Opinion | From coursework to exam halls: Humanities students face a shift back to traditional testing

By Riana McConochie, Third Year, English

Should universities be allowed to abruptly change assessment structure with no warning? This piece will consider the upsides and downsides of a switch back to traditional in-person exams for English students.

After spending 3 long years perfecting the skills necessary to produce a high-level piece of assessment coursework, English BA students have now been thrown an unexpected curveball: in-person exams.

Most third-year English students, at this point, won’t have stepped foot in an exam hall since their A-levels and for those that had their A-Levels disrupted by COVID, it could date back to their GCSEs. For the university to suddenly throw, for the most part, final-year humanities students into the deep end of in-person exams, seems entirely unfair. The final year of a degree is supposed to act as the culmination of a student’s progress throughout their time at university and such a shift in the academic structure seems more like a test of resilience than a test of knowledge. From speaking to a current English BA third-year student, I’ve been able to uncover the anxiety that can accompany an unexpected in-person exam: “Having not done an exam in three years, I didn’t expect to be so anxious going into the exam hall. I remember in the first five minutes after sitting down, I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking”.

It is understandable why the university would decide to implement this change. With the ever-increasing rise of AI meaning that student submissions are becoming less and less authentic, a turn to in-person exams allows no room for students to hide behind the help of ChatGPT. Whilst the thought of this is probably terrifying for many students, for some, the idea of an uninterrupted 2/3-hour exam period to knuckle down and show off their best work seems strangely appealing. There is also no better feeling than walking out of your last exam, knowing there is nothing you can do to impact your mark, and soaking in the new-found sense of freedom that comes with it. When it comes to coursework, for most people, the nagging guilt to be studying is constant and unavoidable, making it impossible to properly enjoy anything fun for the entire exam period, and so it is almost better to have it all riding on that one exam slot, that one chance to get it right. Sure, in-person exams are the simplest and surest way of guaranteeing that a student’s work is indeed their own work, but they can also be problematic for a number of reasons.

The need to relearn how to prepare for an exam and tailor revision to the technique that suits you best can be daunting, especially within a short space of time. For a lot of students, having to quickly transition from writing an essay in the comfort of your own home to the high-stakes, anxiety-inducing setting of an exam hall, alongside the pressure of producing your best piece of work in a single opportunity can negatively impact a person’s mental health. On top of this, trying to become accustomed to the change of setting and the stress of it all, would most likely mean that a student is unable to produce their best work anyway and are likely to feel disappointed with their performance as a result.

While the current assumption of humanities students is to be submerged in coursework for a large portion of the academic year, as time progresses, we should probably expect to be faced with more and more in-person exams as the use of AI becomes harder to monitor and control.

If in-person exams were something that the university eased us humanities students into from the very first assessment period of first year, there wouldn’t be such a problem. The shift in academic framework is not necessarily a negative one and can offer students the chance to showcase a different skillset than they are used to, if gone about in the correct way.

While the switch to in-person exams might feel a bit like a rude awakening, it could also be the perfect opportunity to show just how well we can rise to the occasion – without a little help from AI.