From replacement to reform: why higher education should stop fighting exams and start making them formative

For decades, influential voices within the formative assessment tradition have positioned exams as the primary obstacle to quality learning in higher education, and reform agendas from Bologna onwards have urged faculty to diversify away from them. This position paper argues that the strategy has failed: evidence from several countries shows that exam-centred assessment remains dominant and is not declining. Rather than continuing to advocate replacement, the paper proposes adding formative functions to the exams faculty already use. It identifies a conceptual error in the reform discourse, the conflation of assessment format with assessment purpose, and shows that the architects of formative assessment never intended to exclude exams from formative practice. The argument draws on the testing effect literature, where meta-analytic effect sizes range from 0.50 to 0.61. Five evidence-based practices are proposed: two-stage exams, exam wrappers, predictive self-assessment, cumulative design, and ungraded diagnostic midterms. A further section considers what generative artificial intelligence changes, and what it does not. The paper calls for a redirection of research, policy, and professional development effort.