This is going to be a bit of a rant, and so I appologise for it from the off for it’s potentially poorly written nature.

I just read a story on the BBC news website about a Facebook group which Biology A-Level students have set up, complaining about their recent exam paper.

According to the BBC:

“The AQA biology paper taken on Monday has prompted an instant online protest – with allegations that questions did not match what pupils had studied.

“I’ve spent six months working hard… and only one out of the eight questions had any relevance,” writes one student.”

I know how it feels when you open an exam paper, read a few of the questions and realise you don’t actually know what they are talking about. Dread washes over you – you’re going to let your folks down, your teacher, your school, yourself. You start thinking back to your revision, trying to remember what you may have missed out, all the while reading and re-reading the same ambiguous question. But eventually you stop panicking, clear your head and realise that there is actually a lot you can say in that little space.

The only difference is that you don’t know for sure that you are saying the right thing. Probably because this kind of question never came up in one of the test papers.

To me, while it isn’t the fault of the students and is pretty unfortunate for them, this Facebook uproar just highlights something that a lot of us have suspected for some time: kids in the UK are just being taught how to pass exams – how to correctly answer a certain number of a certain type of questions.

It was even like it when I was doing A-Levels, ten years ago. I took Maths and Further Maths, which were mostly modular, involving exams at the end of each term and slightly bigger exams at the end of the school year. At the start of each term we would spend several weeks learning the new topics covered by the module, and at the end of the term we would spend a few weeks just going through past exam paper after past exam paper.

Literally being taught how to answer them.

It even went as far as being told by the teacher which questions to leave out. Most papers asked you to answer a certain number of the questions given to you, obviously designed to allow you to pick the questions that you feel you could answer best. But I remember being told that “if a question on item-we-didn’t-cover comes up, just leave it and answer the other questions, because we’ll have covered them”. It was as if the questions you were able to answer depended on which school you went to, and which topics they felt like teaching.

Surely the idea should really have been to spend the whole term teaching you as much as possible, giving you the choice of what to answer in the exam depending on your own skills and understanding?

I remember discussions following the exams about what we all put in our answers. Very occasionally someone would have answered a question on the paper that you and your friends didn’t, about something that you didn’t cover in classes. “Wow, you must be so clever”, was usually the response. And yeah I guess those people were – they were using the skills and understanding they’d gained over the term to try to understand something slightly different. And usually it worked, if I remember rightly.

But surely that’s how it should work? If you go to university to study the biology of pond weed in southern Guatemala, you expect to come back with enough knowledge to be able to give some answers on pretty much any question about pond weeds in southern Guatemala, not just a very specific eight ones.

Imagine going to your first interview for a role as an exotic pond weed specialist in the Central America section of some huge botanical museum and saying to your interviewer “oh sorry, that one wasn’t in the syllabus. I could tell you something about blahblahblah instead?”

As my colleague here just said, if they can’t answer questions in an exam paper on their subject, then they haven’t learned the subject.

And I know it’s not the students’ fault, but he’s absolutely right. There’s a massive difference between learning about a subject, and learning the answers to some questions.

Playing Trivial Persuit so much that you remember all the questions does not make you an expert on everything.

I’m sorry to everyone younger than me (and to those older than me whom my generation did ‘better’ than), but I really do think that this is why GCSE and A-Level results are improving so much: we’re just getting better at answering the questions, but probably at the expense of understanding the subjects.

I really hope that most of the students not whining on Facebook just read the questions and had a go, and that they are rewarded for it. And despite the fact that it’s the fault of the schools and the way courses are run and not the kids; the whiny ones who didn’t even try should all get Fs.

Big Red Fs.