Part III: Achievement, Assessment, and Evaluating Learning
Comparative School Achievement
National Case Study Report
International Study of School Achievement
Reflections
The Two Faces of Examinations
Tradeoffs in Examination Policies: An International Comparative Perspective
Secondary School Examinations: International Perspectives on Policies and Practice
An International Perspective on National Standards
A Comparative Assessment of Assessment
An International Comparison of End-of-Secondary School Examinations
Source: Harold J. Noah and Max A.Eckstein (1992). "The Two Faces of Examinations: A Comparative and International Perspective," in Noah and Eckstein (eds.), Examinations: Comparative and International Studies. Oxford: Pergamon Press: pp.147-170. Reprinted by permission of Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd.
THE TWO FACES OF EXAMINATIONS
Introduction
All over the world major aspects of the school system are being reassessed in response to changing social, political, and economic demands. One common and important response by educational systems has been the prodigious expansion of secondary school enrollments, and consequently there is a greater diversity of abilities and aspirations in the student body. In turn, this has been accompanied by demands for more options, and by growing utilitarian and instrumental concern for the applicability and economic relevance of the curriculum and credentials. A particular consequence is that governments as well as politicians, parents and employers have afforded increased importance to vocational considerations. To meet the new demands, the organization and structure of school systems, the content of instruction, and the selection and preparation of teachers, have all come under review. National policies are formulated to work directly on school practices, through regulation, as well as indirectly, via financial incentives and sanctions, teacher training, and exhortations, studies and recommendations issued by prominent individuals or commissions.
One of the potentially most powerful mechanisms for achieving change in education is the external examination system, especially examinations taken toward the close of secondary schooling. In recent years educational policy makers have recognized what was known by the Imperial Chinese court over a thousand years ago and by those who laid the foundations of state-funded elementary and secondary education in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain: that a national external examination system can be a powerful instrument for moving schooling in a desired direction. As a consequence, many agencies, including governments, look to examinations to influence how teachers go about the business of teaching, how students attend to learning, how universities select their students, and how employers choose new workers.
This paper selects eight countries for study: China, England and Wales, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Japan, the Soviet Union, Sweden, and the United States. First, we identify the targets of changes in the examinations taken toward the end of secondary school. We then examine instances of governments using changes in the examinations to initiate or accelerate wider educational change, as well as instances where examination systems have acted as barriers to change. The paper closes with some observations on the nature of examinations and of the ways in which their dual roles have played out in the eight countries.
Examination systems appear to be exceptionally resilient, able to adapt well to pressures for change. Indeed, while the extent and specifics of change in examinations vary markedly from country to country, the social and educational importance of the credentials gained through them seem hardly to have diminished. The substantial changes introduced in recent years in the baccalauréat and the Abitur attest to the adaptability of these traditional examinations, while they continue to retain their status as essential mechanisms for directing students to, and within, institutions of higher education, and for regulating the scholastic activity of teachers and schools. In Japan, the examinations at the end of primary and junior high school, and especially the examinations taken at the end of senior high school, provide the common (some would say, the major) motive force driving the entire schooling enterprise. In the People's Republic of China, the university entrance examinations are a critical device for allocating the severely limited resources for higher education. In England and Wales, while particular examinations have come and gone during the past 40 years, the underlying social and educational significance of the examinations has been conserved. Indeed, the fact that the British government has been eager to break decisively with traditional constraints and has emerged as the leading actor in the nationalization of external examinations and tests is compelling evidence of the status school examinations continue to enjoy. Even in the Soviet Union, where the examinations for the school completion certificate have relatively little importance, the separate entrance examinations to institutions of higher education carry great weight.
Nevertheless, the experience of two countries may be cited in contrary evidence: the United States and Sweden. As we shall see, in the United States the market for tests may be vast and extensively patronized, but there is a widespread (and even growing) suspicion of external examinations. Sweden has gone further, by actually discarding the uniform national examinations that used to be taken at the end of secondary school, though it has been replaced by a nationwide system of regular assessment.
While the United States and Sweden may be cited as being especially critical of end-of-secondary-school examinations, examinations everywhere draw a mixture of praise and criticism, on both educational and wider social policy grounds, and for a variety of alleged merits and defects. They have earned praise because, it is claimed, they provide objective, fair, public criteria for selection; they supply valuable educational data; and they establish and maintain a de facto canon of knowledge to be learned and norms of achievement, stimulating student learning and teacher effort. Furthermore, where educational deficiencies are identified, it is asserted that examinations can be used to assist in the remedy. In this way, examinations are seen as potentially useful levers of change.
On the other hand, in the last decade or two, the claim made by examining bodies that their examinations are fair measures of academic ability and the further educability of persons, irrespective of gender, ethnic and cultural origin, and location has been sharply disputed. Instead, examinations have been roundly accused of being inherently, if not deliberately, biased. They are charged with overloading students with work, raising anxieties in students and their families, depersonalizing schooling, discouraging creativity, and supporting credentialism and "the diploma disease." The examinations are said to hinder school- and teacher-initiated innovations, restrict teachers' professional autonomy, and act as barriers to correction of all these alleged defects. In fact, some consider examinations to be inherently hostile to educational reform and therefore to be necessarily instruments of the status quo.
We do not here propose to examine all of these familiar arguments for and against examinations. Instead we focus on what we see as the inherently two-faced nature of external examination systems: that is, while many instances can be cited of examination systems that are or have been used to initiate and reinforce educational change, there are equally instances of their serving as obstacles to change. Moreover, examination arrangements that at one time were promoted as levers of change in education may in the ordinary course of time turn into quite effective barriers to further change. The present paper identifies these dual aspects of secondary school leaving examinations, citing data from the experience of the eight countries listed.
The Targets of Examination Policies
National examination policies and practices may be directed at securing changes within schools, within other sectors of education and the broader society, or at supporting changes in the political or ideological sphere. Obviously, internal school arrangements and procedures will usually constitute the prime target of changes in examinations, especially such features as the curriculum (not only the official, intended course of studies that describes what teachers are supposed to teach, but also the curriculum that teachers actually teach, as well as the curriculum that students in fact master). Thus changes in examinations are often deliberately designed to affect instructional content and instructional effort (perhaps also instructional methods), and especially to affect the intensity of effort exerted by students.
