The million dollar question

Anastasia De Waal, 24 April 2009

As target and league table pressures have increased, so has suspicion that examining boards are jostling amongst themselves to boost candidate numbers by producing the most ‘accessible’ courses. That is, offering the exams in which schools and  students can best maximise their marks.

There are of course many reasons why schools pick and choose courses, much of it nothing to do with potential exam scores, but what they would like to see on the syllabus. Nevertheless, in a scenario where results are the be all and end all for schools, there is undoubtedly a temptation for teachers to seek out the courses which offer the most ‘lucrative’ returns. For exam boards in turn, there is clearly a temptation to meet this demand. And sure enough there is ample evidence that this is a game which is being played.
As educational journalist Warwick Mansell points out in Education by Numbers, the game does not necessarily mean a clear-cut lowering of standards on the part of the exam board. So it is not simply a question of more easily accruable marks. Instead, as Mansell illustrates, the ‘facilitation’ may come in the form of guidance on how to do well in exams, or ‘assessments in formats which will be attractive to schools, such as modular tests with many re-sit opportunities’. Exam boards frequently market new courses on precisely this type of ‘mark maximisation’ potential. (Mansell also refers to the exam board Edexcel’s bare-faced pledge to make the following year’s GCSE maths exam ‘more accessible’ following its written apology for a paper which was found to be hard.) That a number of schools are resorting to alternatives to what is on offer amongst mainstream qualifications, opting instead, for example, to the IGCSE, is an indictment of this climate in which challenging and stimulating students is falling by the wayside.
This week AQA has come under fire for another way in which exam boards are said to be boosting their appeal: appeal outcomes. The Times Educational Supplement reports today that an independent education consultancy, Anglia Assessment, found that A-level appeals to the board AQA were twice as likely to go up than those of competing board OCR’s. Whilst both boards refute any issue with either standards or inconsistency, Anglia Assessment alludes to the dubious likelihood of such a disproportionate number of AQA papers having been initially under-marked.
Clearly somewhere along the line there is a standards issue, be it a sinister or not. The million-dollar question – literally – is whether the newly established Ofqual, the new regulator of qualifications, exams and tests in England, will put an end to such potential for inconsistencies. In short, whether it can ensure robust standards.