Results day 2021: After the best-ever GSCE grades, are exams gone forever?

GCSE results
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The best-ever GCSEgrades make it a good end to two difficult and disrupted years for many young people and their parents. All who have received their results can feel proud of getting through those years and achieving their grades.

Once again, girls have done particularly well. They have increased their lead over boys in top grades to a record nine percentage points. They are ahead in 45 of the 47 subjects, often by wide margins, even overtaking boys in maths this year. Boys were in front in physics and statistics, but only just.

It is not only in GCSEs that girls star. They get better SATs results, more top A-level grades, and take the lion’s share of university places. Their success is said to be because that they are more serious about studies, they work harder, they like course work and even that they are favoured by teachers. But their dominance is such that it may just be that they are cleverer– at least on average and in academic things.

As last year, the grades have been decided by teachers. This has advantages. They know and care about their pupils and can take a rounded view. The higher grades awarded are popular with parents and pupils who have much to celebrate. The general good feeling has led to calls to scrap the exams.

Teachers don’t like GCSE exams because they are judged on the pupils’ results. Leading schools think they are unnecessary. Campaigners variously claim that they disrupt the curriculum, cause stress and mental illness, and are biased against the disadvantaged.

Maybe, but exams do have a very important function. They provide the objective, reliable and solid information that pupils need in deciding what to do next and those offering places need in order to make informed and fair decisions.

It does, however, pose quite a problem for the government. With two years of teacher assessment, and perhaps a third, will it be possible to go back to exams with grades consistent with those before the pandemic. Now that it is out, will the government ever be able to put the genie back into the bottle.

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