When the cat’s away, the mice will play

Anastasia De Waal, 25 June 2010

The population’s preoccupation with the gaping hole in George Osborne’s wallet has provided a devious distraction from all sorts of tomfoolery, writes Annaliese Briggs.

Ashley Cole’s shacked up with a Wicca practitioner; Katie Price and husband, Alex Reid, have suffered another wedding crisis; and the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) have announced plans to produce different GCSE courses for boys and girls, based on the rationale that ‘girls produce better coursework while boys perform more strongly in exams.’  While Cheryl Tweedy and Peter André have smiles on their faces, second-wave feminists are turning in their graves.

The AQA’s proposal smacks of the kind of gender stereotyping more commonly associated with the workplace in pre-1920s Oxford University (or perhaps just down the road in Bank today).  NUT head of education, John Bangs’s ‘mind boggles’ and so does mine.

If this year’s AQA GCE Psychology specimen paper is anything to go by, exam officers appear to have abandoned their offices (possibly in search of a pub screening the football), leaving a bunch of hapless teenagers formulating their policies.  For eight marks, pupils were asked to design a study to investigate gender differences in children. Should we presume these assessees were girls, who struggle in tests and so put forward such ridiculous proposals? Had the assessment taken the form of a piece of coursework, could we have expected more sensible recommendations from the AQA?

But, of course, these questions are beside the point. Similarly, AQA should stop reinforcing gender stereotypes with devastating implications (please note, coursework is frequently considered the softer, lighter assessment option—and the rise of the internet and parental intervention leaves little room for contestation).  Is it not the AQA’s responsibility to provide a stable platform from which pupils’ results are on some level comparable?  Granted, boys may fare better at exams and girls in coursework, but should the AQA not then seek one alternative that caters for all, especially given ‘there are lots of boys who like the investigative element of coursework as well,’ notes Bangs.

With exam boards slowly being severed from the auspices of the Government, such developments do little to promote the benefits of greater freedoms within the school exam’s market.  ‘Why stop at gender-specific assessments?’ is a reasonable question that pertains to the exasperated commonsense theorist’s reaction—once they’ve regained balance—and the far-reaching significance of such a scheme.  Chromosome-dictated tests will induce a trajectory of stereotypes that might see men and women back where they were at the beginning of the last century, with some of our qualifications counting, and others not.