Rigour and Exams
Since the BC government announced changes to the graduation requirements for students in BC, I’ve read quite a lot of different ideas about what this means for students and our society as a whole. Lots of the discussion revolves around student learning and university acceptance.
First of all, I think a lot of people outside of the educational community don’t realize the current state of provincial exams. 4 of the 5 exams being canceled are in grades 10 and 11, most grade 12 exams were removed 10 years ago.
For the most part the graduation requirements remain unchanged. However, the existing five provincial exams are being replaced with 2 exams. Outgoing exams include math 10, science 10, English 10, socials 11 and English 12. Incoming exams will be a literacy exam and a numeracy exam. There aren’t many details on these exams but the general thinking is that they could be similar in nature to the SAT or ACT exam, and that they are broad enough in nature to cover several different courses. The literacy exam would have to suit kids that take both English and Communications, and the numeracy exam would have to accommodate pre-calculus, foundations, and apprenticeship and workplace math. From what I can tell, the exams are asking the question “are you competent in writing and math?” If the answer to this question is “yes”, then it is one more indication that the student should be a secondary school graduate.
Flawed Arguments
Here are some threads I’ve seen passed about:
- without exams, kids marks will be inflated
- without exams, what will universities use for admissions?
- without exams, kids won’t learn as much
- kids can’t do ___ as well as they used to, so we should keep exams
- young people that are hired aren’t as capable as they used to be, and getting rid of exams will make it worse
I believe that each of the above threads is based on incorrect analysis. Exams have nothing to do with “grade inflation”, kids generally don’t learn from year-end exams, universities don’t use final exams for admissions, and a final exam has nothing to do with improving overall competence of graduates.
Rigour and Learning
We generally have two types of assessments in education, formative assessment and summative assessment. Formative is used to “form” the next step in learning. The idea is that a student can take feedback from their assessment and use it to further their learning. For example, if a student takes a test on light reflection and refraction, you may find that she understands the former but not the latter. From this the student can do more work and get help on refraction so they can learn it better. Summative assessment is used to report how a student compares to a standard or expectation at some point in time. Many assessments can be formative and summative at the same time.
I would argue that a final exam is almost entirely summative. Based on 9 months of studying, one overall number is reported to the student. I don’t see any way that this number can be used to help a student learn, other than maybe to inform them to try something different next year (work harder? do more homework? ask the teacher more questions? who knows…).
Some people may say that studying for a final exam helps the student learn. My response to this is that if a student didn’t learn it in the first 9 months, what is going to happen in the last two weeks? And we all know the two day cram session is a total waste. I would agree that some important learning can happen by doing year end reviews, and I would also argue that such a review can be done without there being a final exam. So yes, an exam can give a snapshot assessment (an exam can be a legitimate assessment instrument), but it will not lead to learning. If students are learning less now in 2016 than they used to 10 years ago, it’s not because of less exams. I fail to see the mechanism by which an exam causes learning on any kind of significant scale.
Rigour and Standards
“We’re lowering the standards if we get rid of the exam,” is another phrase I’ve read a lot. I completely agree that standards are required for schools and curriculum but there is no reason to think that a final exam has to be the standard. They could be, and there are enough final exams already in circulation that teachers could use for an internal standard. For many courses there are already enough tools and resources that can be used for standards. In physics this is especially true. Test instruments like the Force Concept Inventory, along with a plethora of textbook questions and old exams inform physics teachers in BC as to the standards we should set and expect. On the other hand, I think math is generally lacking specific standards in secondary grades in BC and this really should be addressed by the ministry.
Schools should implement good systems analogous to Quality Assurance programs. QA depends on procedures (lessons), specifications (curriculum) and standards. Final exams are a type of Quality Control - they are used as a check for final comparison to a standard. Provincial exams are certainly not the only assessment instrument that does QC. In terms of QC, probably the best use of a provincial exam would be for system wide assessment across BC. The government has chosen to use the literacy and numeracy exams for this purpose and I see nothing wrong with that.
Grade Inflation
I have a lot of problems with “grade inflation” in terms of what it actually refers to and what it represents. For me the problem is that it implies that high grades are easier to get and being gifted to students. I don’t believe this is usually the case. While it could be a fact that overall grade averages have risen over the last ten years (I haven’t checked this myself but I will accept it as being true for this post), I don’t believe that it represents the nefarious things that people think it does.
