'O' no, not again...

Here we go again, all change - out with GCSE’s in with EBaccs. Why can’t they simply leave exams alone and why replace them with something that sounds like it should come from a heavily forested moon a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?

They’ve been saying that GCSE’s have been getting easier year on year for ages. Too many passes, too many high grades, too many happy and proud children and parents.

Well, we can’t have that can we… it’d never do would it? I know, let’s go back to the future and instead of students working towards a qualification in a logical and systematic way, having to complete each step of a journey towards qualification, let’s bung it all down to a three hour examination at the end of a very long and complicated two year course.

Let's put the whole thing in the hands of memory and rote and not recognise any need for a deeper understanding. After all, we're all good drivers after we've passed the test so surely maths and English are just the same.

That should sort the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys, the clever from the dull. Yes, lets go back thirty years to the days of the ‘O’ level and the CSE, let's go back to the good old days where you could waste almost two years not learning a thing and then cram it all in the month before the final exam and still pass.

Yes, I was at school in the days of the ‘O’ level, and back then you could do just that. I knew boys who did almost nothing during the two years leading up to the exam and then ‘crammed’ the month before. Many (at least those whose parents could afford it) even hired a cramming coach who groomed them ready for the exams a few weeks before they sat it. I even knew boys that found ways to cheat in the exams. None of them were ever caught and not a one of us ever ‘split’ – it simply wasn’t done. And of course there were always the ‘O’ level aid books – books that gave you the essential bits of Chaucer or ‘Tess’ required for the exam so that you had no need to actually read the book.

For some exams were easy – they breezed them, hardly breaking into a sweat as they sat on a hard wooden chair for hours on end turning over exam sheet after exam sheet. Others went to pieces. One very bright boy was so scared of exams he flunked the lot; there was another who always fainted whenever he entered the exam room. ‘O’ level time was shit and most of us were scared shitless. It was two weeks of hell, with your whole life resting on a couple of hours and the turn of an exam paper booklet.

I loved history, always got good marks, was top of the class three years running and even won the lower school history prize. I thought I knew my stuff and so did everyone else; but on the day of the three hour exam something went wrong – I lost my nerve or forgot everything I’d once known… and I failed. I’m not talking a low grade here, I’m talking a fail, an ‘F’. All the great work I’d done in the two years preceding that day counted for nothing. I might as well never have studied history, never have written all those essays, never won the lower school history prize. I was a failure… an ‘F’.

I passed other ‘O’ levels, not brilliantly but okay, but I never re-sat my history ‘O’ level. I didn’t have the heart. I was an ‘F’.

I ignored history for years after that, pretending it hadn’t happened. I gave up on something that for years I’d found fascinating and which brought me real pleasure simply because for a few short hours in the school hall I panicked and lost my way.