All the signs suggest that after the pandemic, it is a question of when, not if, online GCSEs and A levels finally arrive.

As Tes revealed last month, exam board preparation for the big switchover is already well under way. But when it does happen, how much will the assessment actually change? Will it simply mean a change in medium, from pen and paper to keyboard and computer screen? Or is something much more fundamental about to happen?

Increasing numbers hope that, as far as GCSEs are concerned, we will never find out. The campaign to use the cancellations of 2020 and 2021 to get rid of the qualification altogether is growing. But could a move online actually save the GCSE by turning it into something very different?

Imagining the potential for change doesn’t have to be an exercise in future gazing. Large-scale online testing of UK pupils is already happening right now - on-screen national tests running in Wales are the perfect illustration of how the wider exams system could be transformed.

Exclusive: GCSEs 2021 - DfE wanted to move exams online

Making the leap: Where have on-screen exams been introduced?

Analysis: How long would it take to introduce online GCSE exams?

Explained: What’s it like to sit a GCSE online?

Revealed: How online GCSE trials have already begun

National tests in maths, set for Welsh pupils in years 2 to 9, allow them to attempt a question a few times until they get it right, rather than using a binary system of pass or fail. So might GCSEs and A levels go the same way once they move on-screen?

The end of pass/fail?

Gavin Busuttil-Reynaud, director of Alpha Plus, which administers the tests in Wales, explained to Tes how they work. He says that in maths reasoning papers, students are given a complex problem, with an “audio-visual” presentation to set the scene.

Busuttil-Reynaud says that students are given a pen and paper “to sit and work things out”, before inputting their answer onscreen. However, if they get it wrong, they are prompted by the programme to check their working.

It’s “a bit of a hint basically that they’ve not got it right”, he says.

“If they get that correct then they get awarded the marks, so it’s reinforcing the lesson that they should check their working, basically.”

‘We give them a hint’

He adds that where students still don’t get the problem right after this, they are given a further hint to help them think about the problem in a different way.

“We don’t start telling them how to address the problem, but we give them a hint - we’ll say something like, ‘Think about the following fact’,” he says.

The question is then presented to students again and they are given the opportunity to have another try. Busuttil-Reynaud says that, depending on the complexity of the problem, students might have three or four hints to work through to make the question steadily simpler.

The feedback from the assessments also gives teachers a lot of useful information about students, such as their staying power when it comes to challenging questions.

“We’re going to show how many hints they’ve used, if any, on getting through the question. We’ll start to learn a bit about the perseverance of learners - do they just bounce off a question and never get it, however many hints they’re given, or do they dig in and think about it?”

Assessment ‘designed to complement what goes on in a classroom’

“It will tell us something about their learning style, which is subtly different to getting information about where they made a mistake if you see working on the page, but it’s valuable and it’s designed to complement what goes on in a classroom, not replace it.”

These online tests are able to give this extra information because they are adaptive. As they respond differently to different candidates depending on the answers given - they adapt to pupil responses - they can draw out much more about the candidate than a simple right or wrong answer.

So, could the same be done for GCSEs and A levels once they move online?

Colin Hughes, chief executive of AQA - the UK’s biggest exam board -  is clear that on-screen assessment would eventually have significant differences for GCSE and A-level candidates.

“Running an assessment online is different to running it on paper - questions have to be different, they can be better, but they are different,” he tells Tes.

‘You can’t just pick up a pen and paper test and put it online’

“Obviously, you’ve got issues on the way answers are entered, so that’s going to be different, too. So students have to be ready to type in short essay responses in an English literature paper, for example, so there are all sorts of fairness questions about access.

“We have to redesign the assessments so that they suit online delivery - you can’t just pick up a pen and paper test and put it online; that doesn’t work.”

And over at the OCR exam board, there is a belief that this involves going right back to the first principles - to effectively start from scratch.

“We have a group that is looking at what a digital first qualification might look like,” says OCR chief executive Jill Duffy.

“What happens when you design a qualification right from the beginning, thinking about what the curriculum might be, what the teaching and learning might be as well. What will that mean in terms of what you can assess better using digital means than you can using pen and paper?

“We will be looking at this for a couple of GCSEs, probably in IT and the sciences first.”

The ‘fluidity’ of online adaptive testing

Hughes suggests that, eventually, boards might be able to follow the example of the Welsh tests and make their exams truly adaptive, whereby question difficulty was adjusted for students as they completed an assessment online. 

“It has a fluidity, adjusting the test to the ability of the student,” he says. “You can think of it as having Foundation and Higher kind of built in, so if you’re very able, it’ll move you quickly on; if you’re less able, it’ll offer you less demanding questions.

“This is true adaptivity, which is, incidentally, an often misused term. This is one of the points really; what and how you assess becomes different when you move it digital.”

But all the boards are clear that this can’t all be done at once; that, actually, it will be evolution rather than revolution.

Initially, when GCSEs and A levels move online, the papers might not look very different at all, as the current pilot versions suggest. AQA’s digital GCSE English mock exam looks entirely similar to a normal paper, as do the assessments created by Pearson Edexcel’s Mocks Service.

Aiming for the blue sky

“There’s a difference between what you need to do when piloting something very new and checking whether people are ready for it, and then what you might have as a long-term, innovative vision of the future,” Derek Richardson, vice-president of Pearson Edexcel, tells Tes.

“Because this would be quite a significant change, if you start by aiming for the blue sky, you might never get there. Do you start with something that’s a bit closer to what you’re doing to see if there’s appetite for it and then evolve slowly to something closer to what you want?”

