AQA revealed that “for some time now” it has been using newly qualified teachers and PGCE students as markers in some subjects. It also said university students would only be approved to mark the types of questions that they have shown they can mark well. “While the vast majority of our examiners will always be experienced teachers, that doesn’t mean that no one else can ever be suitable for the job,” said Webb. “For some types of questions in some qualifications, being good at following a mark scheme – combined with some knowledge of the subject – is enough.” Ben Wood, chair of the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE), said he thought pupils sitting the AQA religious studies GCSE in the summer may feel “concerned” and “worried” about the idea of an undergraduate marking their Christianity papers. “You do need to know what you’re talking about to mark this. You need to know some of the intricacies of Christian theology, particularly.” He teaches the course himself and said experienced teachers who mark the paper understand how the course fits together, and how GCSE students might pull information from one area of the syllabus and use it appropriately in another area. “Being a humanity subject, it’s also not as simple as providing mark schemes and checking exam scripts against that,” he said. Wood said the current cohort of GCSE and A-level state school students had been enormously disadvantaged by the pandemic and some had missed a huge amount of teaching time. “The thought of them potentially having somebody marking their paper who’s not well qualified to do that – it feels to me like we’re adding potentially more disadvantage on to more disadvantage. And they deserve better.” An economics A-level teacher who works as a “team lead” examiner for AQA and wished to remain anonymous, said he was worried it might be possible for wrongly marked scripts to slip through AQA’s “strict” quality control system: “There are checks in place and they are good – but you don’t check every single bit of marking.” An AQA spokesperson said this marker did not have knowledge of the pilot’s tests or monitoring processes and was jumping to the wrong conclusions. Joe Kinnaird, a religious studies GCSE teacher and AQA examiner, said even if university students passed all of AQA’s standardisation and quality control tests, he does not think they will be capable of marking exams well. “Ultimately, I think you have to be a classroom teacher. It actually undermines the teaching profession to assume that people who are not qualified teachers are able to mark exam papers.” Sarah Hannafin, a policy adviser at the National Association of Head Teachers, said when young people took an exam, their expectation was that markers were “experienced, serious teachers”. With confidence already “quite rocky”, due to what happened with the exams last summer, she thinks it is vital young people and their parents feel they can rely on the exam-marking process. “I’d go so far as to say I think it would be a mistake for them [AQA] to go ahead with it.” Ofqual, the exams regulator, said exam boards must ensure markers were competent. “What matters most is that markers are conscientious and follow the exam board’s mark schemes,” a spokesperson said. “Students can ask for the marking of their paper to be reviewed if they believe an error has been made.” In response to the criticisms, a spokesperson for AQA said the pilot would in no way disadvantage this year’s students or affect the accuracy of their results. How can you design fair, yet challenging, exams that accurately gauge student learning? Here are some general guidelines. There are also many resources, in print and on the web, that offer strategies for designing particular kinds of exams, such as multiple-choice.
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Choose appropriate item types for your objectives. Should you assign essay questions on your exams? Problem sets? Multiple-choice questions? It depends on your learning objectives. For example, if you want students to articulate or justify an economic argument, then multiple-choice questions are a poor choice because they do not require students to articulate anything. However, multiple-choice questions (if well-constructed) might effectively assess students’ ability to recognize a logical economic argument or to distinguish it from an illogical one. If your goal is for students to match technical terms to their definitions, essay questions may not be as efficient a means of assessment as a simple matching task. There is no single best type of exam question: the important thing is that the questions reflect your learning objectives. Highlight how the exam aligns with course objectives. Identify which course objectives the exam addresses (e.g., “This exam assesses your ability to use sociological terminology appropriately, and to apply the principles we have learned in the course to date”). This helps students see how the components of the course align, reassures them about their ability to perform well (assuming they have done the required work), and activates relevant experiences and knowledge from earlier in the course. Write instructions that are clear, explicit, and unambiguous. Make sure that students know exactly what you want them to do. Be more explicit about your expectations than you may think is necessary. Otherwise, students may make assumptions that run them into trouble. For example, they may assume – perhaps based on experiences in another course – that an in-class exam is open book or that they can collaborate with classmates on a take-home exam, which you may not allow. Preferably, you should articulate these expectations to students before they take the exam as well as in the exam instructions. You also might want to explain in your instructions how fully you want students to answer questions (for example, to specify if you want answers to be written in paragraphs or bullet points or if you want students to show all steps in problem-solving.) Write instructions that preview the exam. Students’ test-taking skills may not be very effective, leading them to use their time poorly during an exam. Instructions can prepare students for what they are about to be asked by previewing the format of the exam, including question type and point value (e.g., there will be 10 multiple-choice questions, each worth two points, and two essay questions, each worth 15 points). This helps students use their time more effectively during the exam. Word questions clearly and simply. Avoid complex and convoluted sentence constructions, double negatives, and idiomatic language that may be difficult for students, especially international students, to understand. Also, in multiple-choice questions, avoid using absolutes such as “never” or “always,” which can lead to confusion. Enlist a colleague or TA to read through your exam. Sometimes instructions or questions that seem perfectly clear to you are not as clear as you believe. Thus, it can be a good idea to ask a colleague or TA to read through (or even take) your exam to make sure everything is clear and unambiguous. Think about how long it will take students to complete the exam. When students are under time pressure, they may make mistakes that have nothing to do with the extent of their learning. Thus, unless your goal is to assess how students perform under time pressure, it is important to design exams that can be reasonably completed in the time allotted.
