Over the next few days, hundreds of thousands of young people will get the grades that they have been told will define their futures. In many cases, these will represent years of study boiled down to a few hours in an exam hall. But for many of those young people, once the results are in, the memory of exams will quickly fade, only to surface in the occasional anxiety dream. All that training – the cramming of quotes, the learning of formulas – may never be used again.

So why the fuss? Why do we put our young people through this? Part of the answer is that grades matter. I’m a teacher, and when I say to my students that the marks they get will determine the paths they take, it is absolutely true. Entry into professions such as nursing, once regarded as practical and non-academic, now requires a degree. All sixth-forms ask for maths and English GCSE, even if you want to study art or plumbing. And university entrance is a finely tuned process of selection, with precise entry criteria for each course (alongside expected careers and projected earnings to advertise their worth).

But in the context of an economy and society where opportunities seem to be diminishing by the day, the process of getting those grades has become over­whelm­ingly intense, the stakes painfully high. Meanwhile, schools are subject to a system of accountability that says we must wring every last mark from the students in our charge, and it is hard to avoid transferring that anxiety to them. There’s a growing sense that the current generation is in the midst of a mental health crisis, and some hold exam culture responsible.

Then there is the bald fact that educational attainment is not accessible to everyone in the same way. The meritocratic “level playing field” is in fact a steady and persistent slope, with students from lower-income households and marginalised communities struggling to make their way uphill.

So what’s the alternative? There are lots of other models of assessment touted by educational reformers, and none is perfect. More coursework sounds attractive, but is criticised as opening the door to even greater unfairness, given how much parents or private tutors can help. Continuous assessment or modular courses are seen as more forgiving – but in reality they just distribute the pressure in different ways.

And one of the most compelling features of an exam‑based syllabus, well designed and well taught, is that by deferring assessment to the end, it can cement understanding in powerful ways. Poorly designed, of course, it can do the opposite. I’ve just finished teaching creative writing to a GCSE class. As a novelist, I threw myself into this with gusto. But when marking my students’ papers with a colleague, I realised they were being penalised because of the lack of colons in their writing. Without them, they failed to meet a “varied punctuation” criterion. Highly specific mark schemes don’t always recognise individual judgment and craft.

But that is an argument for better exams, not no exams. The thing is, exams are just a tool. They work for some things, and not for others. Getting rid of them would make about as much sense as embarking on a DIY project with a promise to not use any screwdrivers. Instead, we need to think about how this tool can best be deployed.

At the moment, in the UK, exams are about ranking people. This was exposed brutally by the algorithm used to assign grades when exams were cancelled due to Covid in 2020. Scandalously, it explicitly discarded the grades teachers had submitted, based on the abilities of pupils, and kept only the rankings. A child who had beaten the odds to be worthy of an A was reassigned a C if that reflected their school’s results the previous year. The ones who lost out were in fact the most deserving.

Although this was eventually corrected, it laid bare the logic of the system. We currently use exams not purely (or even primarily) to assess knowledge, but to work out who is better than whom.

It is a system that buys into the myth of meritocracy – as if every kid going into the exam was starting from that imaginary level playing field. In a world where there genuinely was equality of opportunity, and where education seamlessly sorted people into occupations that, while different, were satisfying and afforded a good standard of living, this might be fair.

In reality, in an unequal and opportunity-poor society, it simply entrenches existing privilege. The need to constantly make fine-grained and “rigorous” distinctions between students twists the process of education, meaning that key skills such as verbal fluency are ignored because they are hard to assess, and borderline answers never get the benefit of the doubt.

But exams don’t have to be used in this hyper-competitive way. What if, for example, we thought of them as being like driving licences, an indicator that you’ve achieved a universal level of competence? Or judo belts, where the ranking truly reflects the amount of time and effort you have put in?

In truth, the problem isn’t exams, it’s the way we use grades to assign social worth. If we were to focus on their educational value, as opposed to their ability to rank and sort, and if schools were places that made good on the promise of knowledge and cultural enrichment for all, not just stepping stones to success for some, that would be a start. But what would really change things is the prospect of a fulfilling and decently remunerated work life for everyone, regardless of how they perform at 16 or 18. In that world, the presence or absence of exams, their accuracy or their fallibility, might just slip into irrelevance.

Sammy Wright is a teacher and the author of Exam Nation (Bodley Head).

Further reading

Cleverlands by Lucy Crehan (Unbound, £12.99)

I Heard What You Said by Jeffrey Boakye (Picador, £10.99)

How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene (Allen Lane, £10)