Failing my exams was the making of me – scrapping tests would be an utter disaster

Are there forces afoot in this country which are actually trying to destroy us by creating a generation which is stupid, undisciplined and ignorant but which by virtue of the fact that there won’t be anyone else, will end up running the
country? I hate to sound paranoid, but is someone trying to destroy western civilisation from within?

That, at any rate, is what you’d think reading the latest from Dr Zahid Pranjol who is, heaven help us all, the deputy head of School for Education (Life Sciences) at the University of Sussex: in an article in Trends in Higher Education he says that schools and universities should ditch exams and that exams are a “manifestation of colonisation in present-day higher education” based on the British empire’s belief in its “cultural and intellectual superiority.” Well yup: we did once rule a third of the world. That does somehow denote we were capable of making our presence felt.

Like it or not (and goodness knows, many people don’t) the Empire was extremely successful and as such needed to find a way to educate the people who were sent out to run it. But to equate exams with colonialism and say we should ditch them altogether is to turn us into a nation of illiterate ignoramuses.

Every culture that aspires to excellence holds exams: just look at China. The Mandarin ruling class had to go through a highly competitive examination system that cherry-picked the very best to run the show: and the result was a hugely sophisticated and enduring civilisation, the discipline of which can be seen to this day.

Dr Pranjol also deplores the emphasis on the use of “proper” English (seriously, is this a joke?) and says that exams make people feel anxious. Actually, that’s what they’re supposed to do. To this day, decades after I last took an exam, I still get exam nightmares: I’ll spare you the details, but they’re enough to have me waking up in a cold sweat.

But exams proved the making of me and millions of others. My early schooling was in the US, where the attitude of “let the kids set their own agenda” meant most of us didn’t actually do anything and I floundered. I would have ended up making nothing of my life.

At the end of the first year in my extremely academic British girls’ school, I failed all my exams but one, was read the riot act by my father and had to pull my socks up.

Six years later I got into one of the best universities in the world and I have my father, my school and the English exam system to thank for that. Dr Pranjol wants to deny upcoming generations that same opportunity as well as inflicting goodness knows what damage on our society. He should be resoundingly ignored.