Are A levels (still) dumbing down?

As if to make it very clear that the answer to that question was a resounding ‘no’, the QCA (The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) took out a full page advert in some of today’s papers. It congratulated all those students getting their results and quoted some of the questions they had had to answer.

The question that was read out on the morning news  – from Psychology A level -- was “Describe and evaluate the contributions of the Psychodynamic Approach and the Cognitive Approach to society”. Cor, we were meant to think, that’s hard.

It was, of course, something of a hostage to fortune. For a start, it may look gob-smackingly arcane to you and me, but turn to the A level board’s specification for that paper (Unit 6) and it is exactly what the students should have prepared themselves for:

Students, it says clearly in the syllabus, should be able to distinguish “between approaches/perspectives in psychology, including . . . the psychodynamic approach, the cognitive approach and the physiological approach.”

So it wasn’t exactly a wild card. 

Next, it was just one part of a 90 minute paper, which – bearing in mind the time taken reading the paper and making your choice of options – would be answered in something like 20 minutes, which hardly gives time for much intellectual nuance. And according to the examiners’ reports, also published today, it wasn’t even all that well done.

Here’s some of what they had to say:

“Both approaches should have been considered, but some candidates only focused on one of them, which limited the marks available. The question asked for contributions to society, therefore theoretical contributions were only appropriate if they led to practical outcomes, eg theory of psychoanalysis and therapeutic techniques. Many candidates gave large amounts of irrelevant detail in this essay, for example lengthy descriptions and evaluations of research studies to support applications, where only the identification and findings were needed.” And so on.

This isn’t of course exactly what is meant by dumbing down. And in fact the strictures of these examiners may point in the opposite direction. The problem is not whether the kids are working hard (of course they are – and probably very much harder than we used to). It’s the ‘tick-box’ element to the marking that is the killer, and the sense that there is a range of points which have to be included to get the top marks -- rather than the open-ended essay-style intellectual exploration. (Here are the 'boxes' for the Psychology question.)

I know of at least one A level examiner who has given up because he was forced to mark down candidates who wrote really intelligently about a subject but didn’t give the points that were demanded by his “marking criteria”.

When they get to university the hang-over of this is still horribly apparent. Students will press you to say what kind of class you think their essay would be given. If you respond “a 2.1”, their next question is likely to be, “So what have I left out that would get me a first”. As if getting a first was simply about fulfilling all the assessment criteria.

But tub-thumping about standards is a bit of a thoughtless response to all this. The sad thing is that the tick-box style of marking is an almost inevitable consequence of the very proper attempt to democratize A levels. It’s all very well thinking that the open ended intellectual essay style is what should be rewarded. But what do you do if you go to a school where they don’t know the rules for that genre? Isn’t it reasonable for you to expect to be told what you would need to do to get an A?

Perhaps even more pressing is the question of the examiners themselves. In the old days, when A levels were a minority option, you had a small group of experienced (and, no doubt, underpaid but devoted) examiners. You might trust them to make reasonably independent judgments about a kid’s essay (and, in any case, the numbers were small enough for them to be checked up on). Our recent mad fixation with formal assessment has more than quadrupled the numbers of examiners that are needed –  the demand being such that in some subject trainee teachers are used to mark the most important tests in a child’s career. So, of course, we have to generate firm rules and fixed criteria, simply to train and police the examiners.

The real question isn’t whether we are dumbing down. It’s what on earth we think all this examining is for. If it’s for choosing the brightest, it’s a blunt, time-consuming and inefficient instrument indeed. But maybe that’s not its point – and we should be thinking of quite different ways to do that.

Comments

[Jenny]

Truned up a bit late for this discussion but still... I got full marks in my A2 level Latin unseen this year even though I managed to translate 'superiore aestate' as 'at the higher tide'. They gave us 'aestus' and I declined it at the time and worked out it wasn't possible ('earlier in the summer' - got it later in the afternoon and nearly broke shin kicking myself). There were lots of other mistakes I can't remember, too. I felt cheated to be honest - all very well giving bonus marks for good English but incorrect Latin is incorrect Latin and there was no way it deserved 100%. Not that I sent it back for remarking or anything, you understand.

