5/17/2008 8:58:00 AM
Leader; FT 17 May
“The exam board ate my A-grade.” A variant on the age-old excuse involving dogs and homework is now available to UK school pupils, courtesy of Ofqual. Kathleen Tattersall, who chairs the new watchdog intended to enhance confidence in national tests, warned this week that people’s expectations of accuracy in marking were too high, and that it was “simplistic” to expect the system to be perfect. Such brazen shifting of responsibility is, in its way, rather splendid. If only students could similarly shape discussion of their performance. “It would be naive for the examiner to expect me to get this answer absolutely right,” for example, or: “There is nothing intrinsically wrong if I am not completely consistent.” Ms Tattersall scores some marks for honesty. While multiple choice answers are straightforwardly right or wrong, markers’ views of how well candidates’ essays address the question are bound to vary according to individual judgment, even within set guidelines. In other ways, she fails badly. Her comments undermine trust in the marking system just as more than 1m students are preparing for GCSEs and A-levels. This suggests a sense of timing worse than that of a student who spends the entire exam on just one question. She also draws attention to an important issue she does not answer – an approach that rarely impresses examiners. If the UK exam system cannot be expected to be entirely accurate, why is there the spurious precision of several different grades across middle bands of achievement at the same time as the system fails to differentiate amongst the very brightest? Almost one in five GCSE grades awarded last year were A* or A. The current system risks achieving the worst of all worlds: presenting results that are not believed, and failing to deliver consistency while stifling originality. Telling the public to expect less will not fix it. If the official launch of Ofqual were an exam module, Ms Tattersall would do well to sit a retake. FT
Curriculum / Quality Assurance
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