{"id":471,"date":"2018-03-25T18:18:57","date_gmt":"2018-03-25T17:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hilarymoriarty.co.uk\/blog\/?p=471"},"modified":"2018-03-25T18:18:57","modified_gmt":"2018-03-25T17:18:57","slug":"well-what-do-you-know-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/?p=471","title":{"rendered":"Well, what do you know?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Does everything have a right and wrong answer? Which subjects can’t be tied down to assessment objectives?<\/p>\n\n\n

If spring is here, can exams be far behind? Of course not. The\nacademic and calendar years tick by \u2013 a teacher told me last week that\nby week four of the spring term, they were exactly half way through the\nyear. Where did the time go? How much did we do? Have we done enough? Is\n there time for revision?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u2018Have we done enough?\u2019 is likely to\nproduce a very detailed answer. Teachers \u2013 and students \u2013 today know\nexactly what is expected in terms of \u2018know, understand and can do\u2019 for\nwhatever syllabus of whatever exam they are about to take.  Indeed, I\nrecently heard a science teacher declare that he did not really teach\nGCSE Chemistry any more. He taught OCR Chemistry. He taught a syllabus\nto a particular examination board, and he and his students knew exactly\nwhat he should be teaching and they should be learning in order to\ncollect these marks on these papers \u2013 bingo. What is not to like?<\/p>\n\n\n

You could say this is nothing new. I used to teach A-level English literature, but it was, of course, one syllabus set by one examination board. What a class studied boiled down to a novel, a poet, a play, and Shakespeare. And in my department, each of us made different choices about texts \u2013 often because there were not enough copies for two groups of students to study the same one. Same syllabus, different texts.<\/p>\n\n\n

What I taught\n was very similar to what I had learned in my own A-level years.  I have\n to confess I thought \u2018things are not what they used to be\u2019 because all\nthe books I was teaching seemed easier than the ones I had read in the\nsixth form. A complete tale from Chaucer, two books from Milton\u2019s\nParadise Lost, and Conrad\u2019s The Secret Agent were a real challenge when I\n was 16. By contrast, the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings and Ishiguru\u2019s\nThe Remains of the Day seemed easy meat.<\/p>\n\n\n

But the difference\nbetween my \u2018then\u2019 and most recent \u2018now\u2019 in a classroom was more\nthorough-going than managing a choice of texts with the strengths and\nweaknesses of the candidates in mind. The exams themselves \u2013 at least in\n my country grammar school \u2013 were a completely mysterious land in which\nanything could happen.  A candidate\u2019s only defence was to know the texts\n so well, that the examiner could ask what he liked and you would have\nthe answer in there somewhere, even if you had to root around the memory\n banks to find it.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n

In\n the two-year course, our English teacher set not one single essay task\nfor homework. He said he was spending time preparing lessons, there was\nno time also to mark essays. I remember him as mild rather than\nmilitant, but he may just have been ahead of the game. A primary\nspecialist recently told me that marking eight essays a week from a\nclass was as much as could be asked of a teacher, and the upside of this\n was that in three weeks each child in the class would have had a\nthorough marking of a piece of work.<\/p>\n\n\n

In the classroom, I was an\n\u2018essay-setting\/hours-marking\u2019 kind of teacher. I believed the practice\nof writing about a text helped you to do well in exam conditions. So\nperhaps I was teaching people to pass the exams, as well as teaching\nKing Lear and, by extension, English literature.<\/p>\n\n\n

Hoping to teach\npupils how to pass exams even better, I became an examiner, for various\nboards and at various levels.  It was, at the time, the only way to get\ninto an examiner\u2019s mind, to find out what they would credit and what\nthey would not. It was \u2013 and perhaps still is \u2013 an exhausting exercise,\nbut the best INSET I ever received. I would scurry back to class with\nthe lowdown on how to read a paper, how to get to the point, how to\nanswer the question set, rather than the one you had been hoping for.<\/p>\n\n\n

Requests\n for re-marks in my teaching time were few and far between and seldom\nsuccessful. So I lent my voice to the clamour demanding that students\nhave access to their exam papers after the event should they wish to\nappeal a mark or grade.<\/p>\n\n\n

As a teacher, I thought those returned\npapers were gold dust for anyone about to teach the same syllabus in the\n coming year.  Where did candidates go wrong? What did examiners value?\nHow did they think? And what mistakes were our candidates making which\ncould lose them a grade, cost them a university place, lose them a\ncareer?<\/p>\n\n\n

\u2018The exams themselves \u2013 at least in my\n country grammar school \u2013 were a completely mysterious land in which\nanything could happen.\u2019<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Not small potatoes,\nthen. My conviction was strong enough to get me in print on the front\npage of The Guardian, and from there to the Newsnight studio to argue\nthe case with the examination board\u2019s top man. I am still struck by the\nirony of having our slot in the programme severely cut at the last\nminute \u2013 i.e. as we waited in the studio \u2013 because of a breaking news\nstory: Clinton and Lewinsky. The exams man and I were on air for perhaps\n two minutes, long enough for me to say, \u201cIt\u2019s only right candidates\nshould get their papers back,\u201d and him to reply, sagely, \u201cYou don\u2019t know\n what you have started\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

And sometimes I think he was right. \nAmong other things, I think the openness I wanted to see has led to much\n greater accountability on the part of exam boards, and that ought to be\n a good thing \u2013 yes? But that also takes us in the direction of real\naccountability for each mark, as opposed to what you might call\n\u2018impression marking\u2019. And this way lies a mark scheme which gives credit\n for specifics \u2013 i.e. right answers \u2013 rather than for knowledge of a\ntext and a capacity to weave an argument, which might agree or disagree\nwith a proposition, in response to a question.<\/p>\n\n\n

When the English\ndepartment of which I was a member back in the day saw this coming, we\njoked there would be a time when a GCSE mark would be given for a\nmultiple choice question asking if Macbeth was married to a) Banquo, b) a\n witch or c) Lady Macbeth. We giggled until we realised that really an\nA-grade student would cheerfully write for half an hour about the\npossibility that Lady Macbeth was also a witch, and in this new world\nwould probably clock no marks at all.<\/p>\n\n\n

English literature, history, the humanities \u2013 these are not the preserve of right or wrong answers. Indeed, for many sixth formers, that was their charm. As a head of sixth form, I came across many students who would embark on A-levels in physics or maths, and stop after a term because, quite literally, they could not get the right answers. These subjects, quite rightly, have no leeway for dispute, or argument, or alternative views of the universe. The humanities offer freedom to manoeuvre, to think, to argue, to propose, to speculate.\u00a0 Those things should be encouraged even in the exams. To tie everything down with an assessment objective \u2013 tick, tick \u2013\u00a0 is like taking a hammer to a Faberg\u00e9 egg.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

This post first appeared in IE-Today on 4 March 2018<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does everything have a right and wrong answer? Which subjects can’t be tied down to assessment objectives? If spring is here, can exams be far behind? Of course not. The academic and calendar years tick by \u2013 a teacher told me last week that by week four of the spring term, they were exactly half\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[35,208],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ie-today","tag-assessment","tag-syllabus"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/j-moriarty.co.uk\/hilarymoriarty\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}