Brooklyn middle school banishes exams

Few middle schoolers know their mathematical strengths and weaknesses as well as New York City student Moheeb Kaied. Now a seventh grader at Brooklyn’s Middle School 442, he can easily list them in great detail. 

Moheeb is part of a new program that’s challenging the way teachers and students think about measuring progress in the classroom; his school is one of hundreds that have done away with the traditional, end-of-term and end-of-year grades.

At M.S. 442, students are encouraged to focus instead on mastering a set of year-level skills, like writing a scientific hypothesis or identifying themes in a story, moving to the next set of skills when they have demonstrated that they’re ready. In these schools, there is no such thing as a C or a D for a written exam. There’s no failing. The only goal is to learn the material, sooner or later. 

For struggling students, there is ample time to practice until they get it. For those who grasp concepts quickly, there’s the opportunity to swiftly move ahead.

Parents, however, remain sceptical. Most are confused by the frequent progress reports detailing dozens of outcomes for each subject. Many simply want to know whether their children are passing or not.

Literacy suffers as Britain recommits to frequent exams

This desire for a clear-cut result is what motivated Britain’s then Education Secretary, Michael Gove, to advocate a return to an exam-dominated curriculum in English schools in 2012.

“Exams are a way of making sure that students understand, recall and can use information,” he said. “The more that students can recall information instinctively, the easier it is for them to perform complex tasks.”

As a result of the reforms he implemented, English schools reward the ability to cram in as much information as possible and regurgitate it under exam conditions. Teaching only the information that the exam will test, known as ‘Teaching to the test’, has since become the norm in UK classrooms.

Intensive short-term study ahead of exams is merely superficial and quickly forgotten

Subsequently, maths, literacy and problem-solving skills dropped significantly according to University of Oxford researchers. Intensive short-term study ahead of exams is merely superficial and quickly forgotten after the test, lead researcher Professor Danny Dorling explained; deep, sustained learning is not an outcome from this style of teaching.

Test results a matter of luck

There’s another critical element too; how accurate is the marking process anyway, especially for high-stakes exams, such as those at the end of secondary school?

Dan Davies, a former Bank of England economist, carefully read 2020’s evaluation report by Ofqual, England’s regulator for the Year 12 exams. “In any subject other than maths or the sciences, there’s no better than 70% chance that two markers – or the same marker at different times – would agree on the grade to be awarded,” he wrote in The Guardian. 

“For many pupils, it’s quite possible that significant grading differences occurred simply because your paper was in the pile that was marked before, rather than after, the marker had a good lunch.”