But before that evolution begins, the exam boards have to get the basics right. And this, Hughes makes clear, will not be an easy task.

“The complexities of moving the existing GCSEs into online capture are enormous because there are very few people around the world who are doing this kind of fully high-stakes end-of-course assessment wholly online,” he says.

Candidates need ‘equal access to a reliable connection’

“To do it here, firstly we’d need to be confident that every student would have equal access to a reliable connection, so the biggest single barrier to doing it in this country is that we do not. At the moment, we can’t be totally confident that all the systems and machinery are out there.

“The next big issue is you’ve got to enable students to have the opportunity to get used to doing an assessment online, and that doesn’t exist in England at the moment either.

“Until we move to a situation of high-stakes assessment online, schools don’t have any motive for doing this. Why would they buy in formative assessment online, or online diagnostic assessment - all of which are available but not actually that widely used?

“If we flip that and, let’s say, over the next two to three years, we run a series of pilots, schools get used to using online assessments, they prove to be reliable, then there comes a moment where you can flip the switch.”

Schools need to be ready for the online change

However, Hughes adds, first of all, schools will need to be ready to make that change.

“Could you flip the switch by saying, OK, in summer 2022 we’re going to run two or three subjects, full-on national digital capture, live for real GCSEs?

“The answer is no, because none of these things would have been trialled and tested, and the risks would therefore be enormous, not so much the technology risks, not so much the assessment issues - we’re confident that we can deal with the assessment issues relatively quickly - it’s actually the readiness of schools and students to be able to do it.”

Richardson also has concerns about school readiness for on-screen assessment and the equipment and infrastructure it will require.

“A lot of the technology is there,” he says. “But depending on which way you go with it, you just need to make sure that it does not break when you are implementing it.

“So that means making sure schools and colleges are ready with the infrastructure they have got, for example wi-fi and connectivity.

“It is not just about the assessment, it is also about how the school systems work, how the communications systems work and then how the assessment systems work, as well as the digital platforms.”

The cost of sticking with pen and paper exams

But there is also a price for standing still and sticking with pen and paper. Richard Sheriff, president of the Association of School and College Leaders, says that exams, as they currently stand, can be costly and inefficient.

“It’s about time to move away from having piles of papers delivered in vans to schools at a certain time, kept in locked cupboards,” he says.

“The specification for a cupboard was recently upgraded, so we had to go out and buy new thicker steel cupboards - quite bizarre, really. All that expense. In the post-Covid days, when we’ve got used to electronic even more, why carry on as we did before?”

However, will the change mean more than new extras for exams? Could some things be lost through the shift online? 

Take a maths exam. Would students be able to draw graphs if they were completing it online? AQA is confident this will not be a problem. 

A spokesperson for the exam board told Tes that where students now need to draw a line of best fit on a graph in GCSEs, in an online exam “there are other ways of presenting the question, eg, multiple choice to identify the correct graph”.

Showing your working

Boards also believe that they could still give maths candidates credit for showing their “working” - an important feature of how maths is currently assessed.

“It wouldn’t be sensible to remove credit for working in maths exams, because the first thing a mathematician does when solving a problem is to grab a pen and paper,” Richardson says.

“There are ways around that, for example using a Stylus on an iPad or touchscreen, but students would need to be used to that. You start with the purpose of the assessment and then think about whether we’ve got the technology to support that, not start with the technology - that would seem the wrong way round to me.”

Others argue that giving marks for “working”, or “method marking” is somewhat overrated. Busuttil-Reynaud points out that the Welsh online assessments give detailed information about what students can and can’t do, unlike marks for “working” with no feedback involved.

And he points out that, in some areas, getting the “right” answer is all-important, rather than nearly getting there with the working. “If you look at the Civil Aviation Authority qualifying pilots, you don’t get method marks for plotting a navigational route that almost gets you to Malaga airport, you either pass because you work out how to get to Malaga or you score zero because you missed,” he says.

What about handwriting?

Nevertheless, there are bound to be other questions over what skills might be lost in a switch to online learning and assessment. Essentially, any alterations to the exam system mean changes to pedagogy as a whole.

Richardson raises the issue of handwriting, a skill which might fall by the wayside in an era of digital assessment. 

“If you’re not taking assessments on paper, how are you developing handwriting and where does that come in?” he says. “Equally, in pen and paper assessments, some students are held back by their handwriting, so we have to exploit the benefits of this as well as the risks.”

Sheriff agrees that handwriting can be a real disadvantage for otherwise gifted students - and this is especially true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

He says that examiners are often inadvertently swayed into awarding a higher grade by neat penmanship, while good answers are downgraded for being messy or illegible.

“And who’s got better handwriting? Well those from more privileged backgrounds where it’s encouraged and praised, so [online exams] gets rid of that barrier to progress as well,” he says.

A new digital bias from online exams?

But could online exams simply introduce another bias into assessment because of the medium used? Duffy acknowledges that you would need to make sure that onscreen assessments were not simply testing students’ computing skills.

“One of the equality points around if you move to digital, then you’d need to be sure that students have the digital skills to access digital assessments, if you like, because what you don’t want to be testing all the time is how good they are digitally,” she says.

And that is one of the reasons that exam boards are clear that they would need time to trial and test onscreen exams, possibly only in a few subjects at first.

But, if schools in Wales are already running national adaptive online tests, and the technology already exists, then does the idea of running online adaptive GCSEs and A levels really seem like such a “blue sky” concept after all?