to not understand why there are several exam boards?

[OtraCosaMariposa]

Lots of chat this morning about A-levels. Can't get my head round why there are several different exam boards in England/Wales/N Ireland all offering the same qualifications. Why is this and what's the rationale behind it? All seems fairly complicated and doesn't it just cause the situation where kids are moaning that one A-level Maths isn't the same as the next because the paper was easier/harder/different.

In Scotland there's just one exam board. All kids sitting national school exams here do the same paper, on the same day, at the same time. (Unless they are at one of the very few private schools who teach GCSE and A-level).There are still the same moans about an exam being particularly tough one year, but everyone's in the same boat.

Having several exam boards seems unnecessarily complicated.

They are all private companies who parent companies also publish the text book. I assume it is a mixture of wanting to make money and no one company being allowed a monopoly.

There always (?) has been, certainly since the 1960s, and I suppose no govt has ever decided that it was worth changing

If exams arent privatised they would need to be set by the government which has other connotations and downsides (and positives based on your opinion/politics). There are multiple providers because as it's privatised there will be tenders for each country and some different subjects and different companies will have won each of those.

The exam boards in England were initially regional.

So when I was doing A levels the exam board my 6th form college used for all A levels was the London exam board. Those teachers/lecturers who marked exam papers then tended to mark for a board outside London.

For GCSEs as some subjects weren't covered by a particular exam board e.g. Latin, Urdu, Greek my school used a mixture.

YANBU I thought this when I took my exams and my stupid (state comp) school said they preferred our exam board as the questions were harder and would impress employers if we got good results. I knew that was bollocks at the time. It’s a shit system, Scotland is better, as with a lot of things.

Education is devolved to the Scittish, Welsh and NI parliament/assemblies, who set their policies. There is only 1 exam board/regulator in Wales, as in Scotland. When Gove introduced the new A Levels and GCSEs, Wales and (I think) NI opted to keep modular qualifications. As for all the multiple exam boards, they are probably some free market/competition wet dream. I can see what you are saying about English qualifications, but they all ‘sell’ in international markets (eg IGCSE and International Baccalaureate) so there is a wider market than you might think.

The NI exam board isn't a private company, it's funded by public money.

Oh and our Maths A level text books, like my friends at uni who used different exam boards, were by Bostock and Chandler. So the board didn't make money from text books as the text books weren't fixed by the board only the curriculum was.

I see the argument about monopolies. But the government set the curriculum and decide what is going to be studied, lots of chat this morning about a new A* grade at A-level which is a government thing and not introduced by the exam boards.

So do schools/counties all opt for the same board? So if you're in Oxfordshire all schools do the same, cross the border to Wiltshire and it's different?

When I did mine they were all regionalised so most of the ones I did were my local exam board. However we did a few from other regions. I agree that it is daft though.

Yeah! Scotland - fewer boards because fewer original independent areas of education.

England - regional boards, some merged to become to couple we have left

Wales - more recent change to accommodate Welsh language

It's history. Nobody set out to have more than one board for financial gain. State education didn't spring up fully formed overnight and many things are still fragmented, duplicated because of that.

And the easier / harder boards is a matter of perspective, really. They are all held to the same standards, some just use different ways of asking questions. The content is broadly the same every year, as there is a global curriculum!

Oh and I'm not holding up the SQA as some beacon of shining light and an example which all should follow. They have their issues. (We're currently fighting with them over one of DS's exam results which was very odd and completely unexpected).

But there's no denying it's much simpler to have everyone doing the same exams.

So do schools/counties all opt for the same board? No. Not even every department within a single school sticks to one board. There is always a decision made for each subject.

I changed boards a couple of times because of teh weird, stultified way one board set out its stall. Content was the same but the way they examined it was so stuffy it made even the most interesting topic boring.

As for all the multiple exam boards, they are probably some free market/competition wet dream

Probably not...

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examination_boards_in_the_United_Kingdom

One of the reason the boards were regional and it wasn't centrally set is the massive administration involved in getting the papers marked and results organised in a short space of time.

£££££ I assume

Back when I was at school, we mostly had Southern, Midland and Oxford & Cambridge, I think. Decisions were made mostly on syllabus, AFAIK - particularly for English Lit (which set books) and history (which periods). I left school just before the nationalcurriculum was introduced, so there was probably a bit more variation then.

As an adult, I have taken some language exams, and most things seemed to have gone AQA and EdExcel, with WJEC for Welsh, so I assumed in the intervening years, there was some consolidation and buying up of smaller boards.

Probably something to do with different population size and everything being manual/paper based when it was all set up.

Scotland has a population smaller than those covered by many of the regional exam boards in England, so it's not hard to see why there is only one in Scotland, but several are needed in England.

Originally the exam boards were universities, or groups of universities.

It made sense for different universities to offer different subjects. My O Levels were through JMB most schools in the north of England used JMB and/or AEB but if you wanted to take something like Welsh you would have to use a different board because the universities that formed JMC didn't have Welsh departments.

Even within the exam board there were and still are different syllabuses, so all schools teach RE but faith schools tend to study a GCSE syllabus linked to their faith.