I had one of those conversations last week that are all too frequent. An employer discovers I am in education and starts to berate me about the appalling quality of candidates for his latest vacant post.
“Unbelievable! I only bothered with a 1st or top 2 (i) degree”, the conversation goes, or “I looked at their A levels and they had all got As and A* – hopeless, the lot of them”.
The education system has let him down. There is an expectation that doing very well in academic national examinations is the indication of a perfect match for a job description. This is silly but the reasons why we have got to this situation are not.
Because of governments’ needs for short-term illustrations of success, an inordinate amount of value has been placed on examination results. We have a generation of children – and teachers – who value themselves in terms only of examination results and since in the end all exam systems are norm referenced, for virtually everyone, there will always be people who are better and always will be, however much you individually improve.
But then let us imagine that you are one of the ones who is good at doing exams, those with the 1st or top 2(i), with all the A*s and As. What does that actually tell anyone? You are good at doing exams? You were lucky in the questions? You were well taught and did what you were told? You work very hard? You sacrificed every other aspect of life to revise? Or that you are seriously cleverer than most other people, intellectually sharp and curious, intuitive, empathetic, imaginative, creative, disciplined?
Of course, doing well in examinations could mean all of these things, or none. Exams are crude. They are devised, administered and marked by people and people get it wrong. It is an imperfect system. The real fault is not that a particular maths examinations should be more rigorous but that we are foolish enough to give such huge significance to examination results.
So the next time you are disappointed in candidates, have some confidence in criteria other than exam results when you make judgments.
* Sarah Evans, Principal, King Edward VI High School for Girls.