[SW Foska]

That's too bad. I checked The Peloponnesian Wars and indeed there are no three-point turns in it. Next time maybe try Xenophon's Anabasis. Or better still, hire Alastair as your teacher: he'll show you how it's done.

[Mary]

but i did mention Thucydides...
maybe that was problem

[SW Foska]

Maybe they failed you for not mentioning Thucydides. If only you'd known, it wouldn't have been too hard...

[Alastair]

"The real reason was that I just couldn't drive."

I take exception to this. It may be that the real reason was more complicated than the points proposed by the examiner, but the statement above is quite the opposite. How would you have felt if, upon failing, you had asked him what the matter was and received the response, "Well, you just can't drive." Where on earth do you go from there? It's vague, unhelpful and essentially just a cop-out. Perhaps he only ticked the 'three-point-turn' box, but at least that gives you SOME idea of what to work on.

A really good examiner might utilise the empty reverse side of his piece of paper to give a more thorough (and constructive) critique of your driving style. For example, perhaps you have trouble handling the wheel when turning corners (or even driving in straight lines). Maybe you turn it too far in one direction and then overcompensate in your attempt to correct the mistake. Solution: slowly drive 100 times round the block every morning, paying careful attention to your handling of the wheel (especially at the corners). Reverse the direction halfway through to give you experience turning the wheel the opposite way.

Or perhaps you often forget to look in the rear view mirror when supposed to - not necessarily a major fault in itself, but something that contributes to the fact that you "just can't drive". Solution: stick a post-it note on the wheel saying "Look in the mirror!", and repeat the phrase to yourself every time you do so to reinforce the reminder.

You may be applauded for condemning the 'tick-box' system that prevents talented (not 'gifted', the word is a misnomer) students from achieving top grades or forces lesser students into an unhelpful tick-the-boxes-and-get-the-marks mindset, but don't ever criticise a student for asking how they could have scored higher. Answer them!! Is there a reason they didn't get top marks? Necessarily there is, so explain it to them. Don't cop-out of it with the 'you don't have that special something' line - there is NO special something that cannot be reduced to a tick-box (other than a personal like or dislike), and I would stake my life on that assertion. The problem is not the 'reducing things to tick-boxes' attitude, it is simply the problem of reducing them to too few. You can (and must) ALWAYS state what it is that differentiates a 1st from a 2:1, and doing so in detail will help the 2:1 students to improve.

It might be that in a particular area you have always experienced something of a 'natural' advantage, and never forced yourself to look at exactly what it is that makes your work (and others) better than someone else's - rather you 'feel', in a way, or 'sense' something about the better work that you cannot 'sense' in the lesser. But this does NOT mean that it is not a tangible, quantifiable property - only that you have never needed to consider it as such.

I strongly disagree with those who shrug off the difference between a masterpiece and 'simply good' work as 'a touch of genius' or 'that special something'. There is always something there, something real that can be identified as the defining factor that differentiates the one from the other. Even if (in art, say) it is simply the appeal of the subject matter that causes more people to enjoy the 'better' work - credit the artist with the skill to utilise a widely appealing theme. Or, don't - say that the two works of art are equal, and it is only subjective opinion that leads many to enjoy one more than the other.

In science, everything is reduced to a 'tick-box'. It has to be. Subjectivity has no place, and there is a tangible, definable reason for everything. I believe this extends to all subjects - indeed, all of the universe - and as a near concert-level musician I firmly believe this applies to art also (of course, you could accuse me of playing like a robot, but I don't believe that you would - because I don't).

