Grade inflation and exams; former teacher speaks out – Yorkshire Post Letters

AS an ex-college lecturer and schoolteacher, I sympathise with those young people who’ve been upset by the downgrading of their exam results, but surely some reality – and honesty – is permitted (Rachel Reeves, The Yorkshire Post, September 5) to counter the naïve politicising of this issue?

Of course, government 
policies on education have an influence, but teachers are responsible too.

First, marking exams is rarely an exact science, particularly in subjects such as English or history where opinions, rather than just brute facts, influence the exam markers’ judgements.

An element of subjectivity cannot always be eliminated, and that applies to course 
assessment as well as exams –even in mathematics and science!  

Those at the very top and those at the opposite end are not the real victims, but those near the borderline.

I remember, when marking GCSE work, being told to mark “a bit more generously” one year.

That came directly from the examination board, concerned that nationally our regional marks were lower that they should be.

That wasn’t a political decision, but one taken by teachers – and I can’t remember anyone objecting at all.

League tables have only made a fragile situation even worse.

The recent cases have sent out shockwaves, because it’s been about lowering – rather than raising – grades.

Also, one gets the impression that everyone is desperate to go to university.

As usual, further education, and vocational training, are downgraded, as if schools and universities are essentially the real deliverers of ‘education’ while FE colleges are only about getting jobs, acquiring life skills, etc.

I know that FE is where many students study A-levels but, as someone who did most of his teaching in Further Education, I can remember comments from school teachers, implying that lecturers were not “real” teachers.

Finally, it’s an easy equation – that education equals what goes on (mainly) in schools, 
forgetting those words of Albert Einstein: Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learnt while in school.

That might have been said in jest, but Churchill and Einstein only really ‘shone’ after they’d left school.

Schools are important, but 
let’s not exaggerate that importance.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson