> it feels to me that there wasn't necessarily a reason exams couldn't be taken in socially-distanced class rooms (with students wearing masks, as well as the teachers, of course) or if needed be in repurposed venues, like football stadiums (leaving plenty of space between students).

Exactly what you’re proposing just isn’t feasible, because of the sheer numbers. I see American posters on reddit complain about having to do a handful of finals at the end of high-school, and the SAT/etc as well, which I understand is optional.

“In my day...” (wow I’m old... this was only about 12 years ago) my sixth-form had about 1,300 students (650 in yr12/L6, 650 in yr13/U6). Most L6 students did 5 AS-level subjects and 4 A2 subjects. Most subjects are then comprised of modules (e.g. In mathematics: Pure P1/P2/etc, Stats S1/S2/S3/etc, Mechanics M1/M2/etc, Decision/Discrete D1/D2/etc), and each module has its exam at the end of the term/trimester.

In my case, I took 5 subjects at AS-level (L6) and had no less than 8 exams in the May-June of my first year. Multiply that by 1,300 - with probably over 100 different exams. That’s almost 11,000 Covid-safe exam-sittings that need to be arranged.

Social-distancing regs mean that you need four times the floor-space for an exam room than previously (doubling distance from 3 feet to 6 feet in both directions). Doing exams outside on a field wouldn’t work: inclement weather and even a gentle breeze and writing on paper difficult and distracting. Doing it indoors means you’ll not only fill your sports-halls and cafeterias (which we did every year anyway) and need to spill-over into smaller classrooms - which means you need many more exam invigilators.

...and invigilators, in my experience, tended to be older people (60s-70s) - often recent retiree teachers. The exact same people who are quite legitimately fearing for their life over Covid so we can’t blame them for choosing to stay home.

...so we have a 2-month long period where schools and colleges need 4x the space and with far fewer authorised staff to oversee it.

Some schools will be able to handle it, others won’t. If it’s a combination secondary-school + sixth-form then they’ll also need to handle GCSE exams for the yr11 kids and SATs (unrelated to the US SAT exam) for the kids in yr9. Additionally schools also have “mocks” for yr10 (mock-GCSEs, but they still count towards your score in yr11). There may also be additional testing done for other years at the county-level. So that’s another few thousand exam sittings to add to that. My secondary-school sent the Yr7 and yr8 kids home for a week if they were overloaded with handling exams for so many. So if the LEA/exam-boards were to press-on with the exams then that’s unfair to the kids at schools that don’t have the capacity.

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Grading “by algorithm” - especially when that algorithm isn’t public - nor probably even we’ll-understood by the MPs in-charge - is a bad idea, yes. But I can’t think of a workable alternative: people’s lives should not depend on the outcome of exams - but we can’t trust teachers own subjective grading of their own students to be necessarily and sufficiently objective enough. There’s no economically-viable solution to this problem - even without a pandemic going on.

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Now that I think about it - I suppose one option would be still do in-person exams, but only do the core/essential exams for the most important course modules and use that as the basis for university admissions - so if this pandemic happened 12 years ago I’d only sit the P1/P2/P3/etc exams for mathematics and disregard Mechanics/Statistics/Discrete - ditto for physics, and so on. So the exam load would drop from my estimate of 11,000 to maybe 7,000-ish - I don’t think that would be small enough to manage still)