There is, says Colin Hughes, who is the head of the exam board AQA, no downside to switching pupils from written exams into a gleaming modern utopia of computerised tests. Students, he says, are baffled by the fact that exams don’t take place on screens. He also seems to think the poor dears won’t be able to type if they don’t take exams on computers, as if they weren’t competent enough to learn how to use a keyboard without them. What’s more, boring old exam papers, it seems, have been causing delays in providing results for schools: doing them on a screen would solve that problem instantly, and, shazaam, Johnny and Jemima can get their C minuses in Raffia Work almost instantly.

Rod Liddle, 1960 – 2026

The best of Rod Liddle

Sometimes I do wonder why certain people are so bedazzled by technology. We spend so much of our time trying to keep children away from computers: why force it on them in other situations? Well, I know the reason why in this particular case: it would obviously be oodles cheaper to feed pupils’ examinations into a computer, which can then be marked by AI, rather than hiring a lot of depressed teachers to wearily wade through one million essays........

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