Highlights from The Exam Man podcast- Series 2, Episode 7
In this episode, John and Sophie discuss John's approach to running mock exams and how it has changed since he first started his role as an Exams Officer. They also explore the value of mock exams, both for students and teachers.
What are mock exams?
The first thing I want to say is that not everyone calls them mock exams, which is something that I didn't realise until I started doing this job. So, when I was at school they called them mock exams. At the school I work at, they call them mock exams. When I joined the exams office, Facebook group, I started seeing posts about things called PPEs and trials. And I wondered what on earth are these?
What does PPE stand for?
PPE stands for Pre-Public Examinations. And trials is obviously a bit like mocks, but a bit more biblical. I guess some schools don't like calling them mocks because of its association with something not very serious. If anyone knows why, then message us and let us know! But I think probably most schools call them mocks, but some have different terminology. Mock exams are exams which prepare you to do the real thing. So if you're doing GCSEs in year 11, if you're doing A levels in year 13, you'll certainly do one set of mock exams. You might do two. We do two in our school. There's some debate about whether or not you should call exams in other year groups mock exams. I was quite firm in our school about saying that we shouldn't do that, and that we should call them end of year exams rather than mock exams.
Otherwise, they're having them all the time.....
And it's a bit scary as well, because they're not really doing their mocks at that point. It's not the right association, I think. So I tend to think of mock exams as being the exams that they do in the exam year itself before they do the real thing. They're an opportunity to practise, an opportunity for students to see where they are, for their teachers to see where they are. Very often, students will just sit a past paper. The past papers that often get used in mock exams are the ones from the previous year. The reason for that is because the exam boards keep them under a padlock. If you go on to the website of the exam boards and try and access the papers from last year, if you're just a member of the public, you won't be able to, because they're under this padlock system. Only Exams Officers with secure access to those sites and teachers with access to the exam boards secure sites can get those papers and the students can't.
Which teachers can have access then?
Any teacher who signs up to the exam board secure sites can get them. Basically, the rule is there that as a teacher, you have to get permission from the Exams Officer. The Exams Officer is the overall admin for those sites. I don't think I've ever rejected anyone. But I have the power to, if I wanted to!
Often it will be the papers from the previous year. But sometimes teachers like to make their own mock exams. I guess if they're teaching a particular area of the course, and maybe they haven't quite finished it, so they can't really set the whole paper at that point, then they might do a modified exam. There are some services out there as well, which provide mock exams that are like the real thing, but they're not the real thing. Again they'd be hard for students to access, because obviously what you don't want to do is set a paper for a student that they've seen, where they may have even accessed the mark scheme. So there's a lot of ducking and weaving to try and make sure that you're putting something in front of the students that's going to genuinely test where they are at the moment.
When do you have your mock exams? How many do you have?
We do two sets of mock exams in a year, a set at the end of November / beginning of December, and then we have another set end of February / beginning of March. We do sometimes have subjects throw in extra ones. So in particular in core subjects like Maths and English, we'll often get a random one.
You must love that!
It means you have to do all the organisation that you would for an exam season, but just for one morning or something like that. But I do understand the purpose of that, because sometimes it will be that they've completed something in the course and they want to examine the students on it. And sometimes having the odd big exam taken out of the mock exam season just creates a bit more space within that season where you've got more freedom to schedule other exams. So in that respect, it can be helpful as well.
How do kids react to mock exams at the school generally?
Kids love mock exams! Mock exams are, I would say, and I think probably most exams officers would agree with me on this, more difficult to run than real exams. And that, I think, often surprises people.
Why is that in particular?
I think in terms of the level of organisation required, there's pretty much the same amount. You're not under quite the same pressure in the sense that you're not going to get inspected while you're doing them. And the consequences of something going wrong are not necessarily as drastic as they would be in the summer exams. But from a purely organisational point of view, I think they're pretty much as onerous as the real exams. But you're doing it within a different context, and that context is one whereby the students aren't taking it as seriously as the real exam. I don't think that's a controversial thing to say.
What you tend to see in our school is that for the mocks that we do in November, December, often a big chunk of students aren't taking it that seriously. That chunk then decreases when you do it in February and March, and then hopefully by the summer, pretty much everybody by that stage is taking it seriously and does see the importance of it. So for mocks you have to manage a bit more in terms of student attitudes, student behaviour, things like that. And also the school is running normally when you're doing the mock exams.
