image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackhynes/366958167
An increasing number of people are attacking exams as being unsuitable assessments in our schools, colleges and universities. I have noticed that nearly all of them work in AI. Note, for example, who is opposing the very sensible and uncontroversial announcement by Princeton University to reinstitute the proctoring of exams, to ensure students aren’t cheating with AI.
Some suggestions that might explain this relationship between criticising exams and making money from AI adoption:
1 - Exams don’t test whether young people can use AI. This is suboptimal if your business is based on the idea that being able to use AI is the essential future skill.
2 - Young people using LLMs to create answers to questions, rather than doing them themselves, are likely to perform poorly in exams. This is obviously inconvenient if your business model desires young people to use LLMs as much as possible, to capture current and future customers, create dependency, collect data, and train AI models
3 - Exams place a strong emphasis on knowledge acquisition. This jars with an industry that often claims we don’t need to know things anymore, as AI can do that troublesome task for us.
Some people might say this is overly cynical, but take a look at all those who are criticising exams, who also work in AI. It’s not as if exams as an assessment tool is a new debate, it runs more or less constantly in education, but we now have a new group joining the conversation. Can anyone offer alternatives to the above to explain the correlation between employment in AI and exam sceptisim?
Personally, I would feel more reassured if I could see evidence of the same people waxing lyrical on the need to change school and college assessments BEFORE they started working in AI. Again, more than happy to be shown evidence of this.
It was in this context that I came across Alan Milburn’s latest Guardian article, titled “‘Exam-obsessed’ schools leave pupils unready for work”, in which he puts the blame for the increase in the number of those Not in Education Employment or Training (NEETs) at the door of schools who focus on exams.
Whilst there could be some truth to this, it is a very bold claim, and one that prejudges the outcomes of the report he has been working on since 2025, due this summer. It is also interesting to note the views of others on NEETs, such as by the Education Policy Institute. Whilst they do name student disengagement as one possible cause, they make no specific mention of exams.
Could it be that Mr Milburn is keen to get this message out now, during the exam season, to ensure maximum effect? Might this message also be related to Milburn being chairman of Bridgepoint Capital, an investment firm that has interests in AI, and his being on the Board, until very recently, of Huma, a digital healthcare company with interests in AI?
Alan Milburn was also, of course, close with Tony Blair, whose Institute is a big supporter of AI and whose son, Euan, owns the AI company Multiverse, which has just secured an additional £70 million in funding. They will need the money, as their losses are growing. How to make their specialisation, “in digital and data apprenticeships”, profitable?
Maybe I’m just seeing things. Maybe all those criticising exams are doing so because they genuinely believe that this type of assessment is not up to the job and that they have better alternatives.
If looking for inspiration, AI booster could go back 22 years to the Tomlinson Report, commissioned by the Blair government when Milburn was Health Secretary, that recommended integrating GCSEs, A-levels and vocational programmes into a single set of qualifications.
The report wasn’t acted on. Pity that Milburn and colleagues lacked his current zeal for reform. Perhaps now, with their AI infused passions, we will see change.
In whose interests, one can only speculate.
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