My point, to recapitulate, is that getting a first IS simply about "fulfilling all the assessment criteria". They might not be as simple or as obvious as "mention Thucydides", but undeniably they exist - if only in the mind of the individual examiner. Explaining to a 2:1 student how they can work toward a 1st is at the heart of the educational process, and if you can't do that then I would offer that the whole thing is a waste of time.

[Mary]

I take Foska's point. But -- having failed my driving test more than once -- I think that the reasons for failure were more complicated than those given. The sheet I was given may well have marked the three point turn, but the real reason was that I just coudnt drive How do you put that on a tick box?

[SW Foska]

I'm sorry but I don't get it. If I fail a driving test I want to know why. And I don't just want to know why I didn't get the piece of paper, but (maybe annoyingly) I want to know what role mentioning Thucydides or improving the conclusion plays in helping me drive better. I'm not the world's best driver but being less bad at this helps me be less dead and more useful at the things I am good at. I have no pretentions to excellence in this sphere. My driving examiners did this for me, I listened, and passed.
All the good people say education is a fraud except where there is a meaningful aim. Durkheim says this, Samuel Johnson does too. I respect Prof. Beard's good humour and willingness to engage in public debate but has she taken on board their reservations? What meaningful aims does her instruction have?
The system she advocates remains darwinistic insofar as only 'The best students learn from engaging with your discussion of their essay', essentially an admission that your discussion of their essay is so brief and arbitrary that only the best students can learn from it.

[Mary]

To respond to Mr/s Foska's second point. The problem isnt just with the question (though it is in part). It is also with the answer. Fine if there is an easy 'failing' (no mention of Thucydides, for example). But often you get pressed into a corner to come up with a polite and apparently constructive response (should have developed the conclusion more)...which actually isnt constructive at all.
The best students learn from engaging with your discussion of their essay how they might have done better without having the bullet points spelt out! Am I old-fashioned or what?

[SW Foska]

Foska was interested to read many of the comments here, and regretted not being able to prolong the polylogue on this theme, as there was a real possibility of editing a new set of pedagogical principles, a Novum Organum, Scienza Nuova, Nouvelle Heloise or even just 'auch eine' philosophy of knowledge.
The marketing men at the Times clearly spotted this, took prof. Beard aside into a darkened room and warned her against cultivating such dangerous spirits, who not only might actually instruct the populace but fail themselves to purchase any of the products discreetly advertised in their gilded compositional environment. The said marketing people ordered her in no uncertain terms to quit toying with discusssions of educational method among semi-solvent polygraphs and boost the ratings by emitting ethnocontroversial heritage opinions and developing a lunchtime-quiz-style approach to information about antiquity, thus garnering great bales of somewhat baleful comment from types less likely to think before buying.
Unswayed by such tactics, foska returns from a brief vacation to tackle various arising or remaining questions.
1) Some ambiguities cloud the wholesale denunciation of 'tick-box' culture or methods. Most criticisms of it are in fact aimed at the poor quality of the criteria chosen for evaluation. But this does not itself invalidate the need for the latter to be specific, if a fair and incremental mode of instruction and assessment is to be implemented. Mr. Francis's comment shows very well how specific instructions can be compatible with meaningful pedagogical advancement, while Mr. Burns is not being petty or monomaniacal in his irritated crusade against errors of detail.
2) Foska simply cannot understand Prof. Beard's (far from unique) impatience with students' desire to be told, on being given a 2:1 grade, “So what have I left out that would get me a first”. Compare cricket: this English game is alleged to be rife with covert ideological normalizations of abnormal hierarchical arrangements, and yet the rules are clear. If a player hits the ball over the boundary rope, he scores four. Nobody thinks him an ingrate or cheapskate if he asks how it would be possible to get more; he would be clearly informed that he has to hit the ball over the boundary without it touching the ground, and he will get six. Foska cannot see how that diminishes either the game or the pedagogical experience.
3) Foska cannot agree that questions of the social function of an intellectual enterprise are 'not much' different from those concerning the content thereof. Much instruction in the sociology of knowledge is haphazard (not least because carried out somewhat a contre coeur by the practitioners of the discipline, who are often neither equipped with any methodology for the study of society nor prepared to consider the potential irrelevance of their demarche to the common good). Foska salutes the insistence of the examiners that this aspect be seriously attended to, but also wonders to what extent the necessary instruction was imparted. S/he would be happy to have her doubts dispelled by a practitioner, but rests his case until then.