In addition, demands for accountability impel governments and educational authorities to seek out and implement ways of acquiring "hard data" about the "products" or "outcomes" of schooling, by assessing students and thereby evaluating the quality of the schooling provided at social expense. Changes in examination systems are designed not only to improve data gathering, but also to establish appropriate differential criteria for increasingly diverse school populations, as well as to signal changes of acceptable standards of achievement for the school population as a whole.
Opening secondary education to the nonacademically talented and to children of "nontraditional" families has created pressure to elevate the status of explicitly nonacademic, as well as vocational, education. This combines with the pressure to produce needed skills for the labor force and even with ideological preferences for a polytechnical education. The extent to which the result is to modify the older, rather job-specific craft/vocationally oriented preparation, or to introduce a genuinely polytechnical element into the general academic program, or both, naturally will vary from country to country. In any event, changes in the structure and content of examinations and in the credentials they validate, may be introduced specifically to raise the status of nonacademic curricula.
But changes in examination practices can also influence processes beyond the secondary school system. For example, the allocative function of examinations requires little emphasis. Although the allocative function is especially evident where opportunities are strictly limited, even in rich and generous societies the most desirable postsecondary opportunities, whether of work or study, are by definition in short supply. Changes in examination subjects, syllabi, regulations, standards or credentials are all ways to alter who gets rewarded with which jobs and study opportunities. Nor need all these changes be made in unison. For example, the standards for successful performance may be altered without the form or content of the examination undergoing any change whatsoever. Or a credential that in the past had provided unrestricted access to the university may lose some part of its "open sesame" character. Sometimes a quota system is introduced for entrance to certain areas of study (the numerus clausus), or a second-tier examination is instituted, usually by individual institutions or employers facing an excess of "qualified" candidates.
Finally, changes in examinations may be directed at what are essentially political/ideological issues: nation-building in a post-independence society, or the promotion of social justice and the achievement of greater equity among social groups. In excolonial countries, the pre-independence secondary school leaving examination was normally imported from the colonial power. After independence, the slogans "Bring the examination home" and "Indigenize the curriculum" have conveyed an attractive political message. Indeed, until such changes are made, the new nation is unlikely to feel truly independent of its former colonial master. Similarly, social justice may demand that examination standards and content be changed, in order to accommodate the special circumstances of specific social groups: workers who faced limited educational opportunity at the time they were in school, women, the rural population, ethnic minorities, and the handicapped. It is often judged that their interests will be advanced by providing multiple types and levels of examinations and credentials.
Instead of "selecting-out," the stance that characterizes traditional hiring and postsecondary/university admission practices, examinations may be restructured to serve the purpose of "selecting-in." The emphasis on passing or failing is reduced, tempered by a view of examination results as simply one element in a broad array of counselling and guidance measures. To facilitate this new use of examination results, the concept of student portfolios and student profiles may gain support, especially where it is recognized that, while reliance on a single pass/fail set of examination results may suit an allocative process restricted to a small and fairly homogeneous student population preparing for a limited set of study and work experiences, it will no longer serve for use with a vastly enlarged population of young people.
To summarize, then, across the eight countries of our study, changes in examinations have been used as levers to promote change in three broad areas of education and society. In order of greater to lesser frequency of occurrence in the eight countries, these targets of examination change are: (1) to move the school curriculum in a specific direction, for example, to make it either more rigorous, or less rigorous, or to help make it either more uniform, or less so, across the entire country, or to change its character by encouraging the incorporation of more vocational or "practical" elements; (2) to help shift effective control of education either toward, or away from, the center; and (3) to help achieve specifically political goals, for example, repudiation of a previous government's general political line, or achievement of more social equality.
Examination Change and the Curriculum
Standards In England and Wales, as in the United States, through most of the 1960s, criticism of the schools was characterized by charges that schools were too oppressive, too demanding, and too inclined to evaluate and label students. Examinations and tests were seen as symbols of the problems of education, certainly not as potentially part of the solution. In both countries a reversal of the tenor of criticism appeared in the late 1960s. In England the new direction was signalled by the publication of a series of so-called Black Papers, beginning in 1969, culminating in Rhodes Boyson's Crisis in Education (Boyson, 1975). The critics charged school and university curricula with being unstructured and watered down. Domination of school policy by education professionals had substituted faddish, "easy" subject matter in place of knowledge that had proved its worth over time. As a result, it was alleged, Britain was sinking into mediocrity, unable to produce the quantity and quality of graduates required by a first-rate nation. It was absurd, the Black Paper critics asserted, to try to organize the educational system on the basis that there should be no clear winners and losers. The message of an effective education system should be that there are winners and losers, with examinations allocating the prizes.
A degree of support from more official quarters was not long in coming. In 1976 a parliamentary committee concluded that too many options were available far too early in secondary education, and recommended consideration of a core curriculum, to be determined under the leadership of the Department of Education and Science (DES) and Her Majesty's Inspectors. In the same year, concern for acquiring data to use in judging the efficiency (or inefficiency, as the government suspected) of education's use of public resources led to the establishment of the Assessment of Performance Unit. In 1977, the DES itself expressed the need to prune drastically an overgrown curriculum, to concentrate on essentials rather than continually to expand options, to reduce the wide range of differences between schools, and to introduce a core curriculum within a national framework.
Although these calls for change were initiated under a Labour government, the policy direction survived the shift to Conservative government. In fact, a direct line leads from these preliminaries to the passage of the Education Act of July 1988, as educational reform took on new life in 1987.
The Act provides for many quite revolutionary changes in education. Among them are: the establishment of a national core curriculum (to cover at least 40 percent of total school time) and a national system of continuous assessment of students' achievement (at 7, 10, 14, and 16 years of age). Together with a new examination for "all" (the GCSE), these innovations are intended to change principals' and teachers' behavior in ways that will support the core curriculum, and elevate standards of achievement.
In the United States, the rhetoric of criticism, and some part of the reality of action, have proceeded along quite similar lines. As in England, until the late 1960s most criticism of the schools came from the "progressive" viewpoint, though there were those like Arthur Bestor and Admiral Hyman Rickover who called for a return to basics, and tougher standards. As evidence of low average achievement levels accumulated from National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reports, IEA studies, and statistics of declining SAT and similar test scores, a host of voices called for a tougher curriculum, fewer options, and a return to emphasizing basic, agreed-upon knowledge.
