SPRING MATHS
  • Home
  • About
    • Meet the team
    • Contact
  • Resources
    • Using Geometry Skills
    • Using Number Skills
    • Using Measuring Skills
  • Useful links
  • Comment

It’s the Silly (eh, I mean Exams) Season again

25/8/2014

2 Comments

 
As this year’s exam season reached its febrile height, we were treated to the headlines declaring that the headmaster of Eton has attacked the public exam system as “archaic” – something virtually everyone working in education’s public sector already knows.

As Michael Young suggests last week in a blog post on the IOE website, what would really make the headlines is a mandate to examine why our anti-educational, anti-collaborative system of examinations has emerged and what might be the alternatives.

“The problem is that the relationships between public examinations, the curriculum (which defines the purposes of education), and the professional work of teachers, have become grossly distorted.” [Michael Young]

Exams seem to have replaced the curriculum in deciding what is taught and how.

What’s really archaic (not to mention divisive) about the current exam system is the testing of young people at 16. Whilst this made sense at a time when exams constituted a certificate of completion at the end of a person’s schooling, now it happens slap bang in the midst of what should be a continual learning journey until 19. This year students beginning education were required to stay in schooling until 17, next year that rises again to 18.

What is needed now is serious debate about how we can shift towards a curriculum-led rather than an examination-led system.

Meanwhile, across the other side of the world, Chinese educators are increasingly uneasy about their ‘success’ on the PISA League Tables.

This success is predicated on a regime of thirteen-hour days worked by students, and rising suicide rates. A system where the rich have the competitive advantage of being able to move into good school districts and employ private tutors. Sound familiar?

Here’s the irony: Tony Little, (the Eton Head) again, “We seem intent on creating the same straitjacket the Chinese are trying to wriggle out of.”

2 Comments
ANDREW DAY
27/8/2014 04:18:21 pm

You are right to warn against blindly following the East Asian models. I visited after-school schools in S Korea where kids as young as 10 study (usually English) between 6 and 11pm. The only reason these schools don't open until midnight is that the government brought in legislation to prevent it.
I think exams have a role, and it's hard to imagine what can replace them. Continuous/modular assessment has its limitations too.
What needs to change, perhaps, is our attitude to exams. When I as at school, (1970/80s) we had end of year tests from Yr 3/4 onwards, including some public ones. We rarely got told the results and no-one made a fuss about them. And the university I got into overlooked my slightly unamazing A Level results and took me on the basis of references from my 6th form tutors. I have no idea how to change attitudes though...

Reply
Zeb
28/8/2014 05:00:19 am

Andrew, interesting to hear first hand your experience of S Korea.

We need to balance exams with what goes on in classroom.
We do need to assess children, but there are different ways of doing that – it doesn’t always need to be through tests.

We’ve entered into a vicious circle in maths where lots of people do tricks in order to get kids through the exam system, but they are not paying attention to the teaching. It’s all about tricks and focus on exams. Whereas, if the quality of the teaching in the classroom was brought right up, then it would make a difference to the outcomes.

If we were truly teaching maths well, then the outcomes would be better.

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

Spring Maths © 2015