1. Schools are not equal. It's not fair to compare students when they usually have no choice over their teachers. 2. Exams cover an arbitrary syllabus controlled by undemocratic exam boards. 3. Topics are chosen by exam boards that can be examined not by importance. 4. Students who perform poorly under stress of exam conditions are punished for it. 5. Exams serve no real purpose. Children are not chickens being graded for sale. They're at best a weak signal of aptitude.

I would much prefer exams to serve as a prerequisite of sitting a future course rather than an assessment at the end. That way teachers can actually teach rather than continuously repeat the same content.

Reality is whitelisting can't work as you'll simply break websites. This has been my experience at several schools now. Websites may or may not load. And even if they do, they rarely work properly.

Irony is, students are clever enough to realise you can use translate websites to load anything with translation from English to English. No blocking at all!

Many schools here focus on such tricks (nix the tricks was a great book focusing on such things) as schools here are judged on pass/fail rates.

In general, exams are an excellent way to assess students en masse at their ability to remember similar problems but not inherent problem solving techniques. The latter I've found is possible to teach 1to1 but far harder with a class of varying abilities.