ABSTRACT
Stepping outside a conference centre in the north of England a little while ago I was struck by one of life’s little ironies and it made me smile. I was walking past the offices, according to a large sign in the car park,
of AQA, the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance.1 This organization is the largest of the UK’s three exam boards, responsible for nearly half of all GCSEs and A-levels in the country. That’s 3.5 million exams. As we shall see in chapter 19, the written exam industry as we know it
grew out of Oxford and Cambridge universities in the nineteenth century and quite an industry it has grown into. AQA, for example, although a not-for-profit charity, has an annual turnover of £130 million. American company ETS,2 who were sacked in 2008 for making a bigger farce of the key stage three SATS than they were anyway, waved goodbye to a fiveyear contract worth £156 million. But there exists another, more twenty-first century, AQA too – Any
Questions Answered.3
