We’ve all read the stories over the years about exams getting easier, but I always just assumed they were Daily Mail rabble-rousing rubbish. But having sat a GCSE ICT exam for myself – that’s an exam intended to tax 16 year-olds by the way – I can safely say they’re getting, if anything, more difficult. And not in a good way.

As my rather embarrassing performance demonstrates, actual IT understanding didn’t seem to play a huge part in the marking of the paper. On questions requiring written answers, you could have written an entire page of sound argument, but if you didn’t include the precise terms or points in the mark scheme, you lost the mark.

In fact, the whole experience went a long way to convincing me of a common argument: that today’s exams are largely based around training pupils to memorise the particular key facts they’re expected to know.

Barry’s example in his blog post is a great one: Mike correctly stated that sending an email is better for the environment than writing a letter, but as the exam board hadn’t thought of that he couldn’t get the mark.

Similarly, in a two-mark question about how to deliver a finished graphics document to a client, I offered up email as one of several answers – which got me the first mark. Common sense dictates that anyone putting this answer would know to actually attach the file to the email first, but as I didn’t specifically state this that second mark eluded me (and that’s despite me listing FTP and CD/DVD as alternatives, both of which were also only valid for that first mark – in the latter case the second mark was given, unbelievably, for specifically saying you’d then give the disc to the client).

There’s undoubtedly a way of passing these types of exams, but it doesn’t necessarily involve learning your subject properly. Instead, it involves knowing the key terms that the marker is looking for, and teachers (with pressure on them to hit high pass rates) are undoubtedly aware of this. I’m sure it’s not just IT that has this problem – I seem to remember taking that exact approach to one of my weakest subjects back when I had GCSEs coming out of my ears. But it’s the IT industry that’s complaining of a lack of adequately trained applicants, and if this is the start they get it’s not hard to see why.