[Mary]

I take foska's point, which sort of reiterates mine -- viz, if the rules of this are unspoken then it only helps those who are taught the unspoken rules (which is what janey is saying too...).
ok -- i accept that the question was expecting something a little more than the letter of the specifiction -- but not much (and much more than the letter would not be allowed anyway).

[Xjy]

My favourite memory of the supermarket aspect of my college career at Stockholm University is from English. Me and my buddy B had been forced to acquire a Swedish degree if we wanted to qualify for teachers training college and get a diploma - our Cambridge degrees weren't good enough academic grounding to teach English at Swedish comprehensives ;-)

Come the third and final semester (two term academic years) of the English major, we faced the English Novel. No exemptions from attending the excruciating classes under beloved teacher Bertil Johansson I think he was called.

It so happened that of the twelve set books starring in the course, B had read six, and I had read six. So I crammed my books into his head, and he did the same for me.

And guess what!! Come the results, I excelled at B's novels, and he excelled at mine.

Which just shows what marvellous teachers we must have been, and what lousy students when left to our own devices... :-)

Re exemptions, by the way, the comprehensive multiple-choice diagnostic test everyone doing English had to tick their way through, saw both of us disappearing off the right of the bell curve (even though we both made a couple of (different) mistakes :-( . This earnt us exemption from attending most of the classes connected with the first two semesters, but not from doing the goddam exams.

I don't recall ever being so consistently enraged for such a long time as I was then. I could hardly make coherent pencil markings on the paper during the first exam we took, my heart was beating so fiercely.

Cambridge can drive anyone to despair, but hardly to this kind of snarling hoop-hopping resentment.

[anthony alcock]

I don't know any longer what they do in UK schools or universities, but the guidelines for producing a good answer seem to be a surreptitious version of what they do much more blatantly in Egypt (which I experienced at two different universities), where the general attitude of most teachers was: just buy my notes and you will pass the exam with flying colors. A nice little earner.

[Tony Francis]

Reading Zareen's comments on Hamlet made me recall that when in college, I would "prepare" for an essay test by memorizing a large body of facts which I hoped would be related to the subject at hand. Then, no matter what the question, I could "steer" the discussion into that body of facts. This worked more often than one might suspect. A few times, I was left "hanging" with a question which was impossible to "steer" into my "memorized facts" without looking like a complete idiot! I took a required history class. After it was too late to drop the class, the professor mentioned that the highest grade anyone could get, if they weren't a history major, was a "B". Ha gave nasty essay tests. Even so, my "memorized fact" method appeared to work on him. I don't recall much about the class, but I still bristle at the "B" I got!

[Zareen Pervez Bharucha]

A note to Janey --
I agree, but with exceptions.
I am, in equal proportions, an 'awful conscientious girl' and a 'foreigner with a strange intense way'. And I know several like me.
And we offer daring answers in class and in our papers, and we do most of the sneering. Mostly at fellow-classmates who think that wearing cashmere V-neck jumpers are a passport to a distinction. What crap, we laugh, and then hog all the distinctions in class.

