The chief executive of exam board OCR has suggested that all GCSEs should be limited to two exam papers lasting no longer than 90 minutes each, in a bid to boost student wellbeing.
Jill Duffy was speaking earlier this week at an on the curriculum and assessment review.
She said that “we could reduce that level of assessment without impacting on reliability or impacting on standards” and that the move “could have a positive impact on wellbeing”.
“A concrete thing you could do at GCSE would be to say that each GCSE could have a maximum of two papers - a lot of them have three at the moment - and those two papers could be a maximum of 90 minutes,” she added.
“If you did that, you would reduce the exam burden, on average, by about eight to 10 hours. And you could do that without reducing the reliability of exams,” she said.
Ms Duffy, who will be replaced as CEO in September by Myles McGinley, OCR’s responsible officer and director of regulation, added: “I think we have got too much assessment, too many exams going on at 16…If you look at England, at the moment, on average, a student is taking 30 hours of exams. That is far more than almost every other country.”
‘Bare minimum’
OCR has previously called for a reduction in the number of assessments and curriculum content covered by GCSEs.
But a section in OCR’s , chaired by former education secretary Charles Clarke and released in September 2024, acknowledges that cutting down exam papers could be seen as problematic.
The report stated that during OCR’s “discussions with our research colleagues in Cambridge University Press & Assessment”, the view was expressed that “a single 90-minute exam for each GCSE subject would be the absolute bare minimum to stay respectable” in terms of reliability.
It added that 90-minute exams “wouldn’t allow all the content that is assessed at the moment to be included”.
The most assessed system in the world?
Accompanying Ms Duffy on the panel was Tim Oates, group director of assessment research and development at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, and one of the architects of the 2014 national curriculum.
Mr Oates said: “I’m going to challenge the idea that we’re the most assessed system in the world. We’re not and I’ve studied a large number of systems.”
He continued: “America, for example, [has] very high levels of standardised testing and also the implications of the outcomes of those tests [is] felt quite hard.
”[In] Finland…they do a lot of testing in primary and they do a lot of testing of the lowest attainers. They test the low attainers because they’re really worried about them and want to understand what they’re struggling with…so they can better support them.”
Coursework, AI and plagiarism
Among the suggestions to address exam overload and anxiety is increasing the amount of coursework in exams, a point supported by OCR and which Ms Duffy again supported in her testimony in Parliament.
“I think there absolutely are opportunities to look at…the balance of coursework and exam,” she said.
Ms Duffy cautioned, though, that coursework has the additional “issue of AI” and argued that it is something “we need to face into…AI isn’t going to go back into its box; students are going to be using it”.
She added: “I think in the future it’s going to be a case not of ‘did you use AI?’ but ‘how did you use AI in this piece of coursework?’
“So, it might be acceptable to use it, for example, for initial research but not to be passing off AI-generated coursework as your own work - that will be plagiarism and we’d deal with it severely, as we do any other forms of plagiarism.”
‘Different basket of stress’
However, on a potential increase in coursework, Mr Oates noted that although there is a “huge volume of research on stress and exams”, there is an “almost [total] absence of research on stress and coursework”.
He explained that while it is a different type of stress, “when we look at the few studies that there have been of 16-year-olds and 18-year-olds, where the coursework goes up in volume, when it gets beyond a certain point, the stress really kicks in. They talk about deadlines all falling at the same time, the difficulty of completing things in diverse subjects.”
“So, we’ve got to understand that any form of assessment, whether it’s coursework or exams, comes with its own but different basket of stresses and pressure,” he said.
