SanSay.Co.Uk

Recent news suggests that take-away coursework is going to be ditched in favour of coursework done at school, in lessons. This is to stop pupils cheating by simply downloading coursework from websites.

It strikes me that we might as well go ahead and ditch coursework altogether and reply entirely on exams. No, seriously - here's the idea: the above solution won't stop people being able to cheat. They'll be able to download material from the web just as easily at school as at home (no, blocking websites won't help much - children will simply email themselves material from home). Teachers can't monitor every child every moment, and if they can't spot copied coursework already (although I might suggest that most teachers will be able to spot a suspiciously well-worded piece of work from a less-than-steller pupil a mile off) then they're not going to be able to in an hour's coursework lesson split between 30 pupils.

Better to split each course into half-termly modules and have an exam at the end of each one. No big exam at the end of the year - do completly away with the whole panic at the start of summer as people revise for exams. This should allow for much more flexible courses - if a pupil muffs up a module they can retake it next half term. If a pupil is bright enough to take the module exam without the tedium of having to do the lessons, let them and then they can move on to the advanced module.

You could even have modules count for more than one qualification - have modules that earn you 1/12th of a GCSE in maths and physics, for instance.

I'm fortunate in actually having had some experience of this kind of teaching as a pupil at school. I was one of the first years to do AS-levels, back when people didn't quite seem to know what to do with this new qualification they'd just invented and mostly saw them as "extra" qualifications. Hence the curriculum of our AS further maths course seemed to be pretty much made up as we went along, with the course split into modules (including "coursework" modules) that we were examined on at the end of each term or so. No panic or fuss was involved in any of these exams, and they mostly turned into a friendly competition to see who could get nearest to 100%.