Most history teachers will, at some point, recognise the tension between teaching an engaging history course while at the same time meeting the requirements of an exam specification. Mark Fowle and Ben Egelnick reflect here on how they approached teaching a formal requirement of an exam specification. Rather than see "controlled assessment" in a narrow sense, they argue for a wider interpretation of controlled assessment tasks that allow for sophisticated historical investigation. In doing so, they raise concerns about what might be lost if controlled assessment disappears from exam specifications in future years.