Although the education scene in the United States may appear at first sight to be hopelessly chaotic and uncoordinated (and compared to many more tightly organized national systems of education it is), there have been a number of occasions when a consensus on next practical steps of change arises, when most of the actors start talking the same language, and when many begin acting on broadly similar lines. This certainly happened when the "reform" movement in the United States concurred on more and tougher testing and examinations of students (and teachers) to support the business of learning.
Publication of A Nation At Risk (1983) signaled the opening of this phase, which continues to show unexpected signs of strength even six years later. By 1989, most states were requiring regular assessments of students' academic achievement, and were increasingly mandating explicitly defined minimum course requirements and levels of achievement for the award of a high school graduation diploma. The National Assessment of Educational Progress has received an infusion of Federal government funds, and a strengthened mandate to report its findings in ways that can inform the educational policies of the several states.
However, what marks off the United States from most other countries is the refusal to implement a national core curriculum, or to bring the Federal government in any way into the business of constructing a national high school leaving examination. These things, as in the Federal Republic of Germany, remain wholly state prerogatives. To date, though, very few states have seized upon the idea of state-organized high school leaving examinations as a lever to implement curriculum change. New York with its long established Regents examinations and California with its Achievement Tests are the outstanding exceptions. Instead, the task is left to the Educational Testing Service and the College Entrance Examination Board, essentially private bodies, whose influence on the curricula of the high schools is nevertheless vast, through ETS's Scholastic Aptitude Test and the College Board's Achievement and Advanced Placement tests.
Three years of nationwide consultation and consensus building led by the College Board resulted in the publication of Academic Preparation for College: What Students Need to Know and to Be Able to Do (CEEB, 1983), the so-called Green Book. This was followed by a set of suggestions on how to achieve the competencies and knowledge specified in each of the six basic school subjects. The intent of the Board was "to suggest curricular change (and then to modify the tests to reflect such changes as did occur) and not to force curricular change by first changing the tests" (Valentine, 1987: 164). While the Board is currently giving priority to reforming its testing instruments, it specifically abjures use of college admission tests as a means of changing the secondary school curriculum.
By contrast, in France and the FRG, the secondary school curriculum has been regarded as too demanding and restricted, excessively focused on academic material, and too theoretical to be of use to secondary school graduates. As a result, in both of these nations, a previously unitary (singlecriterion) general academic and rather difficult examination has been eased. Differentiation to suit various student circumstances, aspirations and inclinations has been introduced, together with much more optionality. Certain subjects were altered to suit students following different programs, and answers graded differently according to student specialization. Thus, multiple standards replaced a more single standard in the end-of-school examinations in both countries, as a means of implementing the several goals of reform: to improve access to post-compulsory schooling, to diversify the curriculum, and to increase optionality for students.
In the Federal Republic of Germany, where provincial autonomy in education remains a jealously guarded prerogative, changes in the Abitur, central to the processes of national educational reform, have been slow to arrive, but in the end have been very substantial. The effort to modernize the secondary schools and at the same time to achieve some measure of comparability of curriculum and standards of achievement across the Länder soon produced broad agreement in principle among the Ministers of Education on the nature and aims of the examination and on reciprocal recognition of the credential (1950-51). However, only after reform plans had been instituted by the Länder and in the early and middle 1970s were minimum national requirements for the Abitur agreed upon (1979). Earlier Federal law (January 1976) provided certain guidelines to regularize admission to higher education, including a reduction in the number of university specializations subject to the numerus clausus, and reaffirmation of the Abitur as the major requirement for university admission (though now with differential weighting of subjects according to the relation of those subjects to success in a specified university program). The 1979 agreement endorsed the more relaxed pattern of optional basic and main courses which had now been established, with higher standards of performance required for any subject offered in the former group and less demanding standards for the "main" subjects. The numbers of students taking and passing the Abitur increased both absolutely and relatively. The number of applicants to higher education rose from 79,000 in 1960, to 225,000 in 1981, and to 245,000 in 1988; about 7 percent of 19-20-year-olds were in higher education in 1960, compared with 11 percent in 1970, and 21 percent at present. As a result, a mounting chorus of criticism about declining standards has been heard from the schools, the universities, and sections of the public. The reforms had begun to have their effect, and the results were found by some to be deplorable!
A "reform of the reforms" arrived in late 1987. The Conference of Ministers of Education of the eleven Länder revised minimum standards for the Abitur, and called for higher standards. From 1989 on, student options have been limited. Candidates must take continuous courses up to the examinations in at least two of three required subjects: German, a foreign language, mathematics; one of these subjects must be taken in the exam; and the importance of history and natural science is enhanced. Moreover, through changes in the weighting system for different subjects, the value of marks for basic courses is to be increased and those for main subjects reduced. By changing the formulae by which marks for achievement in the various subjects add up to an overall grade for the total Abitur, the ministers intend to reverse some slippage in curriculum and standards. But differences of standards among the Länder have made it necessary to develop a weighting system for university admission, doubts persist about comparability, as well as on such fundamental questions as the validity of results from oral examinations, which are still widely used, and about the predictive power of Abitur scores for success in higher education.
The conflict over standards and the effect the Abitur has on them is by no means over. Concern persists about the pressure on students of successive school tests leading up to the final State examinations, and over their heavy workload, and there is discussion of a proposal to reduce the duration of the gymnasium from 9 to 8 years to bring the age of graduation in line with other nations in the European community (pilot projects are already under way) and to deal with international equivalence of credentials. But if that proposal is accepted, the Abitur may then be taken a year earlier, again provoking concerns about decline in academic standards.
In France, too, reform of secondary schooling has been tightly bound to reform of the terminal credential, the baccalauréat. Increasing access and diversifying the curriculum were major objectives pursued as early as the 1950s. The baccalauréat came increasingly to be seen as a narrow, humanities and mathematics-oriented, academic selection device for higher education.1 However, a series of changes instituted since that time have made it an extraordinarily differentiated and complex system. The four major specializations which existed in 1950, have been increased to 38 (1988), and now cover a range of general academic and technical/professional specializations. Changes in the baccalauréat have brought about radical and significant changes in the French education system. One consequence has been that the number of students sitting for the examination has increased astronomically, and so have the rates of success. Baccalauréat awards have grown from 30,000 in 1950, to 60,000 in 1960, to 200,000 in 1970, and to over 300,000 in 1988.
