I was a studious child and took the examinations that I sat very seriously. As an adult I follow the debate on education reform and I am frequently informed tha

I was a studious child and took the examinations that I sat very seriously. As an adult I follow the debate on education reform and I am frequently informed that there is something wrong with those examinations. If teachers took them seriously and modified their teaching with the aim of improving their pupils scores, this would be "teaching to the test" and educational outcomes would suffer. As a child I took them seriously and modified my learning with the aim of improving my scores. Was I harming my education by taking the examinations seriously? Why do concerns about the quality of the examinations come out now, when teachers' pay is on the line? Why not earlier when children's qualifications were at issue? The teacher's union party line, that "merit pay leads to teaching to the test and that would be bad" is a slap in the face to studious children who took their examinations seriously. It destroys the credibility of the profession. Is it possible to construct good tests? http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~fv/books/em/EssentialMaths.pdf http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~fv/books/em/EssentialMaths.pdf is an interesting example of a test aimed at ensuring minimum standards at the start of a university mathematics course. The usual technique for gaming an examination is to memorise answers to a core set of questions that keep coming up. For example one games a calculus examination by memorising cos 2x => -2 sin 2x and the examiners play along by providing enough easy questions that you can reach the pass mark with doing the hard questions that make the examination look tough. In the article the examiner, Franco Vivaldi, is refusing to play the game. Instead of designing the test so that it can be broken and students can be passed even though they haven't learned the essential technique, Vivaldi takes the opposite tack and tries to design a test with enough variety that students have to learn the relevant mathematics. Would teaching to this test do any harm? Drilling the techniques to get faster and more accurate in pursuit of a higher score would be harmful. Vivaldi needs his students to be competent because these techniques occur as basic techniques in the more advanced material that he aims to teach. He needs his students to be fluent enough that difficulties with the basics do not distract them in the course of advanced work, but beyond that their time is better spent on the advanced work, not on acquiring greater fluency with the basics. Knowing this he sets the test as pass/fail. The success of merit pay will depend on improving the tests. It will be an interesting battle to watch.