[Zareen P. Bharucha]

A 12th Grade (HSC) English literature exam I appeared for asked us to write a 20-mark (read: essay) type question on the nature of Hamlet's indecisiveness: what was Shakespeare's message, if any, about this 'fatal flaw'.
My fellow students reproduced the essay that had been DICATED TO THEM IN CLASS. We'd been assured that this, learnt up and reproduced 'in our own words' (but not our own thoughts. Mugging leaves no room for thinking) would satisfy all the marking criteria.
I am sure most of those who learnt up and vomited the essay received above-average to good grades.
I was too much in awe of the play to do this, so I read a couple of critical essays the night before the exam, covering most of the themes I thought were important, learnt up the important speeches so I could quote, and thought about what I thought of the play in general for a couple of hours before bed. Took some notes on the back of an envelope and read these in the car on the way there. (My mother was appalled at my lack of preparation, but no matter.)
I elected to answer this question in the exam, and received an overall score of 91%. I topped English literature that year, and my grade has not been equalled since. (Merciless self-glorification, but I think I deserve it, since no one else patted me on the back for my guts.)
I am guessing that if the assessment criteria were followed mechanically, I mightn't have scored so well. Considering that this question was worth 20 out of 100 marks, and I got 91%, I am guessing I aced it (I know I answered at least 3 1-mark answers wrong, and no one gets 100 in a literature paper.)
So.
Wow.
Was the marker in INDIA, a country whose mechanical approach to mass-mugging I always deride, more imaginative, compassionate and open-minded than markers for A-levels in England generally are?

[abc]

It is a good structure, for short term (or long term?) meritocracies, but the dangers of pure meritocracies are that people only think of their own performance and their own work. No bells and whistles. No common touch and certainly no flair. BOOORRRIIINNGG society of self-engrossed, bullish egomaniacs.

[Jackie]

I think the sad truth about the 'tick box' exam is that it is actually preparing a lot of the students for life in a 'tick box' society. Too many jobs now (I was in one that went that way) are focussed on 'targets' which have to be hit, regardless of the eventual outcome. Do this job today, because we don't need to worry about that one until tomorrow. Come tomorrow - panic stations. A culture of crisis management. Jobs are no longer permanent, but a series of fixed term appointments, with the result that there is no incentive to actually learn to manage the job properly. Just do what is in front of you, and the devil take the consequences. I know this does not apply everywhere, but often enough for many people to want to learn, not to think for themselves, but to 'do what is necessary.' The current exam structure seems to be a good grounding for this.

[Clayton Burns]

That the system of education does not work is proven by the fact that so many corrupt texts are getting through without people noticing. Phillip Knightley got onto the case of "The Mitrokhin Archive I," but the reviewers just did not see anything. That book is full of bizarre errors--how could it have been printed that way? In History and International Relations, do they know how to read texts?

Another stunning specimen is the 1993 Modern Library "Absalom, Absalom!" Supposed to be the corrected text, it is riddled with impossible mistakes. When Bloom made his catastrophic error in interpreting "The tint I cannot take is best" in his "The Western Canon," that mistake was repeated by another American critic. You might think that at Oxford at least you would not see strangely produced texts with fairly obvious and systematic continuity errors.

But Michael Neill's valuable Oxford World's Classics "Othello" is just that text. Just cannot concentrate. That would have to be the verdict on those who participate in the education game today.

At Oxford and Cambridge this fall, students in English should study Neill's "Othello" minutely and decipher the patterns. For example, at pages 150 and 350 Neill noted the lack of evidence for Emilia's early mistrust of Iago, although at page 342 he had said "Of course she already has Iago in mind...". Neill does not deny that his wording might well have been different.

Education has fallen into a mechanistic assembly-line pattern that discourages perception. Texts should be studied recursively until they are internalized and spatialized and perceptions start to emerge spontaneously.

There should be a far more determined approach to grammar. How could you think about "The Turn of the Screw" if you did not understand past conditional counterfactuals or modal past perfect reasoning? "Great Expectations" contains 140 past conditional counterfactuals. If we can also perform transformations, as in Chapter 8, "If natural light had been admitted into the room, Miss Havisham would have been turned into dust," we will be able to demonstrate skill in grammar.

