I explain to him that the essay seemed to me to be one of the most pretentious pieces of crap that I'd ever read That it communicated nothing. That it read like the work of a pretentious teenager, heady on some ill-digested diet of Sartre, Husserl and others. It's heroic of us to have done the GCSE at all."And what did he think about the result?"It's a disgrace," they both reply, laughing. "Agreeing to do it may have been a scatological slip in the first place," adds Jake.

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But you introduce rogue elements, of course..."So you don't learn to do anything?"Learn?!" sneers Jake "I think we can do anything And the idea of personal development is ridiculous anyway Art's a faux-narcissistic game Our work is all one anyway - like manure. Jake is glib, assured, half-smiling.We returned to the question of what the GCSE tested. "An ability to make work of very little artistic merit," he replies. "You subordinate yourself to the process to produce certain bodies of work within certain set parameters. "The kids seemed so alien, so empty," says Dinos, blinking heavily. "There was so much silence."Suddenly, Jake bounces in, smiling coyly, portfolio in one hand, army camouflage jacket hanging off his arm The atmosphere changes Dinos was grave, tentative, almost apologetic on his own. The most taxing part of the course had been the 10- hour classroom-based exam trapped in a room with all those teenagers.

(The Chapmans introduced spy cameras into the exam, and filmed themselves working.) The whole experience of being in that room had been traumatic, though. It was a testing of procedures and competencies according to rules devised by the educational establishment..."What did they in fact have to "do" though?"The theme of the written paper was `discovery'. We could work in two or three dimensions, make anything we wanted - collage, painting, drawing, prints - and use any materials we liked..." These materials included human hair and cornflakes. Dinos is neither so glib nor so fast-talking as Jake."We didn't try very hard, much less hard than first time around," he tells me, making it all sound fairly remote and faintly ridiculous "In fact, we did two years' coursework in two weeks. More important though, what we were doing there had nothing to do with the art world. This time they both got a "B". There's only Dinos here to do the explaining at the moment because Jake's gone off to fetch the portfolio with the work. Up the stairs we go, to the first-floor studio where art's made.