In addition, a system of weighting compulsory subjects according to specialization is intended to maintain broad curriculum standards while at the same time being responsive to the need for multiple standards. The examination in mathematics, for example, is longer and more demanding for candidates specializing in mathematics and science, and the results more heavily weighted in the final result, than for candidates in the humanities. By the same token, the examinations in, for example, philosophy and French, while of the same duration for all candidates, are more heavily weighted for those in the humanities.
Given the variety of student options and the degree of local autonomy, concern about problems of equivalency, i.e., comparability of standards, is considerable. The diploma is national, providing the legal right to enter any university in France (nowadays for the first two years only), but the examinations are regionally implemented. Each academie chooses questions from a national list of topics and grades student performance according to national guidelines. It is a "hard" examination, but less hard in some places and subjects than others. Thus the number of candidates and their rates of success vary substantially between regions and séries (type of baccalauréat).
Successive governments have announced the target of 80 percent of the age-group at baccalauréat level by the year 2000. Moreover, the report of a recent commission recommends an increase in the options available to candidates, a bac à la carte to contain a number of common required subjects, and an even greater variety of optional ones, possibly to be taken in two stages.
In France, therefore, what was once an examination system which guarded the schools against the pressures of change has served as an effective means for implementing changes in the education system. The current Minister of Education, M. Jospin, has announced his intention of reducing the length of the school day, and the frequency of grade repetition, possibly compensating for this by a longer school year. He wishes to increase the number of technical and vocational baccalauréats, and to reduce the heavy emphasis upon mathematics in order to improve educational opportunity, despite persistent criticisms of falling standards.
In considerable contrast to the FRG and France, Sweden today relies on a nationally provided, but locally administered, system of regular assessment of the individual student's achievement. Sweden has abandoned the studentexamen, once equivalent to the Abitur and the baccalaureat. As part of its larger plan to reform secondary schooling, the Swedish government began to introduce exceptions to the traditional practice of university selection by examination results alone in the early 1950s, and had adopted a totally new system by 1972, consonant with its policies of universal comprehensive schooling and open access to postsecondary education. Since that time, no school leaving examination has been required, only certification that a given program of study was satisfactorily completed (27 lines are defined for the alternative programs of study at upper secondary level). However, locally administered, school-based assessment according to national guidelines is mandatory in the final years of secondary school.
Non-Academic Curricula Four nations, Germany, Sweden, France, and England and Wales, have recognized the potential of changing the structure and content of examinations to increase the attractiveness of vocationally oriented secondary schooling. Germany has done the most, and did it earliest. Alongside the academic Abitur, Germany established a host of federally recognized specialized vocational examinations and qualifications in developing the dual system of employer-sponsored apprenticeships and continuation schooling provided by public education authorities. The academic examination, the Abitur, was protected from pressures to vocationalize it, and has retained its superior status, but careful cooperation among the formal associations of employers, Federal and Land education authorities, and trade unions in devising syllabi, setting and administering examinations, and awarding qualifications, has meant that the nonacademic qualifications are held in very high regard and often pay off well in terms of earnings and social position. The result has been a marked absence in Germany of the familiar pattern in so many other countries, in which vocational education is the mark of a scholastic "loser."
Sweden may have gone further than other nations we have studied in being willing to change examination policy to tailor curricula to suit individual choices and to relate it to employment as well as to study options. It now possesses a highly differentiated upper, post-compulsory, secondary school system. Many of the 27 tracks defined as alternative programs of study at upper secondary school level are avowedly vocational. All, in theory, are of equal status and, with continuous testing, lead to equal rights to enter higher education and further training. In practice, a hierarchy of prestige and opportunity continues to exist. However, by abolishing the final examination for academic graduates and replacing it with a nationally provided but locally administered system of regular assessment of individual student achievement, Sweden has somewhat attenuated the role of simple academic success in distributing future opportunity, and has improved the relative standing of vocational education.
France has a long tradition of in-school preparation for employment. But vocational education was nevertheless clearly perceived as of lower worth. However, as noted above, the French have widened and differentiated the formerly purely academic baccalaureat by adding to the number of technical and vocational options available now, and likely to come along in the near future. As evidence of their popularity, 140,493 candidates took the technical options in 1987 (of whom 65.31 percent were successful), and newly introduced vocational options attracted 1,160 candidates in 1987, 8,850 in 1988, and are expected rapidly to draw greater numbers.
England has just combined its GCE "O" level examination (older, more academic, and university-based) with the CSE (newer, more diversified, and school-based) into a single multilayered examination (the GCSE) for 16 year-olds, which contains elements of both. The intention is also to improve the relative standing of "nonacademic" students and subjects by using differentiated criteria, and by recommending that academic subjects be examined (and therefore taught) in ways that emphasize applications of knowledge, stressing practice rather than theory. (There is of course a contradiction here between the government's attempt to use the examination system to raise academic standards and reduce curricular diversity, while at the same time encouraging vocationalization of those very academic subjects as well as increasing vocational subject options.)
Apart from the changes involved in the GCSE, the Department of Education and Science (DES) established a specific program to encourage local authorities to develop programs to enable students to enter the world of work better equipped (the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative, 1983). Another vocationally oriented scheme, developed directly by the DES, was the new credential, the Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education (CPVE), incorporating general education and specific vocational studies. However, it is difficult to assess its impact: it is awarded on the basis of performance in prescribed courses, not on any set of external examinations, per se. So far, at any rate, it has not established itself as a popular credential.
In the Soviet Union, the rhetoric has been highly supportive of vocational education in the context of universal polytechnical schooling. However, the Soviet Union has not chosen to influence the reality of the curriculum by weighting the secondary school leaving examination more heavily toward vocational subjects and work practice. Instead, a curiously traditional and academic type of secondary curriculum has persisted amidst the vocational rhetoric.
The pattern in the PRC is very similar. Despite the government's announced policy of achieving 50 percent secondary enrollment in each sector (vocational and academic general education), the examinations remain oriented to the traditional academic subjects, with no move to assign extra weight to "practical" subjects.
