Scrapping Oxford’s ‘traditional’ exams won’t make things fairer

Are exams… racist? Are exams snobs? If a report in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph is to be credited, academics at Oxford and Cambridge are taking this question seriously. In the hopes of closing the ‘achievement gap’ between white middle-class students (who scoop more of the firsts and 2.1s) and students from disadvantaged backgrounds or other ethnicities, Russell Group universities are said to be considering replacing traditional exams with more ‘inclusive assessments’ such as open-book papers or even ‘take-home exams’. 

Call me a reactionary, but this sounds quite nuts. We can acknowledge that an achievement gap exists. We can certainly credit, too, that it might be in the interests of everybody to seek to understand and remedy it. But it’s a big – a giant, a 100-league-boot – leap from those two propositions to the idea that sitting finals in an exam room is the problem.  

Unseen examination papers under timed conditions are as good a test as we currently have of accumulated knowledge, ability under pressure and reasoning on the hoof.