The only good exams are pen and paper — or a viva

Nearly there. The exam season, that is. One child has finished GCSEs; another has the last bit of Latin and Greek A level to go. All that schooling: boiled down to sessions of between one and three hours apiece.

I’ve had interesting insights into the workings of the system. My daughter observes that anyone going to the loo during an exam is suspect, which is obviously unfair on anyone who gets the runs under pressure. One girl from another school wrote cribs on her sanitary towel, which is less awkward to look at than the inside of your thigh. I am sorry to say that her sole reaction to this was pure admiration.

There are precautions against electronic cheating; so, no watches. But as my daughter sagely observed, there’s nothing to stop you putting a device in your bra or a book in the bathroom.

For most candidates, the exam is a matter of showcasing your wares; so bad luck to the poor girl who went on social media to ask markers to give her a break; when she was asked about Scrooge being mean, she mistook him for the Grinch who Stole Christmas.

Yet there is still a kind of purity to written exams: it’s a matter of you, a pen and paper and an examiner. Compare and contrast with coursework, where middle classes parents can use all their diabolic ingenuity to inflate the grade, from actually helping to write the essay to undertaking research to go in it.

Yet the unimpressive Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf, has suggested replacing written exams with coursework... it’s fairer, he says. Au contraire!

The real threat now to coursework is of course from ChatGPT; AI does brilliant essays, in the style of the pupil.

So the deputy head of a private school, Haileybury, has proposed that instead, candidates should have oral sessions of 20 minutes, where, rather than writing about the causes of the Great War, you talk about it for five minutes before answering bespoke questions. A bit like oral French GCSE, where you have a range of topics in advice.

Obviously the Humza Yousafs will argue that relying on “oracy” — can we just call it articulacy? — will itself reward confident pupils, but it eliminates cheating: there’s nowhere to hide.

Better a system that identifies a useful life skill — expressing yourself in speech — than the brilliance of your AI.