’s how to deal with the specific demands on the Higher examination paper”.

Accuracy


Are exams accurate enough for us to trust them and tie so much of young people’s futures to their performance in them?

This is generally the area that supporters of the current system camp out on. They say that while there may be problems with exams, at least they are accurate. The belief – implicit or explicit – is that you can’t trust other approaches the way you can trust an exam.

But what if that isn’t true either?

A few years ago, researchers found that, on average, 1 in 4 exam grades are wrong. 1 in 4.

That was to do with the problems caused by single markers and grade boundaries, but there’s probably an easier way to understand it. Look at appeals data in Scotland.

Now usually we don’t have real appeals, just clerical checks and remarks, but last year there was a real(ish) appeals system and it saw about a third of the 60,000 appealed grades moved up because the school provided evidence showing that the exam result wasn’t an accurate reflection of that student’s ability.

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Because that’s the thing with accuracy – you need to ask what you’re being accurate about.

In a best case scenario, exams give you an accurate assessment of a student’s performance in a 2-3 hour window – but is that actually accuracy? Is it being accurate about the thing that is actually valuable (a student’s ability and potential)? For many, the answer to that is no.

Fairness


So is it fair to assess kids using methods that lack relevance in their lives?

Is it fair to use up so much of their limited time in education on exams?

Is it fair to depend upon a system that struggles for accuracy both in a direct and a broader, more philosophical way?

And there’s what most would consider the most obvious issue of fairness: the impact of the exam system on young people from deprived backgrounds.

We know that poorer pupils don’t do as well because of out of school factors, but maybe there are aspects of our system that make it worse?

And we can see that because, in 2020, when exams were cancelled and students given the grades they had actually earned – not the ones allocated to them by the grading policies of the SQA – the attainment gap at higher was cut in half.

We could be here all day getting into why but basically the issue is that we like to assume kids sit the same exam at the same time under the same conditions... but they don't.

A rich kid with a full belly after plenty of sleep isn't tested under the same conditions as a poor kid who was up at 6am to get their siblings ready and didn't manage to eat breakfast before the exam starts.

The exam system we have now might not create unfairness, but it certainly seems to entrench and even magnify it.

That being the case, exam reform doesn’t look like a luxury does it? It looks vital.