An excellent intergenerational game to play at Christmas is to ask everyone to show their middle finger. Not in an insulting way – save that for when the sherries are downed – but as a parlour game, in which you find out who among you has the largest writer’s bump: that hardened lump of skin many of us still bear as a scar of our school days.
Children now no longer write much using a pen. Matthew Hickey, chief executive of the Children’s Literacy Charity, complained recently that even letters to Santa were now more likely to be by email than handwritten. (Though I’m suspicious this is more a preference of parents, who are horrified that a first-class stamp costs 65p and don’t know the location of their nearest postbox.)
Children do spend days writing in notebooks while in school, though, and in the summer exams sweat over their pens as they scribble away for upwards of three hours a time. Have you written by hand much lately? It’s agony! Most adults are ready to weep after signing Christmas cards for 30 minutes, let alone clarifying their deepest thoughts on An Inspector Calls or Twelfth Night for three hours.
All of which, in this season of goodwill to children, makes me wonder why we are still making them write their exams by hand. Once they get to 16, and are on the way to employment, they may never write anything longhand again. Never once in my working career have I been asked to write a lengthy document for my boss by hand. Has anyone? Imagine the reaction of most employers if your CV were handwritten.
Bad handwriting can scupper your chances in exams, too, especially tough when students have so little practice. Many GCSE papers are now scanned and marked electronically, making it difficult for examiners to see writing that’s too faint or small or squashed, something boys are particularly prone to.
We retain handwritten exams for two reasons. Firstly, we believe that handwriting is good for children. And secondly, we don’t have enough computers to go round.
The first is a fair point. Many neuroscientists believe we remember things better if we write them by hand than if we type them. But, in exams, we are not trying to soak up information. Quite the opposite. All we want to do is get our ideas out of our heads and on to paper. Typing is excellent for that.
Researchers at Edinburgh University asked 70 volunteers to complete a mock exam using their choice of pen and paper or typing to give their answers. The researchers marked the essays, and then converted them into the opposite format. They were marked again and the scores compared with the original to see if the format made any difference. It did not; the marks were roughly the same regardless of whether they were typed or written by hand.
Putting exams online would also help with other issues. For example, papers increasingly use colourful graphs, which is lovely unless you happen to be the one in 12 boys who are colour-blind (for girls, the figure is only one in 200). If a question appeared online, the format could be changed at the click of a mouse from colour to black and white.
If all this sounds blindingly obvious, the stumbling block to the idea is having access to enough computers on exam day. The UK is wedded to a model of exams where everyone sits the same papers on the same day. Hence, for exams to go online, even optionally, secondary schools would need enough laptops (and internet capacity) for about 180 pupils all at once.
Even five years ago, this idea would have been absurd. But now schools increasingly provide children with tablet computers to which keyboards can easily be linked. Networks are stronger and more stable. Power is still a problem, though: no one wants a laptop expiring halfway through an exam.
Yet, these are only technical challenges, for which solutions are possible. The bigger question is whether we are philosophically ready to accept that handwritten exams are a strange anachronism, and step into the digital future that exists everywhere except in our exam halls.
If we can, that’s something to which we should all raise our glasses – and our knobbly middle fingers.
