What has been the effect of COVID-19 on the ability of students to take public exams? Xenia Ramirez-Espain NLCS

However, despite this annual tradition of daunting exam halls and looming invigilators restarting this year despite much disruption from COVID over the past few years, all is not as it once was. For starters, the students in year 13 taking A-levels are about to undertake their first-ever set of public exams. If we find it within us to cast our minds back to 2020 and its painful memories, we can recall that these students found themselves being appointed the grades their teachers predicted for them. Whilst they may have sat numerous mocks in the time being, nothing quite feels the same as a real public exam with external invigilators and the strange sentiment that this is your ‘last chance to get it right. Knowing that everything rides on one paper, one essay, one correctly memorised equation, is an odd sort of adrenaline-infused fever dream which cannot be replicated in any other academic situation. Their lack of an authentic GCSE experience can arguably have put them at a disadvantage two years on, despite certain reductions and content they have been allowed. It is then my suspicion that after the incredibly high-grade inflations which we have seen over the past two years, we may suspect that this year the opposite phenomenon may occur, and whilst I am hopeful that this deflation may occur across the board in as equal a manner as can be hoped for, if it must occur at all, this fall in grades will likely hit those who have already suffered the most education-wise throughout the pandemic, low-income students in state schools. 

Whilst I felt that it would be an infringement on their peace of mind to raise the topic with several year 13s at my school, I interviewed year 12s who face a similar under-preparedness at the end of their school careers next May. The consensus was that they felt the exam test hybrid they took last year was unlikely to have prepared them for next year’s exams. One student, Hannah Hammond of NLCS, stated: “I honestly already feel unprepared for my mocks in two weeks that determine my predicted grades, so I can’t even imagine what next year will feel like”.