The work needed to allow GCSEs and A levels to make the big switch away from pen and paper to online exams is already well underway, Tes can reveal.

All three big school exam boards in England are conducting significant research into digital exams and assessment. Two of them have started pilots in preparation for online GCSEs and A levels and the third already offers online exams through its GCSE and A-level mocks service.

The boards are suggesting that this work will make a full switch over to online GCSEs and A levels possible in just a few years’ time.

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Tes revealed last week how there is understood to have been a change in attitude towards digital exams at the Department for Education - because of the Covid disruption to pen and paper exams - which would finally make the long-awaited switch online possible.

The DfE is said to be rethinking its previous resistance to the idea of online exams, partly because it recognises that, had an on-screen system been in place, it may have been possible to run some GCSEs in 2020 and 2021.

GCSEs and A levels: ‘Flipping the switch’ to online exams

Exam boards are already preparing for the change with pilots of digital exams already well underway in two of England’s big three.

OCR is running a project exploring the idea of digital GCSEs, with a research group looking at what a “digital-first qualification might look like”. Digital assessment in computing and in humanities and social science subjects is being looked at by the group, which could deliver its conclusions in the next two years.

OCR chief executive Jill Duffy said it was exploring “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”.

She added that OCR also had a digital pilot underway using tests based on questions from past GCSE and A-level papers on particular topics for teachers to use in formative assessments.

Ms Duffy said OCR would be providing these topic tests “in a way that it auto-marks those items [questions] for teachers”.

“We think this would be an aid to teaching and learning, so we’re also looking at using machine learning and artificial intelligence, so that as well as auto-marking the obvious things like one-word answers, we can have auto-marking of longer passages of text,” she added.

Pearson Edexcel is already involved in the rollout of on-screen exams outside the UK.

In 2019, the exam board worked with the Egyptian government to develop, deliver and mark 125 million online assessments over a four-year period.

The project is focused on students in Years 10, 11 and 12 and aims to improve assessment design and quality.

And in England, Pearson launched its Mocks Service in 2020, which provides schools and colleges with past A-level and GCSE exam papers from the board for use in online mock exams.

The papers can be taken on-screen or on paper by students and marked by Pearson examiners, with results uploaded to its online ResultsPlus for analysis. Papers are currently available in GCSE English language, English literature and maths.

For functional skills qualifications, the board is also working with the DfE, Ofqual, the Education and Skills Funding Agency and the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to explore remote proctoring, which Pearson is currently offering to customers who request it, with a view to scaling this to all customers from March 2021.

And in the Pearson test of English, a language proficiency test, on-screen assessment and AI marking methods are also used.

“What Covid’s driven in everybody is much more acceptance and readiness for digital assessment,” Pearson Edexcel’s vice president, Derek Richardson, told Tes.

“There has been a massive growth in online teaching and learning and that suggests it may not take as much time to implement as we might have thought - it has driven that pace of change.”

But he added that any switch to high-stakes online GCSEs and A levels would need “lead-in” time for tests to be piloted.

“You’d have to tread carefully, because with GCSE and A level...in terms of the lead-in time, we’d have to think carefully about the different impacts; for example, the access requirements,” he said, adding that there was “a very low tolerance for risks for those qualifications”.

Meanwhile, the AQA exam board is running a pilot of an online GCSE English language exam through its subsidiary business, Doublestruck.

Doublestruck’s Exampro platform also enables schools to compile their own assessments from AQA past exam papers, and AQA is in the process of developing an online version of that, meaning the teachers would be able to compile mock exams to be sat online.

However, AQA chief executive Colin Hughes said that transitioning to a high-stakes online assessment where students sat GCSEs and A levels on-screen would take considerable investment.

“We would have to invest heavily at AQA in a project like that,” he said. 

“You wouldn’t do a commissioned pilot process across all subjects straight away, you’d start with a couple of big subjects like maths, science and English language.”

But he suggested that if pilots were rolled out, online exams could be with us in just a few years.

“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,” he said.