Do exams really get children ready for real world?
Every year on this day, celebrities on Twitter like to boast to teenagers: ‘Don’t worry, I failed my exams – and look, I’m now a DJ/rock star/Tv chef!’
It’s a specialised boast. For the less lucky, glamorous or wellconnected, exam passes remain the big ticket out of town.
I feel for the parents, who are keen to help their kids clear this annual hurdle, or anxious that they might fail, and perhaps sometimes worried how this might look.
Modern exams have become a middle-class educational arms race, with a cottage industry of private tutors filling in the gaps.
No wonder there were grimaces exchanged last year when my local school boasted about their exam pass rates, ignoring the strong likelihood that most of the grades were acquired privately at £30 an hour.
It seems that we will never agree on the best way to test our young people. Which is fairer: continual assessment or sink-or-swim exams? Which system will set them up to face real world challenges of disappointment, dodging bullets and deadlines?
Your position on exams may come down to class or politics but most of all your own personality. If you are a methodical type, the kind of conscientious soul who knows what day the bins go out, can’t bear texting ‘u’ instead of ‘you’, can always lay hands on a screwdriver because you have a special place for it in the house like everything else, and like to turn up for a flight the day before, then modules were built for you.
on the other hand, those who thrive on cranking up adrenaline, late-night cramming with coffee and NoDoze and the kick in the pants of an imminent deadline will probably prefer exams.
My own relationship with exams is mixed. I loved english because it was an exam that invited you to use your powers of imagination and invention to consider what the examiner might want to read, and then offering them a toadying fusion of this and Brodie’s Notes.
I also got through a poetry question despite having left Shakespeare’s sonnets unread, by reviewing a David Bowie song instead.
In short, english was a bluffer’s charter and therefore good practise if you end up as the kind of journalist who is sent out to interview economists, or unexpectedly asked on live radio to busk a solution to all that ails the Central African republic.
on the other hand, I was completely found out with art, since you cannot fake an ability to draw, unless – as the late, great Glasgow boy Steven Campbell once claimed to me he had done – you submit a series of inky canvasses for grading, all titled ‘Midnight Down a Mine’.
Today it would be harder for a younger me to catch a break. For one thing, the £400million cut in Scottish schools funding over the past ten years would have completely paralysed my comprehensive.
And for another, the student debt from my law degree would be so huge that I would have had no hope of going down to Twickenham and talking my way into film school by enthusiastically agreeing with the school’s senior lecturer that there was no finer film than the first Mad Max.
So today, the only help I can offer to students holding a results envelope is that if you are going to review a Bowie song, make sure it’s from Tonight. No one listens to that album twice.