Exams

[ck1]

School children may be able to appeal for extra marks if they had a bereavement, headache, bad day etc during an exam, is this just madness????

[Loosehead]

What?? Are there any more ways these lefty's can think of to devalue education?  

[jake-the-peg]

Well the prosecution now have the right to appeal too lenient a sentence in court so we could apply the same principal and give schools the right to appeal if a canditate has done better in his exams than he deserves - could be used to stop known rugby players from getting straight A's for example :c)

[acw]

So you tihnk 16 year olds could cope with the death of a parent or sibling and still get the marks they deserved in their GCSEs.  Wow - what an optimistic view of youth. 

[acw]

BTW - the plural of lefty is lefties.  As opposed to lefty's, which is the possessive singular, e.g., the lefty's car. 

[Hgrove]

Exams are a capricious and unfair form of assessment so whilst it is surprising suggestion, I would not rule it out of hand. Why should someone who has worked hard do worse than someone who has worked half heartedly just because the former is unlucky?

[QmunkE]

How long has it been since any of you took exams? This has been around for ages (I'm 20), and it's always been said for any of my exams if you have exceptional circumstances e.g. bereavment or serious illness that a note can be made and sent to the marker so they know that your performance may have been other than your best.

Does anyone really believe that this is going to completely devalue all exams? I think that the markers have more common sense than that, after all, they are TEACHERS.

[FP]

My son took one of his A levels under 'exceptional circumstances'.  A doctor's note had to be produced and forms filled in by the school - it was not an easy procedure.  So, yes, it has always been around - but it has to be a very good reason.  Why should anybody be penalised in an exam if they have just lost a close family member of have suffered a serious illness.

It didn't mean he necessarily got extra marks, it just meant the examiners were aware of circumstances that could have affected his marks.

Exams are not a fair assessment of knowledge or intelligence anyway.  Some people can cope with them and some cannot and go to pieces as soon as they enter an exam room. 

[Oneeyedvic]

Why can't we teach our kids that sh~t happens?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4527129.stm

 

Does anyone actually believe that educational standards are improving? Would love to hear from you if so.

[acw]

Yes I do believe that they are improving.  Instead of believing all the rubbish in the newspapers, go to a school and see what you think.  Yes, you're right, sh#t does happen.  However a family friend of ours dropped dead on Xmas day when he was 40 and his daughter was 16.  She never did A Levels although she was very bright, because she was unsurprisingly totally traumatised by the experience.  Her life has already been messed up enough from that tragedy, at least the education system was able to take that into account when marking her GCSE's so that she can still get some semblance of a career going. 

 

And it's not just for a headache or a bad day.  You have to actually have something wrong with you - something genuinely exceptional. 

 

Stop being such harsh and mean people those of you who are joining in this ridiculous "in my day" rubbish!

[acw]

Can't BELIEVE I just put an apostrophe in GCSE's! *blushes* It's GCSEs.  Ooops!

[jno]

I think my son's education is of about the same standard as mine. Mine came free and his didn't; but that's just the difference a generation makes. (And because I'd got a good free education, I was able to pay for his; my parents could not have afforded to pay for mine.) I once missed an exam through illness and got an estimated mark based on class work, so no difference there.

[Oneeyedvic]

acw - I really don't beleive most of what I read in the media. However, I firmly beleive what I see and hear in the street.

I have interviewed 16-20 year olds for jobs who have good grade at GCSE English who (in my opinion) do not have a fundamental understanding of the language. At 23, I know someone who has a B in English, who does not know the difference between where, we're and were.

People seem to put in apostraphes wherever they want (and I am really not refering to this sort of post where literacy is not a prerequisite but more about letters that are typed to apply for jobs).

I am only 31 years old, and I was (fortunate) enough to have a decent education. At 15 I managed to take London Board 'O' Level papers as I was abroad at the time. At 16, I started my 'A' Levels in this country (Maths, Physics, Chemistry) and found that for the first term, I did absolutely nothing. All my colleagues who had done GCSEs were now learning things that were part of the 'O' Level syllabus.

When I read articles in the papers about how little people are aware of, I immideately dismiss them. There was an article a while ago in The Sun that something like 50% of under 25s did not know what Aushwitz was. There are two girls who I work with aged 21 and 19. I asked both of them and neither knew!

I'm also wondering when we are going to see cases of people who falsely say that they were abused as a kid and hence they deserve higher marks.

I would also say that there is a big difference and emotional impact between the death of a parent and the death of a goldfish (worth 5% and 2% respectively)

[QmunkE]

During studying for my English Language A-Level, part of our course was visiting a primary schoo to study language development in children. I was shocked and appalled that some of these children had a better grasp of the building blocks of language than some of my fellow students, who didn't even know what verbs, adjectives and nouns were, and couldnt use apostrophe's (sarcasm intended).

