Under exam board proposals, within the next few years, students in England could sit some of their GCSE exams digitally.
By 2030, AQA hopes that, In England at least one major subject will be partly sat digitally.
From 2026 subject to approval, it said that reading and listening parts of its GCSE Italian and Polish exams will be the first to be judged this way. Such exams will permit young individuals to use their digital skills.
The exam board says, they yet believe that paper-based exams are still useful to judge GCSE and A-level students, but the time has come to “expand the range of media we use.”
Digital exams are “truer to the digital world” students grow up and work in, better for the environment, can help those with special educational needs and mean students do not need to worry about “handwriting bias. They also have the potential to be more inclusive and fairer.
In the longer term, they could include video elements and interactive audio, such as discussions in parks for modern foreign language students.
Under the plans, in the exam hall students’ devices would be offline so that they would not be able to use the internet to search for information, or access artificial intelligence tools.
AQA’s chief executive officer Colin Hughes said: “Technology and change are two factors in education. After all, we went from quills to fountain pens to biros, and from scrolls to books. Moving to digital exams is the next step of this evolution.
” Immediately we should not change the way we conduct exams” AQA has spent many years testing and piloting digital exams and we will roll them out over many years.
By 2030, our ambition is that students will sit a large-entry subject – that means, hundreds of thousands of simultaneous exams – digitally.
The exam board said that they will continue talking with teachers and exams officers about how the changes should come about. And in 2024 will announce more detailed plans about what support will be available to schools, and setting out which subjects will include digital assessments after 2026.
According to polling for AQA, more than two-thirds (68%) of young individuals surveyed agreed digital exams would be better preparation for future work, education or training.
One student. who participated in AQA’s pilots of digital exams, said: “I feel that it’s faster to type my responses rather than write, which gives me more time to develop more ideas.”
A digital method has many benefits, but also advised that there must be an adequate investment, so that all students have equal access to the devices they will use in their exams.
If not, this method risks supporting students who have greater access to technology at home and could inadvertently increase the disadvantage gap.
In a policy document setting out plans to introduce a single qualification which will gradually replace A-levels and T-levels, the Department for Education said it would work with the sector and experts to “look again” at the type and format of GCSE exams needed at the age 16.
They said they would consider whether it can “accept digital solutions, such as on-screen assessment” to let performance to be assessed in “more innovative and less onerous ways”.
