In Yes, Minister (a vastly less sweary antecedent of The Thick of It) the senior civil servant Sir Humphrey tells the Minister: “If you're going to do this damn silly thing, don't do it in this damn silly way”.
This is relevant because of
the news that the assessment resources that are due to be released around
Easter won’t just be sent to schools, or made available only via secure
websites, but will be published openly for everyone to access. Everyone.
That’s teachers, students, parents, tutors. Everyone.
Here I explain why I think
this is a bad idea.
Exam papers have never been
wholly secure. There has always been the
chance that an exam cupboard will be broken into, that a parcel will be
mis-delivered, that a paper will be photographed before it should have been
opened. One year a maths exam was replaced at short notice by an alternative
version. Very occasionally a primary
school head teacher has been found guilty of malpractice for instructing pupils
to ‘look again’ at wrong answers. These
situations were thankfully few and far between.
Back when the TES forum was
the main social media used by teachers, every summer teachers would post
reminders to others not to discuss the content of exam papers on the day of
release, even after the exam had finished in this country, because those same
papers might be sat at different times around the world.
This summer the exam boards
have been instructed to produce assessment materials, including questions, mark
schemes, model answers and grade boundaries.
It is not clear to me (at the time of writing) whether it is just the
questions that will be published, or whether the other materials will be
available to students as well.
According to TES: An Ofqual
spokesperson said: "We asked in our
joint consultation with the DfE: “To what extent do you agree or disagree that
exam boards should publish all of their papers shortly before the assessments
in order to manage the risk of some students being advantaged through papers
being leaked?. 66 per cent of respondents either agreed
or strongly agreed with this proposal”
This question is
flawed. In my response to the
consultation (one out of 100,000 that they received), I complained that the
question was unclear. If ‘publish’ meant
‘made available to schools’ and if the emphasis was on ‘shortly’, then this was
sensible. If ‘publish’ meant the damn
silly thing they are now proposing to do (making it available to the whole world),
then it wasn’t sensible. How can Ofqual
tell in which way the other 99,999 respondents interpreted the question?
The problems with releasing
the questions to Uncle Tom Cobley and all:
·
Model answers
will appear on The Student Room, older students, parents and others will record
perfect versions of the questions and these will be available on YouTube.
·
Students who
have a private tutor, or an older sibling who is studying that subject at a
higher level, or whose parents are able to help will receive disproportionate
levels of support.
·
Students will
focus on learning these questions to the exclusion of learning anything related
to their subjects.
But surely it is better to
have transparency rather than to know that the first few students to sit the
questions will then tell their friends in other schools and that it will advantage
them? Well no it won’t. Earlier I mentioned the appeal not to reveal questions
that was posted on the TES forum each year.
This year, students could be asked not to share questions,
education-related websites could remove posts that refer to exam questions, etc. The big thing is that it would be much harder
for students to learn answers, because their friends would have sat only a
small subset of the questions, it would be difficult to collate a complete set
of questions, and each school is likely to use a different set of questions
(albeit with overlap between them). If
they are all published to everyone and are all fully available then it will be much
easier to learn the answers.
And the worst thing? It will be in the interests of the school
to use these flawed materials.
I am so pleased not to be a
Head of Department and not to be in the situation of having to make a decision
about which assessment questions to use.
If I were to choose to use questions I have selected, taken from different
past papers, from different exam boards, over a number of years, then I could
be fairly sure the questions will be unfamiliar to all of the students.
If I wanted my students to
get the grades they need for university, or to achieve extremely highly at
GCSE, I would use these flawed papers, knowing that they would give me inflated
scores that the officially-provided grade boundaries would translate into high
grades. I would then have evidence to demonstrate
that the students deserve the highly suspect grades they would be receiving.
Where would this leave me and
my personal integrity? The second course
of action isn’t cheating, isn’t bending the rules, but rather is using the materials
that have specifically been provided by the exam boards, on the instructions of
Ofqual. Were I _not_ to use these I
would disadvantage my students, would create more work for me and my department,
all the while knowing that in other schools and colleges the students are using
these freely-available papers. This
leads to another ‘what if’. If I were a
parent or student then I would be keen to know why my friends from other
schools are being assessed using questions that are in the public domain, while
my school had decided not to do this.
Surely I’m overselling
this? Surely it won’t happen? Anecdotes suggest it will. I have seen Yr 11s submit fantastic past
papers, only to discover after a disastrous mock exam that the student had been
assisted on a regular basis by their brother.
A memorable A-level student completed the past paper he had been set for
homework by copying out the mark scheme, including the instructions to the
examiners such as the symbols to say that answers could be rounded off, and
giving alternative methods and answers. I
know of schools where the students do several papers as part of their mock exams
and where they now give papers from different years because of the occasion
where students used Google after paper 1 to find out the year of the paper and
then downloaded and learned the answers to paper 2 from the same year, leading
to a massive increase in the results for paper 2. These are all genuine examples of the lengths
pupils have gone to in practice papers and mock exams. Ofqual will be publishing the _actual
questions_ that students will be assessed on.
Clearly many students will learn/practise them.
And, even if you aren’t
convinced by this, the DfE acknowledges that it will happen. According to Schoolsweek:
Rebekah
Edgar, the DfE’s deputy director for 2021 Qualifications, said the materials
would also be published openly after Easter so “students and others can access
them”.
She added that the publication was being delayed
until after Easter “to try and avoid students sort of cramming with them over
the holidays which we didn’t think was a healthy thing we wanted to encourage”.
I
suggest they will still be cramming, but will need to pace themselves and catch
up on sleep over Easter to allow them to do when the papers are published.
I accept that this system is going to be used in the summer: it’s too late to come up with anything different now. Maybe it’s not too late to change this decision about who the papers will be released to. So I say to Ofqual, the DfE, and anyone else who will listen: “If you're going to do this damn silly thing, don't do it in this damn silly way”.
Notes:
https://www.tes.com/news/gcses-2021-car-crash-plan-share-test-materials