[acw]

QmunkE - least you can SPELL apostrophe!!!  And probably Auschwitz too.  Which of course is something that school wouldn't teach you about if you studied say, Roman history, medieval history, Tudors, Stuarts, Elizabethans, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, Falklands etc.  Auschwitz is something you should know from general knowledge, or when your parents take you to free museums where we can learn about our country's history.  It's not ALL the schools' responsibility.  When people learn THAT, the education of our nation's children will begin to improve. 

 

Oneeyedvic, I don't think we need to get into showing off about who is the smartest person posting in this thread.  Nor am I going to start on the difference bewteen an ability to take exams early and high IQ and how it's not ALWAYS linked.  Standards of education are like a maths formula - EXAMPLE DOES NOT EQUAL PROOF!

[Lillabet]

People have always had this ability. It is absolutely nothing new. Schools have for a long time marked on someone's paper if there have been circumstances such as personal trauma or illness at the time of the exam. This has never meant that you would automatically get extra marks. However if someone were to fall precisely on a grade boundary then the decision might be made to err on the side of leniency.

My Mum who has been teaching for nearly 40 years cannot remember a time when this did not happen - apparently before better drugs to treat it were introduced a number of hayfever sufferers, as one example, would really have difficulty taking exams in summer - so saying it is to do with 'modern youth' or this particular government / political persuasion seems to me to be false.

All that has happened is that a set of guidelines has been sent out to schools to give them a different way of doing this. The school has to take the decision wether or not to put in a request for extenuating circumstances to be taken into account within 7 days of the exam. So there is no chance of people getting bad marks then appealing. The school will judge each claim on its merits and may decide not to grant a student's request.

As far as I can see the aim is to ensure consistency as far as is possible between schools. Some may have more sympathetic/weak (depending on your views) teachers than others so guidelines might improve consistency.

[robbieh]

Exams are a test of memory and nerves as much as they are a measure of capability. Can you think straight and rememeber things as well when someones died or you have a migrane? No

[ursula62]

Appeals have been available since the GCEs were introduced. In my day you could bring a doctor's note to the exam if you were unwell. The examining board would also check the pollen count in your area on the day of your exam if you claimed to suffer from hayfever. Certainly allowances were made for bereavements, not just close family, but friends, distant relations and pets. Not to do that would have been inhumane.

On the subject of educational standards falling... are they really? The fact that a person's grade is high has never meant that they are capable of achieving that standard all the time. They may have been lucky in the exam (e.g. been questioned on subjects they had revised very well), or been "assisted" in their coursework (parents writing essays, getting essays from the internet, or paying a tutor to write coursework). All these things went on years ago. One friend who took A levels the same year as I did had not read any of his set books for Eng Lit. He just read the Brodies notes the night before. He got an A. He knew he didn't deserve the mark, but it got him into the Uni of his choice so he didn't really care. How is that any different than what people claim goes on in schools today?

The only real difference today  is that generally coursework counts more towards the final mark than it used to say 20-30 years ago. When I took my A levels, the only subject I took where coursework carried a mark was Biology  - our biological drawings and experiment notes were graded by our own tutors and this mark was sent to the exam board.

These days people studying ALL subjects can spend more time on and be assisted with their coursework and consequently achieve a higher mark than they would perhaps have merited under exam conditions.

... to be continued

[ursula62]

... continued

The answer to employers or higher education institutions who consider that academic standards have fallen is for them to require potential candidates to pass a test before interview. This used to happen when you applied for Nursing or Police careers 20 odd years ago, but seems to have been phased out or is now only required if you don't have the GCSEs required for course entry.   That way you would be able to weed out those whose grades do not match their abilities.

[stevie21]

I've heard about the above and agree that while we'd all be appalled that someone might be denied a mark that they're bright enough to earn just because they were too distraught to sit the exam, the way that it's been reported in the media (and in this question) suggests that it's just another way to skive.

My younger sister is sitting exams that I found quite tricky at the time but looking at her work now I honestly believe that she's doing stuff at 17 that I did at least a year before. A good frind of mine was a bit shocked to hear of her syllabus. (I hope she's not reading this!!).
In fact, I had a look at a few of her past papers recently and not a single thing in any of the Maths ones should even remotely trouble her. (I REALLY hope she's not reading this!!).

I honestly believe that standards of exams and general literacy are falling. I obviously can account for the infinite amount of typos that I make - and I can be a bit fussy about spelling - but, as mentioned, I don't remember that my peers' spelling and grammar was as poor as some things I encounter these days. I suppose a large part of that is down to txtspk and lazy typing online.

[FP]

Going back to the original question - I wonder how many of us could cope with going in to work, let alone taking an examination if we were bereaved, so, for goodness sake, why shouldn't  these poor kids be given some leeway.

I was at work and upset not so long ago because a pet had died that morning.  My boss told me to go home and that I shouldn't have come in.