Japan has largely avoided both the rhetoric and the reality of vocational education in the nation's secondary schools. The regular secondary schools are relentlessly academic in orientation. The small vocational school sector is run by a separate ministry, the Ministry of Labor, and has had little influence on the mainstream of secondary education. The Japanese approach relies on the schools to provide a high level of general education, and on the future employers to provide the directly job-related skills. To that end, for most Japanese youngsters, both the curriculum and the examinations at the end of schooling contain relatively little choice, and few if any vocational elements.
These goals of examination policy (to change the curriculum; to shift standards; to elevate the status of nonacademic education) all reflect a growing human capital development approach to educational choices. Japan stands out in this respect, with its use of a highly competitive examination policy at both the beginning and end of upper secondary school, to serve qualitative and quantitative human-capital goals. Shared by socialist and capitalist nations alike, this orientation is as marked in the already developed nations as it is among the newcomers to development, and it may be observed as well in nations that have inherited quite different educational philosophies. Examinations are regarded as ways not only to increase the quantity and improve the quality of desirable human capital, but the results are seen as indispensable indexes of educational performance and achievement.
Examination Policies and Control
Changes in end-of-secondary-school examination policies and practices will affect two basic aspects of control of education: which level of government authority (central, regional, or local) exercises effective control over the operation of the schools; and how the transfer of graduating secondary school students to further study or to employment is directed.
China's experience with respect to examinations and control of the schools has probably been the most volatile of the eight countries studied, with swings of policy occurring at roughly 10-year intervals since the beginning of the People's Republic. Examination policies have been changed to conform to the swings in the control of educational policies in general. Especially under the influence of the Soviet Union, and in an effort to repair the damage done to education during war and civil war, control of the schools and the transfer of students was initially centralized in Beijing's hands. A national system of examinations was introduced in 1952, reinforcing the power over the schools of those authorities who "owned" and administered the examinations. The departure of the Soviet advisers in 1960, the political rupture with the Soviet Union, and the announcement of the Great Leap Forward marked the beginning of change in concentrating power in Beijing.
Policy swung decisively with the onset of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966. The basic theme of the GPCR was to challenge and destroy the power of the central bureaucracy, especially in education. In the course of this Mao-inspired "second revolution" (this time against the general governmental bureaucracy, and particularly against the educational establishment), examinations were abolished. Students were no longer expected to prepare themselves for academic tests; transfer at the end of secondary school depended on evidence of appropriate social class origin and demonstrated enthusiasm for the new radically populist policies.
In 1976 the overthrow of the Gang of Four brought a restoration of central control over education and a marked shift of emphasis on "expertness" in place of "redness," predictably reinforced by the return in 1977 to highly selective examinations organized on a nationwide basis at the end of upper secondary school.
During the 1980s substantial administrative authority over the examinations was devolved to the provinces and to a few of the larger cities, Beijing and Shanghai in particular. General directions were issued by the State Education Commission, but implementation was in the hands of the provinces. In like manner, secondary school graduation examinations were to be instituted by provincial authorities, beginning with Shanghai and Beijing.
In the last year or two, yet another swing of policy back toward greater central control of the examinations has become evident: devolution and decentralization of the examination system allegedly has become too costly. Construction and validation of examinations by each of the provinces is said to impose undue financial burdens on the educational system. Chinese educational authorities have recently introduced new forms of examinations such as short-answer questions and multiple-choice, machine-scorable tests, in order to reduce costs and improve comparability and objectivity. Such measures are likely to increase national uniformity at the expense of provincial autonomy.
There have been times in China when examinations were seen primarily as obstacles to desirable changes, as instruments assisting in the defense of the status quo -- the period leading up to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, for example. But in the period following that upheaval, examinations have been once again regarded as very useful instruments to help change attitudes and behavior.
However, one of the enduring aspects of education in China has been the tiny fraction of the age-group admitted to higher education (for every 100 children enrolled in grade 1 in a given year, only about 3 students are accepted into higher education). Maintenance of this policy has been facilitated by the highly selective examination system. Thus far the Chinese people have been willing to accept the legitimacy of the "selecting-out" process that the examination system represents.
Few other countries have experienced the alternating swings of examination policy and control of education that we have described in China. At the other end of the spectrum in this respect is the Federal Republic of Germany, in which control of education overall and of the Abitur in particular has been consistently a responsibility of the Länder. The Abitur has undergone some important changes in the last 20 years, but it remains a fixed element in German education. The Federal Government has, with the agreement of the Ministers of Education of the Länder, established a central mechanism for university admission nationwide, and broad agreement on the scope and standards of the Abitur. This has helped deal with the allocation process, in large part through agreement on the numbers to be admitted to certain programs and institutions in especially great demand (the numerus clausus). But control of the examination by Land authorities has reinforced Land prerogatives in education, and has added to the already significant obstacles facing Federal governments that have tried to extend the power of Bonn to influence educational policies and practice.
In France, the examination system has changed sufficiently to help achieve some larger targets of control, but as in Germany, it is more generally seen as a bulwark against any fundamental change in education. On the other hand, quite unlike Germany, French government administration in general, and the control of education and examinations in particular, have been highly centralized in Paris. Beginning in the early 1980s, a policy of modest devolution has been introduced, to give more authority to départements and the larger cities. An accompanying devolution of responsibility for the baccalauréat has meant yielding some authority to the 23 académies, to choose from among the list of topics for each subject issued by the Ministry of Education in Paris, to construct the specific questions, and to organize and set the standards for grading the answers. In this way, examination policies have helped support some significant changes in France's general style of public administration.
As the expansion of secondary education proceeded, the number of young people with formal baccalauréat qualifications, entitling them to enter higher education grew rapidly. In order to control access to the more desirable institutions and programs of study, a second set of examinations assumed greater importance. These were highly competitive examinations (the so-called concours), channelling about 10 percent of the successful baccalauréat graduates to the Grandes Ecoles and to special programs in the regular universities. The concours has acted in effect as a kind of pressure relief valve, siphoning off the most academically able students (who are then provided with superior facilities and instruction for the completion of their higher education). Successive French governments have thus been able to promise the universities more resources, while in practice leaving them to struggle on, trying to cope with the lion's share of higher education enrollment on budgets that have remained severely constrained. There is a certain parallel here with China in the use of highly competitive examinations to legitimize extreme economy in the use of public resources for higher education.
