New-style RHS Exams
The Background
A few years ago, the government revised how national exams worked and produced a new
framework (QCF).
The RHS, which had previously worked independently as an exam board, signed up to this,
hoping that their examinations would now be closer in level and rigour to some of the other
Vocational boards' qualifications - for years people had agreed that RHS exams were harder
and pitched at a higher level than their notional counterparts in full-time horticulture. So RHS
students worked harder and studied more, but came out with the same level of qualifications.
The new framework imposed changes:

Instead of long papers covering a range of topics, and choices of topic so you could
play to your strengths and miss out your weaker areas, in the interests of fairness
all parts of the published syllabus now have to be examined.

The syllabus itself has to be divided into chunks, modules of learning that stand alone
so that you can concentrate on passing this area before moving on to the next. So each
chunk has to be assessed - units have to have their own exams, otherwise you might
take one long exam for the Certificate, do well in three units and fail in one and have
to retake the complete exam without any credit for what you passed.

Retakes are more common, with this - because with the old exams on groups of units,
there could be an 'averaging out' of one bad area against three good, that meant you
got an OK pass instead of three commendations and a failure.
How does this affect RHS students?
First, I'm going to make a sweeping generalisation and divide 'most' ( please remember this is
'most') students taking the exams into three groups, depending on how they come into
horticulture.
1. A lot of students come to the RHS courses after studying other subjects at university or for
careers, at 'higher' levels of study where for example they have to think around a topic, and
produce two or three coherent answers backed by references to reading, in two or three hours.
Study at this level expects them to have assimilated facts, and then taken time to develop
arguments using these.
2. Other people come to RHS courses from a different path - they gave up taking exams after
school convinced them they didn't like studying, and couldn't do exams, and went out into
more practical fields of work. Sometimes it has been many years since they sat at a desk and
heard those traumatic words ' you can start writing now'. They have masses of real, practical
knowledge of horticulture, but putting it onto paper is a challenge.
3. The third category is very much smaller – young people coming straight from school, who
are used to this ‘bite-sized’ style of examination and fairly familiar with how they are
expected to study for them.
The RHS exams start at level 2, notionally GCSE. For the first two groups, GCSE is a long
time ago, (apart for those who are suffering it again, through their own children) and the new
type of exam isn’t what either of these groups is at ease with.
The exams are too short to write essays and develop topics – they demand facts and
information but these have to be relevant, and that isn’t always easy to pick out in only five
minutes a question. There’s no slack for writing ‘around’ at level 2, but equally the type of
question being asked is still quite challenging to ‘deconstruct’ and then answer. Sometimes
the question’s angle seems odd, compared to the way on which you’ve learned the topic.
Whether you are unused to exams, or used to three-hour papers and thinking time, this rush to
cram your thoughts onto paper is not what you expect – a level 2 shouldn’t be so demanding!
And it shouldn’t be possible to fail when you know so much, and have passed many (and
much higher level) exams!
Is this format going to last?
These exam formats aren’t set in stone. The RHS extended the exam-time after the first
exams took place - when it was clear that although trials showed the exams could be done in
the time, most students couldn’t get their ideas down on paper that fast. Assessing
knowledge and understanding at this level is difficult. At level 2, some other vocational
awarding bodies use multiple choice for their testing of ‘underpinning knowledge’, but that
really isn’t a path that the RHS would want to go down with its history of quality and rigour.
So there may be changes over time to the exam format; government fashion swings to and fro
over ‘summative’ testing at the end of study, and ‘bite-size’ learning. But at the moment we
have to work with the fact that the RHS exams expect rapid answers on all topics of each
unit, and four short exams in one day not one long exam.