Tom Greene: There is more to education than exams

Today's results will represent a year of mechanised working towards four grades

Today represents the end of a journey from hours (or not) of revision to a single capitalised letter with implications for the future. It's results day! For many students it brings a reality check to a summer of post-exam indulgence, and for everyone else the annual Rumble in the Jungle over exam results begins.

In the red corner is Chris Woodhead, the former chief inspector of schools. On Monday he said that GCSEs and A-levels had become "less challenging" and "not fit for purpose". Squaring up to him in the blue corner is School's Minister Jim Knight - "This, like many myths surrounding the exams, is nonsense."

The argument is once again set - ex-school inspector thinks standards are slipping, present government official thinks the kids are doing just fine. The truth is that no conscious effort is being made to make exams easier or harder - they are just having to adapt to the formidable machine that the exam marking system has become. Exam marking is no longer a service to the education system - the education system is a service to it.

Full marks to the UK's largest exam body - Edexcel - for perfectly proving this point. Last year, it was revealed that Edexcel Religious Studies scripts were being marked by "unqualified office staff" and students. Edexcel maintained its innocence, claiming that through a shortage of qualified examiners, students and office staff only checked the answers to very simple questions and that they were "maintaining standards".

That is surely not the point. Nobody is doubting whether students and office staff are capable of marking exams - just that if the post boy can mark the answers, is there any point in setting the exam at all? Is not the shortage of examiners determining changes in exams themselves?

The AS/A2 system introduced in 2001/2 has resulted in more exams than ever, which in turn means that time at school is spent mostly preparing for exams. With the old system of a single exam at the end of two years of sixth form, teachers could afford to go off on a tangent if interesting class discussion took them there; with AS exams, every lesson is crucial. Lower Sixth (year 12) is now geared to the exam at the end of the year. Let's not get started on what's in store for year 13: If it's not AS retakes, it's A2 modules.

After every round of exams the whole marking machine creaks back into action: examiners have to attend a standardised meeting where moderators (or "Team Leaders") discuss specific papers and check examiners marking of sample scripts. Moderation continues when marking begins as example papers are scrutinised before the examiners' marks are turned into fully-fledged grades.

If exams are to become more challenging, creativity and ingenuity will have to squeeze in alongside mark schemes and moderation. Perhaps the criteria for examiners will have to change too, if we are to get the challenging exams Mr Woodhead wants. Examiners are mostly teachers, working in their summer holidays, and are traditionally paid per script marked.

For example, an examiner marking AS Psychology would be paid £3.14 per script, added to a standard fee for attending the initial meeting. With an average allocation of about 300 scripts an examiner (pre tax) can expect to earn about £1,200. Anyone fancy applying?

This process would be fine if it was reflecting the work that was done by students, rather than shaping what and how is taught to them. Exam preparation, and increasingly education, is now about adapting to this system; forcing an examiner, wearily red-penning through piles of paper, to give you that top grade. Students are drilled to jump through hoops that the examiner is holding.

Exam preparation is part of education - but they shouldn't be one and the same thing. The mechanical exam process is moulding a mechanical education. In traditionally opinion-orientated subjects such as History and English Literature, subjectivity is being replaced by a clear-cut method of approaching exams. For GCSE English you have to write essays that conform to three-word criteria (eg "Inform, Explain and Describe" or "Analyse, Review and Comment"). In AS English the coursework and three-hour exam are all marked under five "Assessment Objectives" - I know all five off by heart.

Still, once everyone has picked up their results, discussion will be put on ice for another year. Mr Woodhead will go back to waving his walking stick at the generation where "all now must have prizes" while Jim can chill with all the clever dudes. Students will be too happy/sad/drunk to care how their grade was allocated, whereas examiners will be preparing to teach again in September, or jump off a cliff depending on how the whole experience has affected them.

No one will have a serious conversation until some report comes out next August saying that 99 per cent of pupils have passed their A-levels and the whole debate will resurface. Today's results will represent a year of mechanised working towards four grades, four grades that will be added to another year's work of retakes and preparation to produce ... another three/four grades. Isn't it about time that grades were for life - not just for August?

T.Greene@mac.com

The writer is a north London student, picking up his AS results today