I suppose it depends on the course you’re doing, but that doesn’t tally with my experience. For starters, we weren’t assessed constantly – the two annual flashpoints were January and May, when we had our coursework deadlines and a handful of exams.

And I’d also argue that it’s far easier to prepare for regular assessments like these than it is to cram the whole of two or three years’ study into a handful of exams spread over a fortnight or so – not least because you can keep a running score of how you’re doing throughout the course, so you don’t have to deal with the hideous uncertainty that you may have blown it through feeling below par right at the end.

I don’t mean that you can doss around till the last minute – you’ve got to work reasonably steadily – but it’s less stressful than being assessed all the time, surely?

Just a thought. Anyway, it’s a while since I took any exams so maybe it’s rose-coloured specs.

On the other hand, depending on how you approach things, this can actually help reduce stress. My degree was a modular one, and once I’d worked out that the final grade was based on a simple average of the sixteen courses I took across the second and third years (i.e. with no weighting towards particular subjects), my strategy was to work flat out in year two to get a mark much higher than the threshold for a First, and then relax a bit in year three.

Ironically, I ended up scoring better marks in year three, probably because of the relative lack of stress – I suspect I was more inclined to take risks than I might have been if the marks were critically important. The final exam was particularly entertaining: by that stage I was so far ahead of my target that merely turning up and signing my name at the top of the paper would have guaranteed me a 2.1, and I only needed 19% to get a First.

But a strategy like this needs a fair bit of forward planning, ideally right at the start of the course, and I can’t imagine too many 13-year-olds thinking that far ahead.

1)
Piecemealisation (if that’s a word), the exams today are broken down into far simpler and smaller chunks than at any point in the past. Whereas a maths exam from 20 years ago would have been 3 hours long, and featured long, verbose questions with multiple interdependent calculations. Today, the candidates face 3, 1 hour exams, each with shorter and more succinct questions, thus a perceived lack of complexity.

2)
The topics covered have changed to reflect changes in ideology and understanding, for example, my father, when looking at some of the work I did as part of my GCSE’s and AS levels swears that many of the topics I covered, he did not cover until degree or the final year of A level. However, other areas such as Logarithms were covered earlier in the past due to the lack of electronic calculators.

3)
The growth of evaluation based study rather than simple rote learning and regurgitation of facts. Increasingly exams are designed less to calculate the pupil’s retention of factual knowledge, and instead judge their ability to evaluate sources and argue an opinion. Thus when the media sets modern pupils old tests, which prize the memorization of dates over the development of argument and critical thinking there are inevitably allegations of ‘dumbing down’ when in fact the exams are testing a completely different and arguably more useful set of skills. Indeed, in the markscheme for A level Government and Politics, less than half the marks for each question are allocated based on the correct factual knowledge, the rest being based on the content of the argument, and the way in which the information was deployed. This of course means that exam technique and following a rubric inevitably take on a greater significance, allowing pupils to be coached that much more easily, learning painting by numbers arguments in which they join the dots on the day, thus undermining the changes made to the exams to favour independent thinking.

4)
The increased importance of continued assessment. In the past, almost all if not all of the candidates marks were allocated based on the results of the final examinations. Today an increasing percentage is based on performance in Coursework, this ranges from 20% in History to 60% or more in subjects like Media Studies. In theory this allows students who perform poorly under the pressure of exams to acheive, however the entire system is wide open to cheating, usually involving teachers who repeatedly mark and return supposedly ‘independent’ work for correction. The temptation to cheat is inevitably higher among lower acheiving schools, and penalises honest schools.
The other effect of this is a rise in ‘stress’, invariably the media portrays complaints of stress among students as whinging, and in part it may be, however continued assessment and the creation of AS levels which contribute half of the marks of the whole A level, mean that it is no longer possible for a pupil to doss their way through the lower sixth and find a good set of revision notes and do well in their final exams, this constant pressure to perform is the main cause of this stress. The modern child will face four years of constant coursework and exam pressure from age 14 onwards, then potentially followed by another three or four years of higher education.