Everyone assumes the method (assembly-line) and the language (little effective teaching of higher-order structures). Therefore, the students seem distracted. The whole system seems incoherent.

The failure fully to grasp the implications of the corpus revolution in linguistics is causing a lot of trouble. It is why we still have TOEFL. It is why we still do not have great grammar readers.

[abc]

Hello Mary.

There are issues with XJY's comment: "Climbing Everest or taking tea with the Dalai Lama ("as Dalley said to me last week...") can be done by anyone with access to the preconditions. What conditions and stamps the underprivileged masses is their lack of access to the preconditions for getting good exam results - regardless of how the exams are set and assessed."

The underprivileged comment is true, but I knew a girl with dyslexia from a highly privileged background once, extremely artistic and desperate to please from a very very young age, but, nobody, not even her parents (who sent her to the wrong academic school), gave her a chance. Inevitable result: failure (to parents and peers) was better than success. Smacks of societal waste to me and she has become a pretty messed-up adult, yet no one sees the damaged result, and the solution (without family separation) is practically impossible. Most would class her as spoilt. Spoilt is probably the right word, now. As her friend, there is little I feel I can do about it. It took a decade to go to university, and perhaps she would have been a great graphic designer. A loss of talent.

[Tony Francis]

It always seemed to me that essay exams written in a college level course are nuanced based upon the student's assessment of the the psychology of the teacher. The alert student will use certain words and phrases gleaned from the individual peculiarity of that teacher's method. This always seemed to work for me. Essays written for an unknown grader are something else, and more difficult. The California bar had a large essay session which had a reputation for being very difficult. There were several books available that taught the method to write these essays. In the end, it boiled down to recognition of certain "facts", or "fact patterns", and identifying "issues". The graders didn't care how the case was argued, only that a predetermined number of facts and issues were identified. To be honest, there is no other way to grade an essay anonymously than by a "tick box". Giving points for "style" is totally subjective, and renders the grading process biased. I would think most high school or college kids are not very good writers. It is a skill that takes years to develop. In the law school I went to, we were writing (actually sitting in front of a word processor) all the time. The California Bar prep books recommended the following method:
Do Not:
1.) Do not merely state conclusions
2.) Do not be too brief in answering
3.) Do not volunteer information that is not material
4.) Do not be verbose or unnecessarily long
5.) Do not demonstrate your ability to memorize
Do:
1.) Do show a recognition of the problem presented
2.) Do fully discuss all points
3.) Do show an understanding of all the material facts
4.) Do show an understanding of the applicable law
5.) Do show an understanding of the reasoning relied upon to support your solution
6.) Do make your answer complete
7.) Do try to demonstrate an ability to think
8.) Do demonstrate a knowledge of general principles of law
These seem like good rules to follow for any kind of critical writing.
Looking at the psychology syllabus for the A level students, it would appear that this had all been covered in the course work. So, all they needed to do was regurgitate the course material. One wonders what would be the reaction to something like: "an important effect of psychology and psychiatry on society is as a part of the policing power of the state." This is mentioned in several psychiatry books, but didn't appear to be covered in the syllabus. (Foska, you get an A+ for style!)

[Mary]

janey -- I think that I am not so far from you as you allege (and thanks xjy for putting some meat on this).
when I wrote about the 'class specific-ness' of the open-ended answer, I think I was leaning in that direction. I suppose my line was to suggest that the cure might be worse than the disease..??

[SW Foska]

Blimey you would think blogging was an exam judging by the length of the scripts.
Janey's point is valid, and xjy's criticism of it doesn't stand up. 'Interesting' is often used as a codeword for 'conforming to the marker's gross prejudices'. The student should be given a clear idea of the rules, but this rarely happens. Being told something of the content doesn't make it easier. If I publish a specification for an exam in flute-playing which sez 'Candidates must be able to demonstrate shit-hot flute playing skills' and the 2-hour exam paper, with one question says 'Play the flute brilliantly for 2 hours', that's still quite hard.
And Mary, in the example you give the question isn't actually repeating the specification as you allege. The spec says distinguish between two types of psychology, the question asks what are their respective contributions to society. Not content but social function. That's what the examiners are saying many pupils didn't grasp.
I'll probably get a C minus now for poor structure & insubordination.