Sweden, like France, has been seeking to decentralize in modest fashion a system of governmental and educational control that has traditionally been highly centralized. Formal responsibility for education was devolved to the county and municipal authorities at about the same time that the end-of-secondary-school examinations were abolished. However, the Swedish central authorities were not about to relinquish all oversight of education, and a system of continuous testing, under the general direction of Stockholm, but administered locally, has been in place for over a decade. The data on student achievement are used not only for counselling individual students, but also to check on the performance of each school within its district, and of each district compared to others.
The Swedes saw the traditional studentexamen as a major obstacle in the way of democratizing the schools and individualizing instruction. In 1977, Sweden widened eligibility to apply for admission to higher education, to include many groups beyond graduates from the traditional 3- and 4-year upper secondary schools. Anyone with a minimum of two years of secondary education, or the equivalent, or who was over 25 years old and had at least four years of work experience, could apply. Places in higher education were then supposed to be allocated roughly in proportion to the numbers in each of these categories of applicants. In those areas of study for which applications exceeded places available, school marks became very important (or, for adults applying under the 25:4 rules, scores on a SAT-style test). Thus, abolition of the end-of-high-school (university entrance) examination has not done away with the need to allocate scarce places in higher education in a manner that could be defended as objective and fair.
Recent events in Britain provide another illustration of the two faces of examinations as potential instruments of change in education, but equally likely to be reinforcers of the status quo. In voicing profound dissatisfaction with the record of educational professionals and the local educational authorities in managing the schools, the Thatcher government was also reflecting its wider doubts about the performance of local government authorities (especially those in the hands of the Labour Party) in managing local services as a whole. The common thread that runs through the entire set of changes embodied in the Education Act of 1988 is the desire to curtail the educational prerogatives of the local authorities: to reduce their curriculum discretion; to subject their pupils to regular testing and publication of school-by-school results; to put them at risk of losing control of their schools should a majority of parents so desire with their votes; to limit their financial powers; and to divest them of their tertiary level institutions. To help achieve these goals, and to give the central government more control over the external secondary school examinations, the number of examination boards has been sharply reduced (to five regional groups, each comprising former GCE and CSE boards), and their work subjected to close oversight by the newly created School Examination and Assessment Council (SEAC), the members of which are appointed by and report to the Secretary of the DES. In future, all external examinations at the secondary level will be required to receive SEAC's imprimatur. These changes represent a decisive expression of faith in the power of examinations to shift the locus of control of education away from the periphery (individual school principals and local education authorities) toward the central authorities, and thus to unravel what has been the stuff of educational administration in England and Wales since the beginning of public education over one hundred years ago.
In the United States, the absence of a Federal government presence in secondary school examinations has, as in Britain until the recent reforms, severely limited the power of the national authorities to influence, let alone control, what goes on in the schools and in the school systems of the 50 states. On occasion the Federal government has been able to exercise considerable influence by offering Federal funds for specific educational programs (for example, to upgrade curricula in mathematics, the sciences, and foreign languages), but budget constraints have blocked extension of that approach. However, as we have already noted, what is absent on the Federal level is very much present at the state level. There the introduction of new curricular requirements has been reinforced by the establishment of regular testing programs during the course of schooling, and the introduction of final tests and examinations to ensure some minimum level of competence before the award of the high school diploma. State governments have become increasingly assertive in relation to the local jurisdictions which have traditionally exercised considerable autonomy in how, or even whether, they assessed student achievement at the end of secondary school.
Finally, we should cite Japan's well-advertised use of the examination system to control access to higher education. Examination results have become far more than the basis for simple admit/reject decisions; they serve to locate each student on a finely divided scale of achievement, validating his/her selection into a college or university that is ranked on an equally finely calibrated scale of reputation.
Conflict over the direction of educational change will often be centered on control of the examinations, reflecting sharp tension between national and provincial authorities. Indeed, the fate of school reform often depends on who controls the external examination system, and to what end. In Britain, the central authorities have exerted control over the examinations, in order to use them as a lever for change. In China and France, likewise. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the noncentral authorities have used the Abitur for the opposite purpose, to moderate the extent of change. While the Soviet Union has presented itself as highly centralized in control, in practice local discretion is nowadays quite large, especially in the matter of the content and standards of the final secondary school examination. This has added to the already substantial difficulties in the path of using central government power to reform Soviet education. In the United States, ownership and control of the examinations is split between states and the private testing agencies, making for a highly complex and not at all clear relationship between changes in the examinations and the reform of education.
Examinations and Political Goals
Beyond their effects on education, changes in examinations may help achieve particular political goals. The political use of examinations is especially evident when an existing system of external examination is abandoned, or an abandoned system is reinstated. The experience of many of the eight countries studied exemplifies this phenomenon.
In Russia, in 1918 soon after the Bolshevik revolution, examinations, school tests, and marks (including examinations for university entrance) were all abolished, as symbols of Czarist elitism and discrimination. Admission to higher education was instead determined on the basis of social class origin and political activism. The abandonment of examinations and marks signalled the end of an era of highly formalized instruction and school organization. However, by the end of the 1920s progressive practices had come under severe attack. Stalin's political and economic program called for "building socialism in one country," and doing so in the shortest possible time, no matter what the cost. Rapid industrialization demanded less relaxed methods of education than those practiced by the so-called pedologists, most of whom were dismissed from their posts (and worse) in the period 1929-33.
The pedagogical approach of the pedologists called for a "child-centered, student-governed" school. Teacher authority was supposed to take second place to students' collective decision making. The practice was always much less in evidence than the rhetoric, but in any case the pedologists' theories were at odds with the authoritarian political and social system that Stalin was intent on building. Tests of academic achievement were reinstated in the early 1930s. A resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, dated 25 August, 1932, mandated end-of-year examinations in the schools, as a quality control measure, and in the same year examinations for university entrance were established. These changes sent an unmistakable signal to the schools and to Soviet society at large: a relatively unstructured period in Soviet schooling was at an end, and a more uniform, formal and traditional system was to be instituted to prepare youth for an effective role in the building of socialism. Objections that this meant a recreation of elitism were overridden on grounds of national interest, just as in China fifty years later when a similar reversal of policy took place with the announcement of the Four Modernizations. In 1944, a Soviet government order established a secondary school leaving examination for all would-be graduates.
