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In my first weeks as director of the Cambridge International School Bratislava, I did what any new school leader does: I walked the corridors.

And almost every classroom I passed looked identical.

Rows of students facing the front. Textbooks open. Everyone writing. The teacher at the board, explaining, instructing. And I felt strangely unsettled by it - it felt like a school from a different era.

Not unhappy. Not failing. The students were engaged, the teachers were committed and the results were respectable.

An endless cycle of exams

But there was a particular quality to the silence in those rooms; the silence of students who knew exactly what was expected of them and were diligently producing it. Nobody was arguing.

Nobody was presenting. Nobody was on their feet. Nothing was happening that could not be captured in writing and marked with a pen.

I started asking questions. Why do lessons look like this?

The answer, in various forms, was always the same. The Slovak state required students to take six formal graded assessments across the year in each subject, and written exams had always been the way this had been measured.

As such, everything flowed in that direction: lessons that prepared students for the endless cycle of written exams across the year, all students demonstrating they could write answers to questions under time pressure.

Six times a year we called that assessment. The system was not just permitting this - it was actively encouraging it. The assessment tail was wagging the entire educational dog.

Then I read the rules myself.

They said that, actually, the state requires a minimum of four graded assessments per year per subject. It does not specify written tests. It does not specify any format at all. It just requires four grades, recorded and submitted.

Clearly, we could change things while meeting our administrative duties.

New forms of assessment

From this academic year, teachers will submit four grades per subject to the state but at least two of those four must come from a presentation or a project rather than a written test.

The reaction to this change was, from some teachers, predictable. Assessment through presentations requires different planning, different marking criteria, different thinking.

Teachers who have built their practice around written tests over years do not immediately welcome being asked to rethink half of it. I understood that. I also held the line, and my new leadership team was on board with me.

The conversations that followed created interesting debate and got people thinking about the purpose and meaning of assessment.

When you ask a teacher to grade a student through a presentation rather than a paper, you force a different question for both the teacher and the student: not “What can this student remember under timed pressure?” but “How can this student articulate their learning and respond to questions?”

Skills needed for the modern world

These two things require different skills and approaches.

A student who writes a competent essay about the causes of the First World War has shown you something.

A student who stands up and presents an argument about those causes to a room of peers, fields questions that they did not anticipate and holds the thread of their thinking under the pressure of an audience has shown you something considerably more.

The second student has demonstrated that they can think, not just remember. Communicate, not just produce. Perform under the specific kind of pressure that life outside school will replicate.

Aristotle called this practical wisdom, the capacity to act well in the world rather than merely to know things about it.

It is what oral examination was always designed to test. And in 2026, with AI able to generate a plausible written response to almost any question a student is likely to face, it will be increasingly easy to demonstrate knowledge on paper without possessing it at all.

It seems like a reasonable moment to ask whether the written test should ever have been the chosen medium of final assessment.

The system does not know or care whether the grades submitted came from a written test or a presentation. It records the number. The state, parents and students receive it, and the learners’ report reflects it.

What changes is the value we put on that number and how it is acquired, and the skills we want to teach our students to prepare them adequately for the world after school.

Wayne Johnson is director/CEO of Cambridge International School Bratislava