WRITTEN EXAMS

The head of England's exams watchdog has just said that pen and paper exams should increasingly be replaced by computerised tests. These are currently available only in a few papers.

I agree. I completed an English law degree during the noughties, and the exams consisted of nine 3-hour papers, all written in longhand. Since I rarely write anything longer than a Christmas card these days - and precious few of those - it was the physical act of writing that I found the most difficult part of the whole course. My wrist ached after each paper.

If the above applies to old fogies like me, then it applies in spades to the current generation of children, who learn to type almost before they can write. That is no bad thing, but the English obsession with pen and paper is increasingly old-fashioned. In Denmark, not only all schoolwork, but also the exams themselves, are done on computers. Indeed, a fair number of the exams are oral, even in supposedly "non-oral" subjects such as mathematics and physics.

It would be good to see more of that sort of balanced exam structure in the U.K. After all, what is the point of testing people's ability to write for 3 hours in longhand, if they never, ever have to do a similar thing for the rest of their lives?

Walter Blotscher