The restoration of examinations announced a new direction in the national political order. It represented not only a means of bringing order and national cohesion to the school system, but it also signalled that the period of experimentation with school governance by student collectives was at an end. The existence of examinations helped teachers reassume their traditional position of authority. Today, the secondary school leaving certificate, or certificate of maturity (attestat zrelosti), is firmly entrenched as the nationwide credential all Soviet students must gain in order to graduate from complete secondary schooling. The credential is uniform throughout the Soviet Union and is based on the results of written and oral examinations given in schools during May and June in all major subjects, as well as on grades received during the final (tenth) school year.
The attestat zrelosti serves ostensibly to ensure that the Ministry determined curricula are followed and that achievement standards are regularized. In practice, however, wide discretion is left to local districts and schools in the actual administration of the attestat examinations. While the broad themes and topics of study are prescribed in each republic's syllabus, the actual questions asked in the examination are formulated by the local examining board, composed of teachers and administrators of the very schools examinees attend. Oral questions and answers are widely used. Moreover, the criteria by which candidates are evaluated are also very much in the hands of the local examining boards. Widespread uncertainty about the meaning of attestat results and concern about the uneven quality of education from school to school, district to district, and republic to republic, have impelled institutions of higher education (VUZY) to require that applicants sit for special, institutionally arranged entrance examinations, many of which are extremely competitive.
The high degree of local discretion and the variability in both the content of examinations and standards of achievement is part of a larger delegation of the particulars of educational practice to the localities. It may also be seen as a concession to the rights of the nationalities, a source of constant tension and unresolved conflict in the Soviet Union. While the common view in the West of Soviet education is that it is a rather monolithic system tightly run from Moscow, the reality is very different, and nowhere more so than in the realm of examinations. Moreover, because both the secondary school graduation examinations and the university entrance examinations are highly decentralized and wholly in the hands of the secondary schools and the individual VUZy, they have become exceptionally weak potential instruments of change.
Soviet educational policy claims to use the schools to identify, nurture, and promote talent in standard meritocratic fashion. On the other hand, socialist ideals of equality are also strongly voiced. There is persistent tension between these two objectives, and although the late 1920s and the early 1930s marked the time when the rhetoric of the Soviet school swung decisively away from equality, it did not go all the way to pure meritocracy. Instead, parental position, connections, influence, political correctness, and even place of residence all have come to play a large part in settling how far and in which direction a youngster will go in higher education and career. Precisely because their standards are exceptionally malleable at the local level, the school and university entrance examinations admirably support the compromise that has been established between meritocracy and equality. It is not difficult for a Soviet tenth-grader to gain the attestat zrelosti: the demands of equality can thus be seen to be decently met. However, securing a place in a good quality VUZ is quite difficult: selection via competitive entrance examinations appears to satisfy the meritocratic ideal, however tarnished that ideal may be by increasing evidence of social class bias, favoritism, and even outright bribery in the acceptance decisions.
In this connection, it should be noted that in the USA where testing is widely used, efforts to make more systematic use of external examinations are blocked by objections that they discriminate against minorities, females, recent immigrants, and so on. Although examinations are supported by many as a neutral, objective means of identifying superior achievement or talent, they are regarded by others as contraventions of the nation's egalitarian philosophy, even to the extent of offending provisions of the United States Constitution by denying equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. In like manner, the baccalauréat has been criticized in France as likely to exclude potential students from working- and lower-class families, and thus as an undemocratic and discriminatory mechanism. Indeed, the conflict between meritocratic and egalitarian principles appears to be fundamental to the use of examinations by nations, regardless of whether they are socialist or capitalist. Sweden has sought to resolve the conflict by abolishing the traditional academic school graduation/university entrance examination, thus advertising and reinforcing the overall social welfare and egalitarian policies of its social democratic government.
Other nations, too, have used changes in the examination system to signify political changes and to help achieve a particular political result.
In Britain, the package of changes represented by the Education Act of 1988 underlined Prime Minister Thatcher's determination to instill a "value for money" accountability mentality in the schools and universities, as she had tried to do in the wider economic sphere. Hence the prominent place given in the Act to the establishment of a system of continuous assessment of student achievement via tests and to revamped secondary school examinations that are expected to emphasize the practical, applied aspects of subject matter.
The 1987 "reform of the reforms" in the Federal Republic of Germany represented a reversal of the more liberal social and educational policies of the preceding era. The call for restricted choice of subjects and more uniform and demanding standards of achievement in the Abitur, as in Britain, followed a swing to the political right. Ministers of Education of those Länder won by Christian Democrat and Christian Socialist majorities designed measures to prevent pupils dropping "difficult" subjects and gaining the Abitur in "easy" subjects, and incorporated these changes in the national standards. Trends in both English and German examination policies reflect the power of an electorate demanding return to more traditional content and standards of performance.
Yet another dimension of the political significance of examinations may be noted. Examinations are a means whereby nations can assert and maintain a sense of national identity. For example, in France, one response to changes and diversification in the curriculum has been growing fear of the loss of French cultural patrimoine. The requirements for a common core of subject matter embedded in the baccalauréat are seen as a bastion of defense against erosion of the foundation of knowledge on which a secure sense of national identity is based. In parallel fashion, voices in the US are raised in favor of a common core of studies (particularly in literature and history) to be systematically examined at the end of high school, as a means of remedying what many consider to be a major failing of the system. Thus, whether as protection against erosion or as means of revival, examinations can play an important part in the politics of nationalism.
Conclusion
In spite of the many criticisms levelled against them, examinations remain very much in fashion, and are increasingly relied upon to help move educational systems in desired directions.
At the outset of this inquiry our view of examinations was that they would be revealed as instruments that could either reinforce or obstruct educational change. The evidence, however, clearly points to their serving both functions, sometimes sequentially, but frequently at one and the same time. Thus the changes introduced in the baccalauréat over the past thirty years have clearly helped implement some basic changes in French secondary education, for example, the elevation of mathematics and the natural sciences to a higher level of subject prestige, over philosophy and literature. At the same time, the structure and content of the baccalauréat has continued to reinforce many long-standing elements of the French system of secondary education. France is, however, not alone in this. Other nations, for example, Germany, England, and China, provide instances of the paradox that changes in examination policy may also sustain traditional features of a nation's educational system.