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One way to determine how long an exam will take students to complete is to take it yourself and allow students triple the time it took you – or reduce the length or difficulty of the exam. Consider the point value of different question types. The point value you ascribe to different questions should be in line with their difficulty, as well as the length of time they are likely to take and the importance of the skills they assess. It is not always easy when you are an expert in the field to determine how difficult a question will be for students, so ask yourself: How many subskills are involved? Have students answered questions like this before, or will this be new to them? Are there common traps or misconceptions that students may fall into when answering this question? Needless to say, difficult and complex question types should be assigned higher point values than easier, simpler question types. Similarly, questions that assess pivotal knowledge and skills should be given higher point values than questions that assess less critical knowledge. Think ahead to how you will score students’ work. When assigning point values, it is useful to think ahead to how you will score students’ answers. Will you give partial credit if a student gets some elements of an answer right? If so, you might want to break the desired answer into components and decide how many points you would give a student for correctly answering each. Thinking this through in advance can make it considerably easier to assign partial credit when you do the actual grading. For example, if a short answer question involves four discrete components, assigning a point value that is divisible by four makes grading easier. Creating objective test questions Creating objective test questions – such as multiple-choice questions – can be difficult, but here are some general rules to remember that complement the strategies in the previous section. Write objective test questions so that there is one and only one best answer. Word questions clearly and simply, avoiding double negatives, idiomatic language, and absolutes such as “never” or “always.” Test only a single idea in each item. Make sure wrong answers (distractors) are plausible. Incorporate common student errors as distractors. Make sure the position of the correct answer (e.g., A, B, C, D) varies randomly from item to item. Include from three to five options for each item. Make sure the length of response items is roughly the same for each question. Keep the length of response items short. Make sure there are no grammatical clues to the correct answer (e.g., the use of “a” or “an” can tip the test-taker off to an answer beginning with a vowel or consonant). Format the exam so that response options are indented and in column form. In multiple choice questions, use positive phrasing in the stem, avoiding words like “not” and “except.” If this is unavoidable, highlight the negative words (e.g., “Which of the following is NOT an example of…?”). Avoid overlapping alternatives. Avoid using “All of the above” and “None of the above” in responses. (In the case of “All of the above,” students only need to know that two of the options are correct to answer the question. Conversely, students only need to eliminate one response to eliminate “All of the above” as an answer. Similarly, when “None of the above” is used as the correct answer choice, it tests students’ ability to detect incorrect answers, but not whether they know the correct answer.) plans for next year’s A-level and GCSE cohorts (Students in England to get notice of topics after Covid disruption, 3 December). They do nothing to address the fundamental weakness in our education system, which is the underachievement of disadvantaged pupils compared with those from advantaged backgrounds.