[Denise]

So, what seems to be the issue here is approach; instead of judging an open-ended intellectual response, what is called for is being able to tick boxes. This appears, unfortunately, to be symptomatic of today's societal malaise - a quick fix solution, an answer that can be broken down into a set of points, etc. etc. Things are rarely that simple, are they??
This approach can be taken way beyond the exam answer - to the responses to global problems, and to the political short-sightedness that we read and view on tv every day.
The thinker inside us all can scream loudly "but can't you see the bigger picture, or the fundamental issues here??", but too often those in charge are blinded by specific issues, criteria, and mundane practicalities.
Take the global warming/sustainable energy issue. We all know that turning out lights, and recycling our baked bean cans alone are not going to solve the energy crisis. However, if money was pumped into sustainable transport systems using clean energy, and heavy industry and air travel were seriously overhauled, then things would be moving along. The sad fact is that the big shots tend to put the brakes on, as concerns the real offenders, and instead present a blinkered approach that neatly sidesteps the big picture.
Even in the small scale, it would do better for the environment if we had a level of sustainable energy factors built into all new housing, but even this seems beyond the ken of the present government.
So, we are presented with a set of criteria, and then how these issues are being addressed - but what really matters is how these points are established, and whether they are the best ways to deal with the problem.
Joe Bloggs needs to have the skills to see this, and decide for himself - and it is a duty of educators to furnish him with these skills, rather than tell him which a-f he must write out to pass x exam!!

To take another example from the educational arena, one finds that universities are spending thousands on courses designed in the same manner - the "how to" seminars that appear every week, consisting of dry power-point presentations that break down whatever one can think of into bullet-point lists for those devoid of initiative. For most, these are an absolute waste of time. Personally, I feel that the money could be better spent on things such as better support for departmental staff, library resources, institutional online journal subscriptions, support for poorer students etc. These "how to" initiatives all seem to be run to comply with government-led criteria, rather than looking at what students need (more box ticking).
Another comment highlighted the issue of students who had previously attended establishments where the intellectual open-ended response was beyond what was on offer. (Can this really be??) This goes back to the old chestnut of equality in education, and the fact that schools need more funding, better teachers, and a less blinkered approach. Such a response should be a given, and be able to be taught by every teacher.
What is important for schools nowadays seems to be the focusing upon teaching such things as Creationism, rather than free thinking...
Worries are more based on how one dresses to school rather than if a sentence can be strung together, or a flawed argument unpicked.
The blinkered approach seems to be prevailing - box ticking, criteria, and short-sightedness.
The trend continues, if one considers the case that abstinence classes are being favoured over an agreed programme for Reproductive/Sex Education; Davina McCall recently took issue with this in a TV documentary.
The shutters have well and truly been pulled down as concerns this issue - the government minister questioned neither offered any recipe for change, nor answered any of the posed questions. You guessed it - her answers were in the box-ticking format - addressing issues already raised, and giving the stock answer - usually irrelevant to Davina's "hitting the nail on the head" questions.
So - we appear to dismiss the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe as an issue that needs addressing in a "go beyond the nit-pickey criteria" way.
Do we care that our future adult population may not have the skills to intellectually consider important issues, or give a far-sighted response?
Much better, it seems, to simply tick all the boxes and leave things at that - JOB DONE.
My comment has ranged a good way around the main point of discussion, but i feel this reflects the ubiquitousness of "box-ticking" in our culture.

Who can blame the kids for asking "what did i miss, what am i supposed to say in order to get an A??" They follow from example.
- Something must change!

