Monday, June 12, 2006

Grade The Tests, But Ignore The Mistakes

It seems our friends in Britain have some grade inflation problems of their own:

GCSE examiners are being told to ignore mistakes in pupils’ scripts to push resulting grades as high as possible. The instructions also tell examiners never to reduce a mark “solely because of the existence of an error”.


Read the whole thing, if you have the stomach to.

4 comments:

Ellen K said...

Wow. So if a student makes a mistake, it's not a bad thing, it's a "learning experience". I hope that doesn't carry over into the professions. I would hate to think a surgeon could get away with that sort of training.

Anonymous said...

I'm not quite sure if the GCSE is similar to the SATs or APs or what, but we have the same error policy here. I was told by almost all of my AP teachers that graders are only told to add points, not subtract, so write as much as you can, even if it's bs.

Darren said...

Sad.

Darren said...

From Wikipedia:

The General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) (Welsh: Tystysgrif Gyffredin Addysg Uwchradd (TGAU)) is the name of a set of British qualifications, taken by secondary school students at age 14–16 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.