Examination systems present two faces to the world in another way: they are both embraced and excoriated, often by the same people for different reasons; sometimes by different people for the same reason. As the experience of Germany indicates, on the one hand the demands of the Abitur are cited as the cause of student overload, and on the other hand they are defended as the necessary protection against dilution of standards. In Japan the examinations are constantly castigated for the damage they cause to young people's mental and physical health ("examination hell" is the term employed to indicate the week or more of concentrated examinations at both the beginning and the end of Japanese upper secondary education), yet the Japanese are immensely proud of the test prowess of their young people in international comparisons of scholastic achievement. The French can, and do, regard the baccalauréat as both a lever for effecting change in education, and at the same time, as an obstacle to further change. In England, the GCSE is criticized for being a tool of the Conservative government used to achieve national uniformity and reduce optionality, while others welcome the new examination for its legitimization of such progressive measures as school-based assessment. And (paradox again) teachers everywhere are inclined to view external examinations as restricting their professional autonomy, but at the same time enhancing the perceived importance of their indispensable work in preparing the candidates.
Although there are numerous examples of examinations being supported and changes in examinations being proposed in expectation of the changes in education and society they can help bring about, once "modernized" or "reformed," the examinations do not necessarily continue as dynamic elements in the educational system. The Soviet Union provides a classic example of this dialectic process at work. Since the early years of the Stalin period, social and political conditions have changed markedly. In addition, a set of entrenched interests has grown up around the examinations for the attestat and for entrance into higher education. Ironically, Soviet education has proved extraordinarily difficult to change. partly no doubt because of the examination policies that were introduced over fifty years ago as part of a program of vigorous reform. On the other hand, England's fundamentally new GCSE, in combination with the creation of a national curriculum and assessment system, serves as a means of reshaping English education, replacing an examination system that, despite additions made over recent years, had for long served as an obstacle to change.
Present Soviet and past English examples may be striking, but they are not unique. In most countries, after some time (perhaps a decade or two, perhaps longer) what was devised and implemented as a solution becomes in its turn the problem. What began as a lever to effect and reinforce change, then ends as an obstacle in the way of further change.
The changes in examination policies that we have identified conform well to the human capital development approach to the purposes of education. First of all, if education is in fact an investment made by society in its citizens, it is appropriate to figure out what return is being obtained. Hence, the results of examinations and tests come to be used not only to rank individual students, but to estimate what has been learned by the aggregate of students. The United States is a leader in this respect, especially now that the National Assessment of Education Progress has been given more funds and a fresh mandate. Britain and Sweden have also moved strongly in this direction.
Second, insofar as education can raise workers' productivity and earnings, it is argued that the proportion of the total curriculum devoted to material of direct vocational use should be expanded, and that the examination system should be changed to encourage this shift. France and Germany lead in this respect, and Britain is following their example. Curiously, China and the Soviet Union, two socialist countries who have voiced the rhetoric of vocational and polytechnical education most strongly, have not altered the predominantly academic content of their end-of-secondary-school examinations. Nor has Japan "vocationalized" the examinations, preferring instead to provide employers with a large supply of academically proficient graduates, whose subsequent employment-based training can go forward thoroughly and efficiently.
Third, the human capital development approach implies that potential talent should be developed as much as possible. It follows that the examination system should be geared toward "selecting-in," rather than "selecting-out." We might expect to see examination policies change to enhance the potential guidance and counselling functions of examinations, and we do indeed observe this in Sweden, and to a lesser extent, in Britain and the United States.
Finally, emphasis on the economic value of schooling also supports the more traditional view of examinations as devices to identify and nurture high-level talent. Each nation argues that it is in direct competition with other countries, and therefore needs to develop higher levels of knowledge and skills in many more young people. Curricula must be made more demanding, and standards and requirements must be raised. Of all the eight countries we have considered, it is probably Japan that has pursued this goal most vigorously, but the same rationales and goals are now widely cited in the United States, Britain, and France.
But the prominence given to the human capital development uses of schooling need not mean abandoning the more conventional humanistic goals of education: a broad and general approach to personal development, self-discovery, individual growth. With all the emphasis on preparing the young for productive contributions to their nation's economy, examinations continue to be dominated by the traditional subjects of the liberal arts curriculum: language and literature, history, cultural and civic knowledge, as well as mathematics and science. Examinations are thus a means of strengthening both sets of educational aims.
However, what may be even more important at this time is "the other face" that examinations show as stimuli to effort, and as quality controls in education. Whether directed at human capital development or at personal growth, or at both, examinations are opening up to larger numbers and a greater variety of students. While more and more succeed, it is inevitable that more become clearly labelled as failures. Cynicism envelops the student devoted to mastering the skills and acquiring the knowledge to pass the critical examination at the end of secondary school; discouragement and even burnout accompany failure or follow success. As a recent letter-writer to Le Monde de l'Education (June 1989) observes, the problem with making the baccalauréat the target for 80 percent of youth by the year 2000 is that it will create growing numbers who will have failed the examination and as many more who will be turned off school and even all future self-education by excessive emphasis on preparation for the examination. As Mathews observed, in introducing his study of examinations (1985):
On an historical scale examinations are a recent phenomenon, at least in their application to the mass of people. Perhaps not quite so inescapable as death, they form, none the less, part of the experience of most people in the developed countries and increasingly in the developing countries. Seen in their early days as means of liberation from the inequities of advancement through privilege, patronage and wealth, they now appear to some as a distorting influence on education and careers. It could well be that the next decade will be a critical period for examinations. In some countries there are signs of a decline in their use; indeed, there are instances of outright rejection; in others their use and influence increase. Precipitate rejection of them could be as unwise as slavish reliance on them. In any event, a period of appraisal is called for.
NOTES
- Criticism of this kind is not altogether new. See Emile Boutmy, Baccalauréat et Enseignement secondaire, projets de réforme (Armand Colin, 1899), described in Le Monde de l'Education, No. 157 (Feb. 1989). [BACK]
REFERENCESBoyson, Rhodes (1975). Crisis in Education. London: Woburn Press.
College Entrance Examination Board (1983). Academic Preparation for College: What Students Need to Know and to Be Able to Do. New York: CEEB.
Le Monde de l'Education. No. 161 (June 1989), p. 7.
Mathews, J. C. (1985). Examinations: A Commentary. London: Allen & Unwin.
National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983). A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Washington D.C: US Government Printing Office.
Valentine, John A. (1987). The College Board and the School Curriculum. New York: CEEB.