[Xjy]

Janey's response is very blinkered. It assumes that there is an either-or option to solving the problem. EITHER daring /adventurous/ special OR conventional/ conscientious/ (intense???!!!). This is nonsense. Gilded brats are rich and unconcerned, that's all.

Climbing Everest or taking tea with the Dalai Lama ("as Dalley said to me last week...") can be done by anyone with access to the preconditions. What conditions and stamps the underprivileged masses is their lack of access to the preconditions for getting good exam results - regardless of how the exams are set and assessed.

The Swedes recently swung away from a democratic form of grading, statistically grounded in the performance of most kids at most schools, while allowing for pluses and minuses where verifiable by both national and local tests and in-class performance. The new system is supposed to be "absolute" rather than "relative". Command of and insight into the subject - mastery of its basics and understanding its purposes - rather than rote learning or just doing what the textbook and teacher ask.

The result has been chaos, demoralization, greater grade-grinding, worse sycophancy and social-emotional pressure towards teachers, grade inflation, the demolition of a high, general level of standards throughout the education system, soaring social selection in upper secondary and higher education, crippled teaching standards and morale, and a trend towards the French/English
obsession with pedantic curriculums and top-down teaching and testing.

The "reform" was presented as a victory for individualization and quality, as against collectivized dumbing down and quantity.

A true incentive for the gifted, and a salutary stimulus for the herd.

The problem was that the teachers, schools and authorities were even less capable of managing the new system than the old one. Plus of course that few of the teachers had the requisite "command" and "insight" into the subject to make an authoritative assessment of the pupils' achievements in this regard.

So, a standardized, comprehensive, working system was dumped in favour of an arbitrary, patchy and unreliable system. The Zeitgeist at work.

The schools now reflect society more faithfully, of course, making them - as in England - frightful places for kids and teachers to interact in. No more illusions of a better world being built on the foundation of a better schooling system!! Bye-bye Social-Democracy and the Swedish Model.

In a crappy society, you get a crappy educational system. In a contradictory society, you get elements of good among the bad. Mary is desperately trying to separate the pearls from the turds in her work. But she's stuck in the cesspool, so to speak.

However, to end on a cheerful note, tensions and contradictions give birth to new conditions and new states of being - new societies too.

And the weak pole of our present contradictory society - the old, decayed, obsolescent, holding-us- all- back-just- cos-it's -there-and-we- haven't- shifted-it- yet Ancien Regime - is the ruling class, the minimal few at the top of the Capitalist/Imperialist/Bourgeois tree.

Mary and other courageous pearl-divers aerate the cesspool, as it were, and paradoxically weaken the system the more, the higher they operate.

[dr venables preller]

There could be sound arguments for changing to the classical chinese examination concept of replacing questions in the paper with the instruction to write down all the candidate knows in the given time.

This would focus assessors on areas of excellence (or not) and on candidates' ability to distinguish between the important and less so, Candidates should benefit from a more holistic approach to knowledge so that competence in box ticking goes out the window, along with correctness concepts of equality of minds.

Quite how the marking establishment would cope with such radical notions would be a matter for conjecture, possibly assisted by lengthy exchange vists to locations where ancient wisdom was venerated.

[Janey]

Just to remind Your Oxbridgeness how extra marks for adventurous answers preserves the status quo. If you belong to a group that you believe is discriminated against then you stick closely to the conventional criteria for marking, as otherwise you can expect to be slammed. But if you know that you belong to a favoured group -- and especially if you come from a privileged background and a bad mark wouldn't cripple your future -- why then you can afford to offer a daring submission that may win big.

And so we end up with a system where those awful conscientious girls and those foreigners with their strange intense ways can be sneered at because they don't get Oxbridge firsts because "they lack that special something". What they lack is confidence in a system which they believe is stacked against then -- after all, people like them don't get so many firsts. And so it perpetuates.