What’s wrong with our exam system?

Our exam systems put the cart before the horse

What’s the point of examinations at the end of school, asks Guy Claxton. The tests are so general, they cannot possibly predict to which tasks a child’s talents will be suited…

Horses are good at pulling things, but they are useless at pushing. That’s why, if you try to put the cart before the horse, you create unnecessary problems. Our exam systems always put the cart before the horse, and so makes life needlessly difficult. Let me explain. Exams should be at the entry to things, not at the exit. When you apply for entry to any kind of club, it doesn’t matter what you have done; it matters what you can do. We don’t make everyone take a driving test as a condition of graduating from school or university. You take your driving test when you want to join the club of drivers – and the test is specific to the type of vehicle you want to drive. Equally, if you want to know whether someone can read at the required level for a specific job, it is very quick and easy to find out: give him something appropriate to read and see how he does. That will be a much more reliable check than looking at his school grades. When you set up universal exams at the end of primary school, or at 16 or 18, the tests are bound to be so general that they will not accurately predict how suited any individual is to a particular context. You can get an ‘A’ in writing about Shakespeare, but not be very good at your own creative writing, or at writing technical manuals.

Medical students’ examination marks are very poor at predicting how good a practitioner they will turn out to be – lots of Fellows of the Royal Society got pretty average degrees. IQ doesn’t predict how smart you will be in many real-life contexts.

When you make everyone jump through the same set of general-purpose hoops, you create all sorts of problems. Some students are just not very good at showing what they know in decontextualised surroundings. What they know (or can do) fails to come to mind at the right moment. Harvard’s David Perkins has shown that up to half of the variance between children’s performance is due not to what they have learned, but whether they realise the relevance of what they have learned in the testing situation. The same is true with mental and emotional skills. You can train pupils to think more clearly, analytically and methodically – to use de Bono’s Thinking Hats, for example – but those abilities very often just go quietly to sleep as soon as the children walk out of your classroom door. Alternatively, children may have developed highly creative dispositions in their out-of-school learning lives, but show no trace of them in the classroom.

And sometimes that’s just what you want – you don’t want to be analysing every little thing all the time. The disposition to be analytically precise makes you dull company in the pub or the playground. No-one wants to hang out with a pedant. Likewise, creativity isn’t always what you want. If you were exploring remote possibilities all the time, it would take you an age to get ready for school! The value of different habits of mind depends on the context. And that is precisely what conventional exitstyle exams can never capture.

Exams are based on a widespread misunderstanding of the mind. We think the things we have learned ought to swim around freely, like goldfish in a bowl, ready to be hooked by any relevant occasion that happens along. So sit someone in a strange room, on their own, under pressure, and we suppose that they ‘should’ be able to show us what they know. But that’s not how we store ideas and experiences. Instead, everything we know is tagged with suggestions about what it is good for and when it is good to bring it to mind. And those tags only change through experience. We are honest in some situations, and a bit devious in others. Only gradually does a disposition like ‘honesty’ (or ‘resilience’, or ‘imaginativeness’) spread it wings so it comes to operate in wider and wider areas of our lives.

Exams are not a good litmus test of what we know (or are able to do). How a child performs on a special afternoon is not a reliable guide to how he will behave in very different situations in the future. The only way to assess that is the put tests at the beginnings of things, and not at the ends