I believe higher grades are easier to get today than years ago partly because teachers are much more careful with their feedback to students and what students can do with their feedback. For example, I let students re-test learning objectives that they’ve improved on. So naturally this type of grading system will result in higher grades. What is happening is that schemes like this are grading something entirely different from schemes 20 years ago. 20 years ago a grade represented a snapshot of fast learning. The speed at which a topic was learned was intrinsically part of the grade. What newer grading schemes now do is try to take away the time factor. This isn’t necessarily bad, it just reflects a different purpose for grades in school.
Grades are also rising for a few other reasons. More students are accessing more tutors, which I think must have an overall positive effect in schools. As well, my anecdotal experience tells me that students are generally more serious than students years ago. I look out across my physics classes and I primarily see motivated students that work hard in class to do their best. If you think back 20 years ago to what your classes were like in grade 11 or 12, I think you’d remember something far different. Perhaps not, maybe my experience was uncommon,
Regardless of if or why there is grade inflation, what does this have to do with provincial exams? Is the exam a tool used to lower the average grade of students? If so, why does this help? Who does it help? How does having a kid graduate with a 74% average make any difference in their life as opposed to graduating with a 67% average? There is no reason I can think of as to why grade inflation would affect learning, and I see no advantage in using an exam to put downward pressure on grades.
University Admissions
This is where I think the pro-exam arguments really falter. To the best of my knowledge, universities won’t care at all about your grade 10, or even grade 11, provincial exams. I’m sure that when it comes down to student selection, these exam results are very, very far down the list of priorities for the universities. If a student doesn’t get accepted because of a grade 10 provincial exam score then that probably speaks to the weakness of the rest of the student’s application.
Furthermore, most students are already accepted to a university even before they write a grade 12 provincial exam. There’s no reason to think that universities are going to re-do all of their admissions after receiving a grade 12 provincial exam grade in July or August. I’m sure this is one of the reasons why grade 12 provincial exams were phased out over 10 years ago. The results of the exam were not used by universities.
I’ve read comments from several university profs and secondary school teachers saying that grade inflation is causing universities to admit students that are less capable than they were years ago. Let’s not kid ourselves here, if UBC has X,000 openings they will take in X,000 students. Whether the average grade is 90% or 78%, those top X,1000 applicants are still going to UBC. If you really think that students are not as smart as they used to be, consider the following. About 12 years ago, approximately 30% of secondary school students went to university. Now this number is closer to 65%. While I would like to think that we’re better at teaching students now than we were 10 years ago, the overall difference is surely small. Therefore it stands to reason that 12 years ago universities were, on average, accepting 70th percentile students, whereas now it is 35th percentile. My numbers may be off but the overall effect should be similar (I also firmly believe that our top students today are more sophisticated and knowledgeable than they were 20 years ago). If anyone has better data on this, I would love to see it. Anyways, universities are knowingly and willingly accepting a different student demographic than they used to. This has nothing to do with grade inflation or the fact that there are no longer grade 12 provincial exams, and it won’t change after we get rid of grade 10 and 11 provincial exams. It also wouldn’t change if we automatically reduce every student’s grade by 10%.
What is it good for?
Are provincial exams worth nothing then? To be honest, I don’t mind the idea of grade 12 provincial exams. I’m not entirely convinced of their usefulness but I don’t see much harm either. I’m sure the province could make good use of the data they collect. And maybe the students will get some practice in writing exams, and in some very small way help prepare them for university. Deep down I don’t think they are much practice though. There are not many similarities between a secondary school exam and a university exam. Universities examine a course that is 12 weeks in length compared to the 40 weeks at a secondary school. As well, in university the final exam is very likely one of only two or three assessments used for the whole course. The learning and preparation for a university exam are also drastically different. There’s no way to compare a classroom with 30 kids and all sorts of supports from peer tutors, teachers and counselors, to a 300 person lecture hall experience in first year university. When I stepped into the Armouries for my first final exam at UBC I didn’t find it at all familiar, it was apples to oranges. But, the grade 12 exams probably helped in some small way.
What about the kids?
This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be worried about our kids’ learning and schooling, that things cannot be improved, or that there aren’t any problems in BC education. I just happen to think that provincial exams are neither the cause nor the solution to any problems we have. And to properly answer the question “what is causing the problem?” we must first answer the question, “what is the problem?”