Of course. So how do you manage things like rooming?
Rooming is more difficult. In the winter we need to use the sports hall, and PE needs to be running lessons as well. If it's cold outside, the weather might not be appropriate for going outside. So there's all these tensions at play. The real exams can pretty much trump other things, or certainly it's much easier to make that argument. I think when you've got mock exams running, it's more fluid, you have to be more flexible. And you have to understand sometimes that there might be something that is, if not of a higher priority, at least as important as what you're doing. And so you're going to have to give and take a little bit more. But that can make the organisation of mock exams a bit more difficult.
So what was your biggest mistake that you've made in terms of mocks?
When I first started the job, I was very focused on the real exams. You don't really know what you're doing, so you're desperately trying to learn how to do the job. And I guess it's reasonable to see the real exams as the most important thing. I didn't use the same methods for organising mock exams that I did for the summer exams. I think that's a mistake, because of what I've just said about the fact that you have less overall control when you're running mocks, and you have to be more flexible. The more that you can do to organise them in a way where you have as much control as you possibly can, that's always going to be a sensible thing to do. So now what I do is that I organise and plan mocks in exactly the same way that I do for summer exams.
To get a bit technical for a second, what that means is that on our school's management information system, I do what are basically the equivalent of entries for the students for their mock exams. This takes a bit of work because you have to set up in the system a whole framework of examinations, as if they were like real exams. And that is time consuming, so the first time it probably took me a couple of days to get it done. But it's worth it because you can clone it and you can reuse it year after year after year. So once you've done it, it's done. If you start doing a new subject or something a bit differently, then you have to add things in from time to time. But the basic framework is there and you're never going to have to do that massive piece of work again. So anyone who's not planning their mock exams in their management information system, I would say, unless you're quite a small school, it’s worth thinking about setting that up.
Then I go through the process that I would for real exams, which is I enter the students, I then seat them in a seating organiser within that software as well. They get issued with a personalised timetable that tells them what venue they're in, what seat they're going to be sat in and all those kind of things. That obviously takes more work, but I think when you then come to run the exams, it reduces the levels of stress because you're much more in control. And also the students are learning how it all works. You issue them with that timetable, say in November, December and that's exactly what you're going to do for them when you come around to April, May time. So I think from their point of view, it familiarises them with it. And from your point of view, it takes out some of the uncertainty and just means that you're a bit more in control than you might otherwise be.
So that's one mistake. Another mistake I made was more kind of a general professional mistake. When I first started the job, I found it quite overwhelming. The sheer volume of exams that we were running, at times I found really, really difficult to manage. We were still doing modular exams then.
Just to explain - in 2015, exams changed a bit and basically most exams went into the summer season. But before then there were exams running in January, in March, big exams as well, big GCSE exams. Plus you were trying to run two sets of mock exams as well all around this. To be honest, I was finding it really, really difficult. And I remember e-mailing the senior leadership team, suggesting that they should go to one set of mock exams rather than two. And one of the deputy heads e-mailed me back very, very nicely, very politely. But he basically said to me, John, we can't make decisions about what's right for the students around your admin requirements and admin schedule.
I think it highlighted something to me, which I think you do have to understand when you're an Exams Officer, and when you work in schools more generally, is that you are there to serve the students. Obviously the leadership in the school will want to do the thing they perceive to be in the best interests of the students. I think whenever you're approaching management to talk about things like that, you should always make sure that you're framing it in those terms as well, what's going to be the best outcome for students. If you frame it in terms of yourself and your needs, I think you're always going to get that kind of push back from senior management in school. So that was a very good lesson for me in terms of how to work within a school. And that as an Exams Officer is a really core skill. It's not just about knowing how to do your job, it's knowing how to work within your environment, within the school as well.
You've given a couple of tips there from your mistakes. But what's your overall top tip for Exams Officers around running mocks?
So my top tip would definitely be what I was saying about organising it like they're real exams. It completely changed for me, I think, at the point that I started doing that. I noticeably found the stress of running mock exams reducing. It puts you in a place where when you get to the real exams you've got the muscle memory almost for how you're doing it. So you're not at that point switching to a completely new approach and new way of doing things. You've been doing it throughout the year basically.
And that level of calm must permeate to the students and to your invigilators and everyone else.
Yes, I think another benefit of having everything very organised through the mock exams, is in terms of your invigilators. They have that sense of calmness and organisation as well, which again is going to be more difficult during mock exams because of all the other things going on in the school. It means that you're sort of building a level of trust with them throughout the year, so when you come to do the real thing, they can have confidence in the systems that you're running. That will help the harmony of your team and then help you to be able to deliver the exams more effectively.
Can you expand a bit on the benefits to students of sitting mock exams, in your opinion?
I think sometimes people can worry that students do too many assessments and exams. And I think that was part of the logic behind getting rid of some modular exams. There was the sense that students were taking exams too often.
I think mock exams kind of serve a dual purpose really. Obviously one of them is to check the progress of students, to check where teachers might be issuing predicted grades, how they think the students are going to get on. This is a reality check for that. So it's, okay, you think that they're going to get a six at the end of the day, but they've just sat an exam and right now they're only getting a two. So what's going on here? Is it just that they haven't done any revision or are there things that, as a teacher, I'm missing, that I'm not seeing? Are there broader issues with the student, personal issues and things like that, that need addressing? So it's a kind of health check really, both on how the student's getting on, but also looking at how the teacher's evaluating that student's performance and whether it's accurate or not and what needs to be done, what needs to be worked on.
But we’ve talked about how exams can be intimidating. They are kind of unusual experiences. A lot of people who criticise exams make that observation, that it's a very strange thing to do. You don't really do that in other aspects of life. Probably one of the biggest purposes of mock exams is to acclimatise students to the experience of taking exams. And acclimatise them as well to the rules that they have to follow. So that when they get to the summer, those things are, if not second nature, at least a bit more ingrained than they would have otherwise been.
And they can focus on their learning and applying that, can't they? Rather than the sort of system and procedures.
And also we can focus on supporting them rather than having to reprimand them for not following the correct processes.
What sort of issues like that do you come across?
In mock exams we do tend to have more issues crop up because the students are not used to it and maybe it's not quite as high stakes. So these things are more likely to occur and you're going to see a lot more violations of regulations. So things like a student bringing a phone into an exam or having a watch on.
What do you do if a student brings their phone in?
We always make sure that right from the get go, when we're doing mock exams, we are being really quite rigorous about the processes. That is to ensure that when the students come around to do the real thing, that they're not making those mistakes. So if, for example, a student's walked into an exam with a mobile phone on them, if we come down relatively hard on it in the mock exam, hopefully that's going to really send the message that you shouldn't do this and when they come around to the real exam, they're not going to do it. So we're not going to have to deal with any kind of malpractice with that student.
So if, for example, a phone was found in a mock exam, then we would call home, we would make sure that the parent is spoken to about it. And usually the student will have a conversation with a member of the senior leadership team, so deputy head teacher probably. And they will be very, very clear about the implications of breaking these rules.
So what happens if they get a phone out at the start of a mock exam? Do they get to sit the exam?
There is obviously a very strong academic purpose and progress purpose to doing these exams. So we don't really want to stop students from doing them. We wouldn't go as far as to say, if a student had done this once, you can't sit the exam. Normally we would remove the phone from them to give them the message within the exam that students shouldn't have mobile phones on them. Then my invigilators would follow all the processes that they normally do. They'll write up an incident report form, which will come to me. I will speak to my line manager, who is deputy head. We'll then have a meeting with the student to explain what they've done wrong and why they mustn't do it. We'll call home to ensure that it doesn't happen again. So it's quite a lot of work, actually for one small incident, but the payoff is worth it, because if you're having to deal with those kinds of incidents in the real exams, the work involved in that is huge.
And the impact potentially to the student?
Yes, the impact could be massive. And the workload from the point of view of an Exams Officer. Anyone who's had to deal with malpractice will tell you that it's not a simple process. It's close to being a kind of legal process that you have to go through. So it's definitely worth doing all those things to prepare the students mentally and so that they understand everything very thoroughly before they get around to the real thing.
So that's about it for our whistlestop tour of mock exams!
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