Are examinations unfair?

Text 1: Diary of a Pupil-Teacher, by Ellen Marsh

An original diary written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

March 14th. The Inspector comes tomorrow. Mr Dobbs has been sharp with everyone all week, and today he made the Third Standard read the same page of their book eleven times, until even little Polly Hearn could say it with her eyes shut. That is the trouble. I believe she does say it with her eyes shut, for when I pointed to a word on a different page she could not tell me what it was. She has learned the page as one learns a song, and the Inspector, if he is a hurried man, will never know the difference.

March 15th. He was a hurried man. He arrived at ten in a hired fly, with a clerk to write down the marks, and he heard a hundred and twenty children in two hours and a half. Each child had perhaps a minute. Polly read her page beautifully and passed. Then he came to Samuel Firth, who reads better than anyone in the school, who reads the newspaper to his grandfather every night, and Samuel was so frightened by the gentleman’s whiskers that he could not get past the first line. He failed. Every child who fails costs the school money, and Mr Dobbs looked at Samuel as if he had picked his pocket.

I cried on the way home, which was foolish. I am meant to be a teacher myself one day, and I suppose I shall have to prepare children for the Inspector as Mr Dobbs does. I do not know whether I can. The examination, I think, does not ask what a child knows. It asks what a child can perform, on one morning, in front of a stranger. Those are not the same thing at all, and today proved it.

Text 2: Why I Don’t Hate Exam Season, by Kofi Mensah-Lloyd

An original contemporary article.

Every May, the same articles appear. Exams are cruel, exams are outdated, exams measure nothing except how well you can sit still and panic quietly. I have read them all, usually while revising, and I agree with about half of what they say. My friend Isla knows more about chemistry than anyone in our year, and last summer she spent the first twenty minutes of her paper in the toilets, shaking. She came out with a grade that tells you nothing about her except that she had a bad morning.

So, yes, exams are blunt. They reward a particular kind of nerve. They depend on which questions happen to come up, and anyone who tells you luck plays no part has never turned over a paper and seen the one topic they skipped.

But here is the half I disagree with. In Year 9 I was put in the bottom set for maths. I had been loud in Year 7, and that reputation followed me around like a smell. Teachers saw the boy who messed about, and they predicted grades to match. The exam paper did not know any of that. It did not know my name, my reputation or the fact that I once set off the fire alarm. It only knew whether my answers were right. When my results came, two grades above my prediction, I felt something I had never felt in a classroom: that I had been judged on what I could do and nothing else. Exams are an unfair test of some people. For me, they were the first fair one.

‘Both writers present examinations as unfair tests of what young people really know.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the examinations in each text
• explain how far you agree that both writers see examinations as unfair
• compare the ways the writers present examinations and the young people who sit them.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.