I visited the 2025 Next Generation Assessment Conference, only 10 months since the 2024 edition, I saw progress in digital school exams and assessment – but why is recognition still elusive?
Digital empowers people. Some schools at the conference are designing their own content, tests, and qualifications. Easy-to-use tools. No heavy regulatory hand or trad exam hassle. Digitally-Authenticated Project Qualifications, Oracy, Formative - all rapidly gathering pace.
Yet old media still indulges assessment heritage acts, such as handwriting hobbyists and manuscript martyrs. In a pertinent rebuttal, the eAssessment Association CEO recently wrote, "The handwriting debate should not distract from fair, accurate, inclusive, and future-focused assessment...ensure students are judged on their ideas and knowledge, not their penmanship."
It’s foolish to think we’ll just put down our phones, quit using the internet, ignore AI. Out-of-touch academic blowhards still bellow, 'I can tell if AI wrote it'. Policy butterflies, and old media hacks are a little too quick to punch down on Project Qualifications, vocational assessment, and digitisation. ‘Flimsy evidence’, ‘Only for the well-heeled’’, ‘Easy to cheat’.
We won’t put down phones, quit the internet, or ignore AI – yet old media still indulges handwriting hobbyists, not serious time-served digital exam practitioners.
But they all go weak-kneed and frothy for the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme - welcoming 331k young people last year, with over 545k active on-scheme. Hardly an edge case or an obscure qualification. The same people and old media who fall in line with lazy tropes, “There’s nothing to see here, your kids’ exams are perfectly fine”.
All the while: marking is wild, assessment invigilation/ supervision casualised, SEN learners locked out, exam fees rocketing, malpractice soaring, outcomes weakening, social mobility slumping.
Hypocritical blowhards, policy butterflies, and well-educated hacks love punching down on project qualifications. Yet they all go frothy over the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme.
The general public is now digitally empowered as never before. And it doesn’t like being talked down to. The conference showed me where school exams and assessment are heading. It’s not 12 GCSEs with 3 hour paper essays, delivered on the same sweaty day in June, marked by tired, grumpy examiners on their 80th script of the day.
Some of these schools are now only entering learners for Maths and English Language GCSE. Two qualifications, supplemented by their own. The BBC crime drama ‘A Good Girl's Guide To Murder’ saw a Project Qualification in action. Shouldn’t exam owners betting on ‘paper behind glass’ exam digitisation re-consider that strategy’s viability?
Q: Why does the exam sector and regulators not give what people need and want?
A: Resistance from the established order. Lacklustre support from potential beneficiaries. The mainstreaming of AI underpinning fear and disbelief about the digital assessment toolkit (or Target Operating Model) required.
Yes, that sounds Machiavellian. But digital exams and assessment give everybody transparency, full audit, accessibility, and equity. Never forget that some people are not on board with that for parents and (their own) kids.
Digital exams and assessment give full transparency, accessibility, and equity for all. Never forget that some people don’t want you and your kids to have that.
At the conference, educators said they needed solutions that are cheap, fast, good. They’re right to reject the analogue orthodoxy of expensive, slow, and crap. They want solutions that deliver on: Knows>>Knows How>>Shows>>Does.
Educators want cheap, fast, and good solutions that deliver on Knows>>Knows How>>Shows>>Does.
The social media debate on digital exams/ assessment and Project Qualifications still gives more heat than light. But I sensed from conference delegates that schools, parents, and kids still feel mugged off with quibbling, obfuscation, and protectionism. Regulators kicking the digital exam can down the road for somebody elde to deal with. Stifled by exam traditionalism. They are right to challenge, ‘What exactly are GCSEs and A Levels giving us? Limited job prospects and access to housing? Eternal university debt? More nepotism and cronyism, not meritocracy?’
Schools, parents, and kids are right to ask, ‘What exactly do we get from GCSEs and A Levels?’
While the conference gave comfort that the tide is turning, we still have rampant exam fee inflation, exam officer pain, parents compelled to go legal to get assessment justice for their kids, and barred rooms with pallets of exam papers nurturing temptation.
Digital exam progress is ours for the taking, but who wants it?