Testing times

Today, children across the country will be taking their Key Stage 2 SATs exams. Firstly, good luck to them. These are exams the children have worked hard for, and they deserve praise for this, no matter what controversy is surrounding the exams themselves. There is controversy though. Let’s start with the fact that the exams were leaked online. Admittedly, only to a secure website targeted at exam markers. While these exam markers are mostly primary school teachers, and it wouldn’t be beyond them to maybe drop a few hints to the children before the exam starts, they are also trusted professionals, most of whom won’t even have seen the leaked material anyway, so it’s not as though the exam papers were publically available on a national website for an extended period of time. Like the Key Stage 1 SATs were last month for example.

The problem is clearly endemic. I’m not worried about the effect on the children’s results. I don’t think any children taking the test will actually have had an opportunity to see the leaked material. What is worrying is that procedures that should have been in place before the first leak still haven’t been tightened up enough to prevent the second leak. Those of us outside of government learn from our mistakes. Those in government simply look for someone to blame.

The other controversy is around the difficulty of the tests. Much has been made of the fact that the parents, indeed the politicians who are setting the curriculum, are unable to answer the questions. Well, so what? I don’t often agree with David Cameron, but I had to applaud him when he refused to answer a grammar question in parliament on the grounds that, "The whole point of these changes is to make sure our children are better educated than we are." In fact, Chris Moyles read out a few example questions on his breakfast show this morning and, while adults around the country were stumped, most callers to the show reported that their 11 year olds were smashing it. Proof positive that, if we complain when the tests are ‘too hard’ and equally complain when the tests are ‘too easy’, we are doing a disservice to the children themselves. Having set tests myself, I’d say the only issue is when the tests don’t contain a range of questions, from impossibly hard to impossibly easy, allowing the examinees to spread themselves along the range and appropriately discriminate their ability. There’s even a handy mechanism, calibration, whereby those scores can be compared against previous tests and an appropriate grading applied. It’s almost as if standardized testing had been going on for years, and simply needs tweaks and course correction, rather than razing to the ground and replacing with a brand new, equally fallible system every time an education minister wants to make their mark.

We will always have testing, however. No matter how egalitarian we wish our society to be, it is also important to have some level of meritocracy such that each ends up performing to their strengths, rather than having a plumber attempting to lecture on quantum chromodynamics while Steven Hawking struggles in vain to change a stopcock. So here’s to our future politicians, scientists, business leaders, trade professionals and academics. It all starts here. After all, as has been made abundantly clear in parliament, if you can differentiate your subordinating conjunction from your preposition, then the world might just well be your oyster.