Ken Boston was bullish about the power of technology to transform the educational experience of millions of pupils. “On-screen assessment will shortly touch the life of every learner in this country,” predicted Boston, at the time chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, in a speech at London’s Royal Festival Hall, setting out his organisation’s “blueprint” for the use of technology in exams.

But that was back in 2004, and few experts would say that he has been proved right. In fact, five years on, none of the predictions Boston made on that day has turned out to be correct.

Sceptics, then, might have let out a weary sigh at the Guardian’s revelation last week that Simon Lebus, chief executive of Cambridge Assessment, a department of Cambridge University and the umbrella organisation for exam boards including OCR, was offering a similar promise: that traditional pen-and-paper exams could be obsolete in the next 10 to 15 years, to be replaced by computerised testing. For many in this field, the big question has been why, given that technological change has happened quickly in so many other areas of life, the pace of reform in this area means that, for most pupils, taking exams still means scribbling on paper.