Letters From A Tory Daily views on British politics and the Conservative Party from a centre-right thinker who writes letters on his blog to politicians, journalists and many others.

Dear QCA,

Yet again you have failed to give the public good reason to believe that our national examination system is alive and well.  I’m sure most people outside of education probably didn’t realise that many exam papers are now marked on a computer screen instead of having the exam script on a desk in front of the marker.  The National Association of Headteachers (NAH) thinks the online marking system is starting to break down and I agree with them.

The problem that every government for the last 15 or so years has failed to address is the operations of privatised exam boards.  These exam boards, such as AQA, OCR and EDEXCEL compete with each other to attract schools to take their exams in order to receive an income from examination fees.  The problem is that in a competitive market, they have a clear incentive to reduce their overheads to increase their profit margins, as any organisation in the same position would do.   The fact that exam papers are marked online is heralded by some as a great step forward in education, but as the NAH rightly pointed out: “[The examiners] are not able to annotate the scripts by hand, there’s a time constraint and you can’t take into account youngsters who do quite a lot of writing and don’t fill in the standard box that online marking demands.  So legitimately there’s a question whether or not online marking is missing some of the achievements of youngsters.”  As an examiner how can you leave comments and clearly indicate the distribution of marks with supporting evidence when you are staring at a script on a computer screen which may not fit neatly into the examination marking criteria?  The drive to increase profit also goes a long way to explaining why exam boards often get office staff to mark scripts instead of qualified teachers (EDEXCEL in particular have been caught doing this several times).

With profit the overriding concern in examination syllabuses and the marking of scripts, the quality of exam questions and exam marking is always going to suffer.  It’s about time we dumped this ludicrous notion of exam boards competing with each other and handed control over to a single non-profit non-governmental organisation that has rigorous exam questions and exam marking as their first priority.

Yours in annoyance,

A.Tory