How Good a Judge of Educational Standards Are You? Try Our New Test

Civitas, 12 August 2008

Yesterday saw the publication of two conflicting accounts of how educational standards have fared under the present Labour administration. According to one account, standards had risen; according to the other, they had fallen. One account was that of Government ministers responsible for education. The other account was that of employers and university admissions tutors.
Test Questions:
1. Which account was given by whom?
2. For which account is there greater evidence, and what is that evidence?

Model Answers:
1. It was Government ministers who claimed educational standards had risen, and employers and university admissions tutors who claimed that they had fallen.
Thus, writing in yesterday’s Independent, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families Ed Balls asserted: ‘We have made huge progress since 1997 because we have used testing to drive up standards. Alongside our wider reforms, effective assessment will continue to drive up standards in the years to come.’
Likewise, Schools Minster Jim Knight was quoted in yesterday’s Guardian as having stated: ‘There is absolutely no doubt that English and maths standards have risen over the last decade – results have risen and quality has been rigorously scrutinised by our independent exam regulators.’
It was employers and university admissions tutors who claimed that educational standards had fallen. According to a report published yesterday by the Institute of Directors, 47 per cent of its members believed that the quality of education in schools had deteriorated over the last ten years, as against only 27 per cent who believed it to have improved. Similarly, a sample survey of 100 university admissions tutors revealed 41 per cent of them to think that the quality of undergraduates beginning a course had deteriorated while they had been involved in admissions, as opposed to only 28 per cent who thought their quality to have improved. 32 per cent thought the quality had remained constant.
2. There is greater evidence in favour of the account given by the Government which holds that standards had improved. That evidence consists in the improved test scores recorded year on year in GCSE and A levels, as well as in final honours at undergraduate level.
N.B. Instruction to Examiners:
1. Under no circumstances are candidates to be penalised for mistakes in spelling, grammar or punctuation, only for doubting that improving test scores are a reliable sign of improving standards.
2. Border-lining, the practice of re-checking papers which fall close to a grade boundary, is to be undertaken whenever, but only when, a grade falls just below a boundary. It is NEVER to be undertaken where a grade falls just over a boundary.