Alan Ryan: GCSEs are an outrage against teenage nature

The release of A-level and GCSE results provokes predictable reactions. On the one side, the Government spokesmen stand like Stalin's ministers during the period of the Five Year Plan, praising the Stakhanovite heroes – heroines mostly – of scholastic productivity; and on the other, Chris Woodhead announces the end of intellectual life as we have known it, and Ruth Lea laments the absence of plumbers and mechanics.

There are deeper issues. The deepest is the obscurity of what the process is for. Talk of a "gold standard" suggests that A-levels are an indicator of academic aptitude and a test of a student having acquired some knowledge of a recognisable field of inquiry. But talk of parity of esteem between vocational and academic tests suggests that A-levels indicate employability rather than academic capacity. Either goal makes sense, but it's not obvious whether we can pursue both by the same kind of teaching and testing.

And what are GCSEs for? To give every 16-year-old something to wave at employers to show they have a modicum of self-discipline and persistence, or to provide evidence that they can usefully pursue some subject to university and beyond? The entire process is beset with contradiction. One examination can't test both whether one student's French is good enough to enable them to do a degree in European business studies, say, and whether another student's understanding of the language and the literature of France is good enough to let them take on Julia Kristeva. The first needs a simple test of competence, the second an open-minded assessment of a more complicated and subjective sort.

The fact that 94 per cent of candidates pass their A-levels isn't a scandal; it's good that almost everyone at least learns something from the previous two years. Nor is the fact that many more of them get A grades than used to; given the predictability of what's needed, it'd be a scandal if teachers hadn't learned how to teach for it. The real scandal is that creating examinations that serve internally contradictory purposes ends, not in dumbing down, but in driving out intellectual interest. The process goes like this: we want scores that don't vary between examiners, tests that don't vary between examination boards, a wide enough range from top to bottom to justify the range of letter grades that are awarded, and a good correlation with SATs and IQ tests.

The tests that do this have familiar properties: most of the information students need must be supplied with the question itself; what the examiners are looking for must be clear to teachers teaching for the examination; and the examination itself must tell the students what the examiners are looking for. Three things happen; "teaching to the test" becomes the dominant mode of instruction, assessment becomes a matter of ticking the box, and students need continuous reassurance that they are doing what is wanted, and become very unadventurous.

This is what the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) inflicted on universities, where the pursuit of efficiency produces students who give respectable tick-box responses to questions they have been prepared for – and flounder once they think for themselves. This would be less of a disaster if it didn't produce something else as well. Because there is no way in which students can show that they are lively, adept, possessed of unusually good memories and unusually good analytical skills by taking two or three demanding examinations, they go down the quantitative track, clocking up 10, 11 or 14 GCSEs and anything up to six A-levels.

Aggrieved parents and teachers point to these accumulations and ask unhappy admissions tutors what more we want. But the question misses two things. Climbing Everest is not the same thing as walking up Primrose Hill 100 times. If you want students who can challenge themselves and you, it's not enough that they have loads of stamina, an amazing tolerance of boredom and a willingness to do what their teachers wish. And making adolescents waste the most interesting years of their lives passing tests of their readiness to conform to other people's expectations is itself an outrage against teenage human nature. This cannot be good for the young and it suggests some terrible things about their elders. Pension off Chris Woodhead and Ruth Lea, and bring back Ivan Illich.

The writer is warden of New College Oxford

education@independent.co.uk