Re: Oh, please...
Yeah, it's like asking someone to do a Geography exam in a hall on paper instead of, say, climbing Mount Everest.
Or a Media Studies exam in a school hall rather than, say, live on the BBC.
Or a French exam in France.
Examinations DO NOT TEST your real-world ability level. That's not what they are supposed to do, are designed to do, or have ever done. They test your foundation knowledge in the subject you've chosen, in a controlled environment.
If you want to know if a guy can program in a team, you put him in a team of programmers. You don't expect him to have GCSE Collaborative IT Coding. GCSEs are literally baby qualifications. They assess your ability to learn and retain information, and eligibility for A-Levels, which themselves do the same and test your eligibility for a degree course, which themselves don't qualify you to walk into Microsoft and tell them they're doing it all wrong or that they should give you a job developing code for life support systems.
You sadly misunderstand such qualifications (and even MCSA, Cisco and A+ etc.) if you think otherwise.
There is literally no point having the people paid by the success of their students to assess their students. There is literally no sensible way to have an external unrelated agency test the capabilities of a student within a handful of hours on an exam they can Google the answers to without individually assessing each student by a qualified person for that time (and longer). Both are an absolute waste of time and money and cheating the younger generations.
So what you have are exams which test base-knowledge in a written exam - even practicals are a waste if the science teacher has scope to literally just make up any grade they like and say they didn't help you when they did. The same way you have written exams for Food Technology, Customer Service and... yes... IT.
You think they're assessing your capability to perform the job. They're not. Even job interviews don't/can't do that. You certainly can't do it en masse for an entire cohort of students nationwide within a 2 hour window for that subject. What you do is test base knowledge retained in their head, and then let that lead them to ever-more difficult-and-expensive base-knowledge tests until you get to the point where only someone well-versed in the subject stands a chance of tackling the problem (e.g. university / college degree). Then you unleash them on the workplace to see if they sink or swim in "real life".
I'm a mathematician and a computer scientist, by degree. That was ALL done on paper with one minimal programming course in my degree. I actually used more maths in my CS side, and more CS in my maths side! Literally! That didn't get me a job - it couldn't. But it proves I can learn and continue to learn, and learn difficult and boring things, and that I enjoy learning. Then the workplace takes a chance on me and ends up finding out if I can do the job for real.
You desperately misunderstand the whole academic system if you don't get that. Every kid out there now has a hairdressing or bricklaying GCSE. Trust me that you only want maybe 1% - if that - of them to do those things for you. A GCSE is almost a certificate of participation more than anything.