Scottish exam results: Is there really no wrong path?

If you didn't know any young people and paid attention only to media coverage, then you might think exam results are awarded merely based on who can jump the highest.

The country over, local authority press officers are cajoling schools to let the media in and priming teenagers to leap skyward brandishing a cardboard cutout A.

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This year, for the first time since the coronavirus took hold, exam results are being awarded based on actual exams, rather than the teacher judgement and in-class assessments used as a stop-gap while learning was significantly disrupted.

Of course, learning is still disrupted by the effects of the virus and exam results will be too.

It's expected that pass marks and grades will be down across the board today, when compared to the alleged generous marking of teachers last year.

As if it wasn't enough for this year's cohorts to have had to work through two years of a pandemic, miss out on class contact time, time with their friends, extracurricular activities and on and on, they've been used as a political football for the past two years too.

Whether it's been mask wearing in schools or self-isolation regulations, whether ditching exams for good or missing opportunities to overall the education system, teenagers have had a lot of headlines to deal with.

Just before the pandemic I was writing about the gobsmacking school trips young people were going off on. Parents somehow having to stump up £4000 for trips to the Bahamas or some such.

From being faintly scandalised by the inequality and profligacy, I'd now happily have a whip round now to send all the young people who missed out on school trips away off somewhere exotic. They've earned it.

Today, as well as coping with their own exam results, they're going to have to cope with relentless comparisons to the results of the last two years. It's like the school league tables but on steroids.

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How rotten to work as hard as you can but still have the nagging doubt gleaned from unproven theories that your grade is of less value and was only awarded because of an overly-generous teacher.

Or that your mark this year is less than it would have been if only you hadn't had the misfortune to sit your exams at the end of the pandemic.

Socioeconomic factors are likely to feature again hugely this year. The exams of 2020 showed the gulf between pupils in less and more affluent areas, starkly illustrated by how results were effected. Politicians have had two years to make improvements but will there be any positive impact on exams results this year? 

It's hard to feel anything other than pessimistic about that.

The key modern exam day message over the past few years has been that of "no wrong path". We tell young people that, while their grades may feel all-consuming now, actually, in the long term, they don't really matter that much.

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They are just a stepping stone on to the next thing with multiple paths leading to the same – or an even better – destination. That's all very well, but, despite being the right message, it's pretty meaningless for a young person who's done nothing but focus for a year on more on this one goal.

It's also meaningless while the media and parents and politicians show clear priority for pupils heading to university. For pupils who might be the first in their family to go to university or who have dealt with more difficult home lives while studying, making it to university is, of course, a measure of success well deserving of congratulations and it would be problematic to undermine that.

College is just as valuable - either as a route onto university or as an end in itself. So are apprenticeships, and so are work.

School league tables don't reflect any of this. Taking university acceptance as a measure of success doesn't reflect any of this. 

Having a narrow focus on pupils leaping about with cardboard cutout letter As certainly doesn't reflect it. 

It's a conflict: I almost wish we could leave the pupils out of exam results day and instead focus on politicians and schools and what the adults are doing for young people.

But, of course, they deserve the focus and the plaudits after all their hard work and their successes. There's success even in failure, if that doesn't sound too much like a Hallmark greeting card, and I wish we focused more on that too.

So, good luck to all pupils receiving their results today. You'll be grand, you really will. It might not feel like it now, but it won't be long before you're the ones glad exam results are behind you, dolling out the advice with the benefit of hindsight.

Enjoy it now. I hate to say it but, results-wise, there really is no wrong path.