Skip to main content

A discredited exam system?

The revelations in the Daily Telegraph about improper practice at examination meetings raise a number of questions. Firstly, let's not pretend that there is anything new in individual examiners overstepping the mark at meetings when advising teachers about how to get the best marks in GCSE and GCE exams. Off the cuff comments about the ease of exams or advice to teachers about what to teach or emphasise may be too careless, but are not necessarily symptomatic of a deeper issue. Examiners have been saying this kind of thing for years. They are nearly all practising or former teachers, so their inclination is to support colleagues as far as possible. As exam boards have become less aloof and keen to offer better customer service, examiners will occasionally overdo it. They are only human.

No, the real issue here is the one which other commentators and teachers have raised: the commercialisation of the exam system. Exam boards are competing for schools' business and there is serious money involved. Boards sponsor text books which teach to their syllabus and teachers shop around to be with the board which not only has the most suitable specification, but which also gives the most generous grades. You only have to trawl the professional forums for a while to find teachers talking of switching boards for better grades.

Despite the efforts of Ofqual and the JQC (Joint Qualification Council) there are issues about the relative value of grades from board to board. That's not to say that the exam boards are deliberately lowering standards, but they do give increasing levels of support to teachers as part of their service and with the aim of keeping them as loyal customers. Yes, customers.

There is a way of taking away the profit motive from the boards and to clean up what is a somewhat discredited system. We could have one single examination board offering a range of specifications to ensure the choice which teachers rightly value. I believe it is desirable that not every A-Level French student should study the same prescribed list of authors or topics. So why not allow the one board to offer, say, three alternative specifications? One could offer a prescribed list of texts or topics (à la WJEC), another could allow teachers more freedom (like AQA or Edexcel) and a third might offer a specification more weighted to language with less cultural content.

The government and Ofqual are right to be looking at this issue. It is not new, but the Telegraph story, albeit a little over-heated, may bring it into sharper focus.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,