examinations are defended on one powerful ground: they are .
A grade means roughly the same thing in two different schools.
Teacher , by contrast, carries documented bias against particular groups.
Removing the examination does not remove judgement; it relocates it somewhere less visible.
The criticism of examinations is nonetheless substantial.
They measure what can be marked reliably in forty minutes.
, revision over weeks and tolerance of failure are therefore excluded by design.
Since teaching follows , those capacities are then taught less.
Countries that added found a predictable problem.
Family resources shape the result whenever work is done at home.
project work inside school hours avoids that trap at a cost in teacher time.
A further reform is simply to publish less.
Ranking schools on raw results measures more than teaching.
Progress measures, which compare a pupil against their own earlier performance, are fairer and far less popular with newspapers.
No system escapes the rule that whatever is measured becomes the target.