Exam vs Coursework: How Different Countries Weigh Them

England has moved GCSEs sharply away from coursework, so that most subjects are now assessed almost entirely by final written exams, with non-exam assessment surviving mainly in practical subjects. Many other systems — including the Netherlands, the International Baccalaureate and the US — still build a substantial share of a student's final result from work done and assessed across the year. Each approach trades comparability against breadth of what gets tested, and neither is simply "better."

If you grew up sitting coursework yourself, or you're comparing notes with a friend whose child is at an IB school, the near-total shift to exams in today's GCSEs can be genuinely surprising. It's a deliberate policy choice, and looking at how other countries strike the same balance helps explain what that choice actually trades away.

What changed in England

GCSEs reformed between roughly 2015 and 2018 (with A-levels reformed on a similar timetable) moved the great majority of subjects to being assessed entirely, or almost entirely, through final exams sat at the end of the two-year course, rather than through a mix of coursework completed along the way and a final exam. The Department for Education's GCSE subject content documents set out, subject by subject, how much (if any) non-exam assessment — now generally called NEA — remains. It survives mainly where a written exam genuinely cannot test the skill in question: practical work in art and design, drama and music performance, PE practical ability, and the practical endorsement in the sciences (which is reported separately and doesn't usually count towards the overall grade).

The policy reasoning, as set out through the reform process overseen by Ofqual, centred on a few consistent concerns: that coursework was hard to guarantee as the student's own unaided work, that marking standards for coursework varied more between schools than exam marking did, and that repeated, modular coursework deadlines added workload without a clear assessment benefit compared with a single, secure, externally-marked final exam.

The Netherlands: two exams, blended together

Dutch secondary education splits a student's final result in most subjects between two components, described clearly by DUO, the Dutch education executive agency:

• The schoolexamen (school exam) — a series of assessments set and marked by the student's own teachers across the final years of school, often including practical work, oral components and internally-set tests.
• The centraal examen (central exam) — a single national written exam, set centrally and sat on the same day by all students taking that subject nationwide.

A student's final grade in most subjects is typically an average of the two, weighted per subject. This deliberately keeps a school-based, teacher-assessed component alongside a national exam that anchors comparability across the whole country — a structurally different balance from England's near-total move to a single terminal exam.

The IB Diploma: internal assessment as standard

The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, as described in the IB's own assessment guidance, builds internal assessment (IA) into almost every subject — an extended essay, a lab investigation, an oral commentary, a mathematical exploration, or similar, depending on the subject. The work is set to an IB-wide task type, completed by the student, marked first by their own teacher, and then externally moderated: the IB reviews a sample of each teacher's marking against the same criteria used worldwide, and adjusts a teacher's marks up or down if they're found to be out of line. This moderation step is the IB's answer to the "can coursework marking be trusted" problem — rather than removing internally-assessed work, it checks and corrects how consistently it's being marked.

The United States: continuous grading as the backbone

US secondary education has no single national exam board or qualification at all — it is run at state and district level, and as the US Department of Education's overview of state assessment makes clear, standardised state tests exist but generally sit alongside, rather than replacing, a student's ongoing course grades. A student's transcript — the accumulated grades a teacher assigns across every course, every semester, feeding into an overall GPA (grade point average) — is typically what colleges weigh most heavily in admissions, alongside separate standardised tests some universities use. This makes the American system, structurally, the most coursework-and-continuous-assessment-led of the four discussed here: there is no single terminal exam whose result defines a subject the way a GCSE or A-level paper does.

Germany: coursework built directly into the final grade

Germany's Abitur — the school-leaving qualification that determines university eligibility — takes a fourth, distinct approach: rather than treating coursework as a separate component alongside a final exam, it folds continuous assessment from the final two years of upper secondary school (the Oberstufe) directly into the overall Abitur result, combined with grades from the final written and oral Abitur examinations. Because Germany's 16 federal states each administer their own school system, with content and grading coordinated at national level through the Kultusministerkonferenz (the standing conference of state education ministers) rather than a single UK-style regulator, the exact weighting details can vary by state — but the underlying principle, that the final two years of ordinary schoolwork formally count towards the leaving qualification rather than being separate from it, holds nationally. This is a different design again from the Netherlands' two-exam split or the IB's internal-assessment-plus-moderation model: Germany doesn't moderate coursework marking centrally the way the IB does, relying instead on nationally coordinated standards that individual states implement.

A concrete worked example: GCSE Art and Design

GCSE Art and Design is one of the clearest illustrations of where England kept coursework and why. Because the subject is fundamentally about a body of practical and creative work developed over time — sketchbooks, developing ideas, refining a final piece — a single timed written exam cannot meaningfully assess it, so the qualification remains built almost entirely around non-exam assessment: a portfolio of coursework developed across the course, plus a supervised practical task completed under exam-like conditions but still assessing a made piece of work rather than written answers. This is the same logic driving the Netherlands, IB and German approaches to sustained practical or research work — some skills genuinely cannot be captured by a timed written paper, whichever country's system you're looking at — but England has confined that exception to a narrow list of subjects rather than building continuous assessment into the mainstream GCSE model the way Germany does across the board.

What each approach actually trades off

The takeaway

There is no single right answer to "should this be assessed by exam or coursework" — it depends what you're trying to protect. England's reforms prioritised comparability and reduced the risk of unequal outside help, at the cost of assessing a narrower range of skills through timed exams alone. The Netherlands, the IB and the US each keep a larger continuous-assessment component, accepting more variation in how consistently that work is marked in exchange for testing things — sustained research, practical skill, oral fluency — that a single written paper struggles to capture.