The Horseless Carriage Stage: replacing conventional measures

Abstract

The principle that ‘what you test is what you get’ is widely appreciated in education, so conventional examinations—bound by the limits of pen and paper—are often criticised for preventing teachers and students from fully embracing the new opportunities that modern technology provides. In this paper we argue that the need to be fair to students regardless of their schools’ technological capabilities, and the requirement to avoid sudden discontinuities so that standards may be compared, may require a transitional period when computer and paper versions of conventional external examinations run in parallel, creating little scope initially for new types of assessment. We outline some of the issues that must be considered and the difficulties that must be overcome before conventional examinations can be computerised, and describe two illustrative cases. We conclude by noting how the computerisation of conventional examinations could lead to substantial changes to the nature of external assessment.