Many of you will already have experience of on-screen examinations. They are commonplace for IT certifications; you may have taken Microsoft Office Specialist certifications in Word, Excel or PowerPoint on screen, or maybe you have taken one of the numerous technical certifications Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, Cisco and others offer? 

Those of you who have had to take a driving theory test recently will also have experience of taking on-screen assessments.

Many of the UK’s Examination Boards have been sharing their thinking with regard to the introduction of digital examinations for GCSEs. A small number of subjects will introduce small-scale digital exams as pilots in 2025, with some examination boards suggesting that even subjects like GCSE English examinations could start going digital before 2030. This means that by the time our current Upper III cohort take their GCSEs several, if not all, of their examinations are very likely to be taken on a computer.

There is little information on how schools are supposed to manage these examinations at present and we are in the early stages of preparing for these. However these preparations can be categorised into preparing the school environment and infrastructure, and preparing the students to take such examinations.

Until we have greater detail on how the examinations are to be run we cannot do much in terms of preparing the school environment and infrastructure but we already have a strong wifi infrastructure in place and our IT team are constantly working to improve the school’s network infrastructure. They will ensure that our devices and infrastructure are ready when these examinations start.

All the evidence we have so far shows that students read from the screen in a much more superficial way than when they read from paper. It’s not just students. I gave a presentation recently on the research into improving outcomes for girls in Computer Science. I ended up printing out loads of research papers because I found I couldn’t give the same focus when reading them on the screen.

What this means is that we need to train our students to read in greater detail from devices, rather than the usual scanning and scrolling through social media feeds and the like. All our students have access to a wide range of digital publications through the Library and you can support your daughter to learn to focus more with on-screen media by helping them to read and understand “long-read” articles in online newspapers and magazines. [Many subjects regularly recommend articles in their Google Classrooms that might be of interest too]

We are also starting to give students experience of taking examinations on devices. Upper Three parents received a letter from myself and Dr Tullis explaining that one of their End of Year Examinations next week will be an on-screen assessment . This will be the Computer Science examination, which will be taken on the student’s own device using a high-security browser that stops students being able to use the internet to search for answers etc.

It should be said that all the students have experience of taking low-stakes quizzes digitally using Google Forms and so we believe that taking these examinations digitally will not be that different and that they will quickly embrace what for us is a new way of working. This is likely to be the first of many such digital examinations as we strive to prepare our students for the future where on-screen GCSE and A-Level examinations are the norm rather than the exception.

Image credit: Created by Dall.e