One of England’s major exam boards is planning to “crowd-source” questions from teachers to use in its GCSE and A level exam papers, TES can reveal.

The idea being developed by Cambridge Assessment, which owns the OCR board, involves asking teachers to submit questions that have stretched and challenged their pupils in lessons and improved teachers’ understanding of what has been learned.

The board hopes to receive “millions” of questions and says the best of these could then be used for GCSE and A-level exam papers.

Tim Oates, research director at Cambridge Assessment, told TES: “Really interesting questions which - put to children - encourage them to think hard, to integrate things, to understand things and challenge their ideas a bit, are really important.

“We don’t think we should necessarily just commission those through asking a limited number of people.

“We want to know what questions teachers ask in the classroom and whether they were good for unlocking that bit of thinking or revealed that misconception.”

He said the plans could result in crowd-sourced questions appearing on actual GCSE and A-level exam papers within the next three to five years.

Questions would have to go through “technical, tough and expensive” quality assurance processes before being used for a real exam to make sure they were up to standard.

But Mr Oates said using classroom questions as the basis for exam papers “would more seamlessly integrate assessment and learning”.  “It’s a very new idea and we’re quite excited by it,” he said.

‘A bank of questions for teachers’

The questions submitted by teachers would also be made available to other teachers online through a question bank, so that they could be used in the classroom.

School leaders and assessment experts have welcomed the idea of an easily accessible bank of questions for teachers.

But they are concerned that the crowd-sourced exam questions could give some pupils an unfair advantage.

“The only potential weakness I can see in the system is, if I’m sending in questions and using the same questions in preparation for the examination, if they then turn up on the exam paper it advantages those youngsters because they’re seeing a question they’re familiar with,” said Malcolm Trobe, interim general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders union.

“You’re going to have to find a way of overcoming that.”

But Mr Oates said schools already guessed exam questions and prepared pupils for likely questions using past papers.

He said the crowd-sourced approach would not create unfairness because there would be so many questions in the pool that teachers would have little incentive to drill pupils for any particular question. He added that no exam paper would be made up entirely of crowd-sourced questions.

OCR and Cambridge Assessment are already working on a project to crowd-source questions from computing teachers, which will be available to other teachers to use in classroom-based assessments.

Now Mr Oates says the plan is to extend the crowd-sourcing approach to other subjects and to formal assessment.

He said exams were “not trying to trip children up” and that the purpose of exam preparation was to make sure pupils learned the things the exam would focus on.

“It’s the case now that certain questions advantage certain kids because they’ve thought about the questions more than others, and they’ve spent particular time on it,” he said.

Plans are at an early stage of development and would need to be approved by the exams regulator Ofqual in order to go ahead. However, Mr Oates said: “I can see within three to five years’ time we might be able to start doing some work [with crowd-sourced questions] in formal examinations.”

But Professor Alan Smithers, an assessment expert from the University of Buckingham, warned that some schools might use the crowd-sourced questions to game the system.

“The risk is that some schools begin to dominate the process [of submitting questions] and they’re probably the schools who do well at the moment and are very aware of the examinations game and will play it to their advantage,” he said. 

“Never discount the ingenuity of schools when it comes to examinations; their futures depend on it.

“Other schools will think they’re too busy and have other things to do than have their brains picked. So [OCR] needs to be proactive and get to the schools that might not be enthusiastic about sending their ideas.”

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