Students have had such widely differing experiences of education during lockdown, that it is hard to conceive of when – or perhaps even whether – exams will ever offer a level playing field again.
Exams are facing their biggest test as a measure of student achievement after continued lockdowns prompted cancellations for the second year in a row. Educationalists and policy makers are scrabbling to find alternative means of assessment after it became apparent that there was no way exams this year would be a fair test of student ability. But the level of disruption to education at all levels casts doubt on whether exams could be an acceptable way to grade students not just this year, but for years to come. Public exams in England have been one of the biggest education casualties of the pandemic. After insisting exams would go ahead this year – long after it became obvious that they would not – the U.K. Government finally bowed to the inevitable earlier this month and announced they would be cancelled. Instead, a form of teacher assessment would be used to determine grades for 16 and 18-year-old students, although – astonishingly, given the amount of time to work up an alternative – the exact approach has still not been agreed. Across the Atlantic, the SAT is still due to go ahead this year, despite the likelihood of disruption continuing into the spring and early summer. But the impact of the pandemic on education poses a twin threat to the primacy of exams as an assessment tool. One is that the use of a form of teacher assessment has the potential to provide an example of a successful alternative.
