e-assessment (f)or learning

In my last post, just over a month ago (sorry folks, I’ve been a bit busy) I was ambivalent about the news that GCSEs in England are to be replaced by an ‘English Baccalaureate’ and the more general trend towards increasing use of examinations and decreasing use of other methods of summative assessment.

My views have now firmed up a bit – I don’t like it! Yes, I had a very conventional education with lots of exams (O-levels, A-levels and a degree in the 1970s) and I thrived on it. But many didn’t. And does the fact that I was good at exams mean that I was good at everything those exams were supposedly assessing? I rather doubt it.

This brings me to the issue of (lack of) authenticity. There are many skills that are very important in real life that are rather difficult to assess by exam. And of course there are other ways (though perhaps not quite so watertight) to reduce plagiarism – ask questions that expect students to use the internet, referencing their sources; ask questions that expect students to work together, reflecting on the process.

I’d like to concentrate on the difficulty of assessing investigative science by exam. At a meeting yesterday, Brian Whalley highlighted the difficulty in assessing field work in this way. It is possible to assess some skills in practical science by exam  – back in the 1970s I did physics practical exams alongside written A-level papers, but these generally just expected you to demonstrate a particular technique that you had practised and practised and practised. There are far more appropriate methods for assessing the sort of investigative science that real scientists do. Please UK government, think carefully before imposing exams in places where they do not belong.

I can’t quite decide what I think of today’s news that, in England at least, GCSEs are to be replaced by an English Baccalaureate. I can see some good points in what is proposed, but I do wish that the Government (indeed, governments of all political hues) would stop messing around with education.

I do know what I think about the hiatus following the apparent tightening of the marking of GCSE papers in the summer. I feel very sorry for those who had expected a Grade C in English, only to be awarded a D. And, again, I wish they would stop messing around (it really doesn’t seem fair that our public examinations – at least in some sense – got easier and are now getting more difficult again). However, the awarding of grades on the basis of assessment is not, and never has been, an exact science. Markers are not consistent; difficult students react in different ways to different exam papers; we all have bad days and good days. So are exams ever fair? No, really and truly, they’re not.

That in itself is  not the real problem – we accept that whether or not one passes one’s driving test on a particular day is largely in the lap of the gods. The cause of the difficulty is the perception that academic exams are reliable and consistent;  that students who get a grade C in one set of circumstances, would also get a grade C on a different day with a different paper and a different person marking it. That’s just not true.