Outsourced exams

By Brian Micklethwait | 31 October 2005

Globalization is not just about TVs and DVD players and digital cameras, appealing though such products, of high quality and of amazing cheapness, undoubtedly are. Other products are equally important and maybe even greater significance.

Britain has long been an exporter of school exams. Countries where running an honest exam system is made difficult by nepotism and corruption can import exams from a country where the examiners are not susceptible to such pressures, thereby enabling their citizens to acquire qualifications that are respected not just in their own countries but everywhere.

But now, Britain is itself becoming an importer of exams. Our problem is not nepotism. But it is politics. Results don't mean what they used to mean. Everyone, from the student of the most limited intelligence struggling for a few meagre exam results, to his teacher, to universities, up to the Minister of Education himself, has an interest in exams becoming ever easier, and in pressurising all rebellious teachers, who insist on failing their own students if they do not perform well, to play along with the new, dumb-down-and-dumber regime.

But this process has now been going on for so long in British state education that qualifications that used once to separate the best from the rest are no longer much good at doing that. If even an average student can get straight As, how can a student prove that she is above average, if that is what she is? What use is a qualification if future employers are going to despise it?

One answer is for a British school which is eager to attract the brightest and the best to switch to a foreign exam system, from a country where there is less inflation in exam results.

This article by Robert Matthews describes just such a school, which he knows all about because his sons go there.

We have found a school operating a system designed to educate, rather than pander to political mores. Grade inflation, devalued A-levels and endless curriculum revisions are all behind us.

And from what country does this miracle come? France:

Around 50 schools in England offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) and its reputation for combining depth and breadth with competence in the basics has remained mercifully beyond the reach of meddling ministers. That makes the IB something most parents can only dream of: a qualification that produces more than eye-rolling cynicism among employers.

Formidable, not to say magnifique.