Making a Grade: Victorian Examinations and the Rise of Standardized Testing by James Elwick (review)

Standardization is what makes "testing powerful" (p. 3), states James Elwick at the outset of this book. Tests are designed in a way that allows people in different places to take them and those administering them to trust the results, even if few people actually enjoy the process of marking them. This book covers "an age of examinations" (p. 25), as Gladstone (who famously took a double starred First at Oxford) described it in 1862, repertoires of testing now common having developed in Britain between 1850 and 1900. By the 1880s, testing reached an industrial scale and its popularity had spread beyond Britain. By the end of the century, specialists throughout the West could draw up questions, ship them to various locations where they would be answered by candidates under nearly identical conditions, before they would be returned to experts who marked them according to the latest accepted knowledge. Together, these methods enabled examiners to identify individuals best qualified to undertake work in the professions.

Testing is an understudied chapter in studies of governmentality. Despite some resistance, most educators engaged with the challenge of what and how to learn. Improving achievement was good for British competitiveness, not to mention the military, which embraced exams earlier than the civil service. Testing helped the professions discover hidden talent at a time that beliefs in meritocracy and statistics increased. It also promised to reform schooling and institute a free trade in education. British students, as this suggests, were self-reliant, compared to their continental counterparts, and examinations tested for both knowledge and morality, given that perseverance and industry reputedly ensured success. Personal testimonies were thus replaced with certificates, a new currency of competence, and paper exams replaced oral ones, not least because they were easier to administer. Order had seemingly been imposed on learning, despite some cheating, and, as importantly, testing put additional money in the pockets of examiners and teachers, who were paid by results. Elwick's book outlines this "'eco-system' of examinations" (p. 20), describing how they worked, providing both the examiners' and examinees' perspectives.

In terms of medicine, Elwick recognizes the importance of exams to those entering the medical profession. Chapter 6 reveals how the new provincial medical schools were tied to London by the railways and affiliated with the University of London, whose exams certified provincial students as competent. In the 1830s, Lyon Playfair, a medical graduate from University College London, warned about the economic consequences of neglecting what we now call the STEM subjects. At the start of the nineteenth century, medical students appeared before the examination boards of institutions, such as the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS), where they were tested by way of an oral examination. Examiners might linger on certain aspects of questions or interrogate the son of a favored member less rigorously. Under the new standardized regime, handwriting became more important than elocution, and paper scripts separated answers from the physical and personal context of the oral examination. Diversity of practice naturally continued, but all students had to demonstrate reliable evidence of attainment. Tests might be taken anywhere, and the public appeared to trust the "thin description" of exam results, in contrast to the "thick description" formerly offered by testimonials (p. 136). Eventually, the RCS accepted the new methods, adopting paper examinations in 1860. Uniformity was thus secured in medicine, as in other fields, and exam results appeared the best indication of competence, of both staff and students.

Under the new system, groups previously seen as incommensurable, such as women and those of low social status, were better able to compete. In a final chapter, Elwick demonstrates how examinations were used by excluded groups as "wedges with which to pry open" schools (p. 179). Initially, the thought of women attending examinations provoked panic, largely because of the potential for rigorous examinations to cause physical harm to women. Paper credentials had become important in...