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The pandemic has widened the differences between the two groups. Pupils in private schools have much better distance-learning provision if they are unable to attend. Advantaged pupils in state schools have access to computers and broadband and to places where they can study at home. The government’s promise to ensure all pupils have access to distance learning is another broken one. The measures announced – advance warning of topics, taking aids into exams, contingency papers for those suffering any disruption during the exam period – will all favour advantaged pupils. John Gaskin Bainton, East Riding of Yorkshire The secretary of state is putting forward changes to the 2021 examinations in the vain attempt to make them “fair” despite the inevitable impossibility of doing so given the variations in students’ Covid-related exposure to teaching and learning. The professional associations seem to have accepted this unsatisfactory fudged situation. Do they not have faith in their members’ professional judgments? Why attempt the impossible and possibly have to U-turn eventually, so creating yet more stress for teachers and students? Why not rely, as in 2020, on moderated teacher assessments, given that universities and colleges have not raised any outcry about teaching the students assessed in that way? One answer: this rightwing government does not trust teachers and is obsessed with the “GCSE and A-level gold standards” despite a lack of professional consensus on the reliability of externally set, unseen, timed examinations as the sole means of assessing students’ performance. Prof Colin Richards Former HM inspector of schools Throughout the examination results fiasco earlier this year, the education secretary parroted the same mantra that end-of-course exams are the best system of measuring learning. He frequently added that this view was “widely accepted”. He has never told us why he holds this view or to which evidence he is referring. In fact, there is considerable evidence stretching back 40 years that various forms of continuous assessment and coursework give a better and fairer guide to pupils’ abilities. At a time when so many pupils have had severely disrupted education and those in deprived areas are likely to have suffered most from lack of continuity, surely it is sensible to let hard evidence take precedence over political dogma. Ever since a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher started denigrating the concept of teacher-assessed coursework, until Michael Gove finally abolished GCSE coursework in 2013, there has been a common thread to such attacks, namely the unfounded myth that teachers cannot be trusted. England’s exam regulator Ofqual was riven by uncertainty and in-fighting with the Department for Education before this year’s A-level and GCSE results, with the government publishing new policies in the middle of an Ofqual board meeting that had been called to discuss them. Minutes of Ofqual’s board meetings reveal the regulator was aware that its process for assessing A-level and GCSE grades was unreliable before results were published, even as Ofqual was publicly portraying its methods as reliable and fair. The minutes also show repeated interventions by the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, and the DfE, with the two bodies clashing over Williamson’s demand that Ofqual allow pupils to use the results of mock exams as grounds for appeal against their official grades.
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Williamson told about flaws in A-level model two weeks before results Read more Ofqual’s board held 23 emergency meetings from April onwards. As the publication of A-level results on 13 August drew near the board met in marathon sessions, some running until late at night, as controversy erupted over the grades awarded by its statistical model being used to replace exams. Williamson wanted the regulator to allow much wider grounds for appeal, and on 11 August Ofqual’s board heard that the education secretary had suggested pupils should instead be awarded their school-assessed grades or be allowed to use mock exam results if they were higher. Ofqual offered to replace its grades with “unregulated” unofficial result certificates based on school or exam centre assessments, but that was rejected by Williamson. Negotiations over the use of mock exams continued into the evening of 11 August. In the middle of the day’s second emergency meeting the board discovered that the DfE had gone over its head with an announcement that “was widely reported in the media while this meeting was still in session”. The meeting ended close to midnight. During the controversy, Ofqual published and then abruptly retracted policies on the use of mock exam grades the weekend after A-level results were published, with three separate emergency meetings held that Sunday. Shortly after, Ofqual backed down and scrapped its grades in favour of those assessed by schools for both A-levels and GCSEs. The minutes show that Ofqual had serious doubts about the statistical process it used to award grades, with a meeting on 4 August hearing that the board was “very concerned about the prospect of some students, in particular so-called outliers, being awarded unreliable results”. Advertisement The board’s members “accepted reluctantly that there was no valid and defensible way to deal with this pre-results”. But despite the board’s doubts, Ofqual officials continued to insist in public that its results would be reliable. Roger Taylor, the Ofqual chair, wrote in a newspaper article on 9 August that “students will get the best estimate that can be made of the grade they would have achieved if exams had gone ahead.” Ofqual also issued a statement on 10 August saying it wanted to “reassure students that the arrangements in place this summer are the fairest possible”. 'Plan B' for rigorous mock exams to avoid rerun of A-level fiasco Read more Separate details of meetings held between the DfE and Ofqual – obtained under a freedom of information request by Schools Week – show that Williamson met Ofqual twice in the two days before A-level results came out. Williamson held 10 meetings with Ofqual to discuss the 2020 results from March until A-levels were published on 13 August, while the schools minister, Nick Gibb, attended 16 meetings. The records also show that DfE officials held 55 meetings with Ofqual specifically to discuss the summer’s exam results.
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