The Theatre of the Test

When should we use controlled conditions?

Anyone who has worked in a secondary school will be familiar with the theatre of externally set examinations: students line up in alphabetical order; they are reminded of the strictures of the exam (no phones or watches, clear pencil cases only, no talking once you enter the exam hall); then students file to their seats to be told when to turn over their papers.

The performance begins.

The justification for the controlled conditions of external examinations is that no student in any school across the country should be given an advantage over any other. Each has the same amount of time, minimal disturbance, and access only to the knowledge they have acquired to answer the questions within the test.

This level of control and vigilance is often held up to be the gold standard for test completion. Schools may seek to replicate these conditions in their own internal assessments, such as end-of-year exams. Even in the ongoing ‘informal’ classroom tests held throughout the school year we may observe the features of the staging of external assessments: students sitting in silence, books put away in bags, papers facing down until the teacher instructs students to begin.

Tightly controlled conditions may indeed be optimal for ensuring fairness, but are they optimal in achieving other goals, such as maximising student effort? Furthermore, which aspects of the stage management best help us achieve the outcomes we are after? Strangely, there isn’t much literature on this topic or research that may enlighten our decisions.

Let’s look at what we do know that may be of assistance.

Test anxiety, distraction and memory

Firstly, we know a little about test anxiety¹. Formal and unfamiliar settings may increase test anxiety in adolescents which may negatively affect performance via decreased levels of concentration and cognitive function². Students suffering high test anxiety may perform better in their regular classroom, although the setting is not the only factor likely to trigger this anxiety. Tests weigh on students in different ways, as we wrote about here.

It is tempting to argue that we should avoid sitting students in exam halls whenever we can, but then when do they overcome this anxiety if we avoid them being exposed to this setting? Furthermore, for many students the theatrical staging of formal exams may lift effort levels with a positive effect on their performance. A change of venue signals the importance of the test. However, the power of this effect is in its scarcity, and we should expect diminishing returns on students’ effort if we overuse it.

We also know that test performance can be affected by distractions. Exam halls have numerous advantages in this regard: plenty of space, isolation from the rest of the school, and limited decoration such as displays and posters. Gymnasiums are often used by schools for this purpose which may have the added benefit of no eye-level windows looking out onto corridors or, perhaps worse, green fields or bustling city streets. However, an exam hall can bring novelty of surroundings or proximity to other students who are not normally encountered. Students are also often supervised by people other than their regular teachers, and with a higher pupil to teacher ratio, bringing opportunities for misbehaviour. Again, familiarising students with the formal exam hall setting, ensuring the routines and expectations are clearly established, can help.

Removing students from the environment within which the knowledge was acquired may, however, disrupt retrieval. Memories are to some extent context-dependent in that recall becomes more difficult when in a new environment.³ However, this effect is likely to be quite trivial, besides which, we may conclude that there is little point to their learning if students cannot access this knowledge as soon as they step outside of the classroom!

Booking the gym

Perhaps more significant than all the above are the practical considerations schools face when running tests. We may convince ourselves that the controlled conditions of the exam hall are preferable for reasons of validity, fairness, motivation, minimising distractions, reducing cheating, flexibility over test length (and so on), but pity the P.E. department whose teaching space is sabotaged throughout the year and spare a thought for the exams officer or senior leader charged with scheduling the assessments.

And the whole-school theatrical production involved in formal exams inevitably begins to dictate when tests must take place (during the designated exam window for the year group) and the form of the assessment (pen and paper). We may question whether a valid test can be administered by sitting all the students in the gym for an hour or two. In this post, we highlighted the subjects for whom this version of ‘controlled conditions’ simply isn’t appropriate.

Clustering assessments (rather than spacing them out and administering them when the subject teachers choose to) can also have consequences. Faced with multiple, formal tests, students will make decisions about which ones to prioritise, which will affect their performance and undermine the validity of inferences made about their knowledge relevant to others in their class or year group in a subject.

What is your goal?

The staging of exam-periods introduces different behavioural incentives to the sporadic, low-key classroom testing that takes place at the discretion of the classroom teacher. We should ask ourselves what it is we are trying to achieve.

Our goal may be to signal the importance of the tests, to control test conditions for fairness and accuracy, and to limit distraction. However, we may inadvertently create test anxiety, limit test formats, and reduce the validity of the inferences we can make about learning. We should also consider the organisational and administrative burden. These considerations should be carefully balanced before deciding that strict exam conditions are worth the cost.

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1. Putwain, D. W. (2008). Deconstructing test anxiety. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 13(2), 141–155. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632750802027713

2. Cassady, J. C. & Johnson, R. E. (2002). Cognitive Test Anxiety and Academic Performance, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Volume 27, Issue 2, Pages 270-295

3. Smith, S.M., Vela, E. Environmental context-dependent memory: A review and meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 8, 203–220 (2001). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196157