Beyond Selidor

So, A Level results are out. As I read a newspaper (The Times, don't kill me - there were no copies of The Guardian in the cafe for some odd reason) and listened to the conversation of the baristas, I realised that Britain was going through its seasonal bout of hand-wringing about whether the A Levels have become too easy. (In Australia, we do our own version of this, with added 'Isn't it time for the exam system to be uniform throughout the country?', in November and December.)

I don't pretend to have any great knowledge of the UK system, but I know some people who have been, or are, going through it right now. I have first-hand experience of the ACT system and the International Baccalaureate, and good second-hand understanding of the NSW system, having coached my sister through it for four years. It is on the basis of this experience and knowledge that I make the following remarks.


1. On the whole, I think that systems which give students a mark (out of 100, as in Australia, or out of 45, as in the IB) are slightly more accurate indicators of students' ability than systems that give students grades (As, Bs, Cs etc). In the Australian system, only one student in each state or territory can get 100, so that mark really reflects that they are better than the other students in their region. Slightly more can get 99.99, slightly more than that can get 99.98, and so on as you progress downwards. Thus the system does not merely assess students, it ranks them.

2. That being said, the UK education system (as opposed to the assessment system) seems better than the Australian one (students seem to come out of it with a more sophisticated understanding of things, although I might be biased, in that the only people I know from the UK are very intelligent Oxbridge students and very intelligent sraffies). The IB is superior to both the UK and Australian systems.

3.I believe strongly that standardised tests do not reflect people's abilities or intelligence. I believe that continuous assessment is the only way to provide a comprehensive picture of students' abilities. This is not bitterness speaking. Maths aside, I always did reasonably well on tests.

4. Too many people go to university, and this is a reflection of a society which views tertiary qualifications as necessary to all careers. This is a particularly chronic problem in general arts degrees, as I found when I was at Sydney Uni. It has also, to a certain extent, affected Education degrees. Don't get me wrong, I know some incredibly intelligent people working in education (two of them are on my f-list, in fact) who have a genuine vocation for teaching. But I have met (and been taught by) so many poorly-prepared teachers, some of whom were just plain ignorant (at best) or unintelligent (at worst). (I recall, with horror, the student teacher we had in Year 11 Biology, who was unable to spell many basic biological terms, and would constantly turn to us and ask, 'is that how you spell it?' As you can imagine, we didn't take her very seriously. I also recall my atrocious Year 3 teacher, who was so bad I can't remember a single thing he taught me. All I remember of that year was him playing golf in the bag room with a metre-ruler, spending lots of time watching TV, and having to talk to him about a maths test where, in answer to a series of questions asking me to 'round the numbers to the nearest 10', I had put a circle around the numbers closer to 10. I remember doing the exam, too, and having no idea what the question meant, and 'correcting' my teacher's 'grammar mistakes' to make the question mean something that I could understand. I don't remember a single thing he taught me about any subject, whereas I can remember the words in spelling tests from Year 1, learning how to do subtraction regrouping in Year 2, writing an assignment on Lawson, Blaxland and Wentworth in Year 4, studying the Murray-Darling Basin in Year 5 and every book that we read, wrote about and studied in Year 6, to take several examples out of many.) This is a serious problem in our attitudes to tertiary education (and the teaching profession itself), and something needs to be done about it.

5. Exams, in Australia at least, have not become easier. Indeed, they require students to have a superficial knowledge of an incredibly broad range of ideas (English exams in the HSC in NSW are the worst culprit in this regard; it is irrational to expect students to be able to write an essay detailing a Marxist reading, existentialist reading and a reading for race of Othello, giving two quotes as examples of each reading and outlining a production which read the play in each of the three ways in an hour-and-a-half). Something needs to be done about exams, but it needs to be part of a broader reform of the entire education system. Exams are a symptom, not the disease itself.

6. All of that being said, it is my experience that intelligent people will do well no matter how flawed the system. This is because their intelligence allows them to understand the system and how to get the most out of it. The same can be said for privileged (through wealth or class) people: their parents and school understand the system and how to get the most out of it. The problem, whether you're talking about the UK, Australia, or indeed the United States (with whose education system I have little familiarity), is focused on the underpriviliged: those who aren't at the selective schools, those whose parents can't afford maths tutors (or indeed aren't aware that their children are struggling with maths), those whose teachers don't even know what a Marxist reading is, let alone how to apply it to Othello. Until something is done to address these inequalities, our education systems will always be flawed.