The “enormous” investment required to digitise exams would not make economic sense without a wider project to digitise education, the chief regulator of Ofqual has said.
Speaking at the Schools and Academies Show in Birmingham today, Sir Ian Bauckham said any move to digital exams would need to ensure fairness for all pupils, regardless of the background they come from.
“One of the things that the pandemic taught us is that we do have a digital divide,” he said.
Ofqual is doing “a lot of research” into this digital divide, Sir Ian said. He stressed that if exams and qualifications move towards digitisation, we must ensure that certain groups of pupils are not disadvantaged.
“We have a very intense period for running exams and qualifications that happens every summer,” he said.
“It wouldn’t really make sense to put in place the enormous financial investment you would need in schools to enable everybody to [access digital assessment] equally efficiently across the country and not at the same time have a wider project for digitising education.”
Switching to digital exams
Sir Ian said Ofqual’s research indicates that we will get better value for digitising exams if this is part of a wider digitisation of education.
He added that the introduction of digital exams is likely to happen “incrementally”, saying that while young people are positive about digital exams in some subjects involving extended writing, they tend to be less positive about them in creative subjects and maths.
Several exam boards have laid out plans for certain qualifications to move online - though these plans are subject to Ofqual approval.
Pearson Edexcel set out a plan at the beginning of the year to take GCSE English language and literature digital from summer 2025, with all of its GCSEs to have an on-screen option by 2030.
Meanwhile, AQA had planned to have online exams for GCSE Italian and Polish from 2026, with a major-entry subject to follow suit by 2030. However, AQA later said it no longer expected its digital exams to be sat from 2026.
Sir Ian also warned about the impact that offering both a written and online version of an exam could have on standardisation.
He said one of the possible scenarios that Ofqual is thinking about is different exam boards using different platforms and interfaces for digital exams.
“We wouldn’t want to create a situation where teaching time ended up being used on familiarising students with access to one platform and another,” Sir Ian said.
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