Corona Diaries: exam assessments – pity the poor teachers

We must spare a thought for our teachers, as they get to grips with assessing their students for grades in lieu of the annual GCSE and A Level exams.

Not only are they accused of potential unconscious bias against black and Asian kids, but they face the unenvious task of having to justify in detail each grade they award for fear of sparking off a blizzard of complaints from students and parents. And from the Daily Mail, of course.

I learned how difficult this is when I had to rate the performance of a bunch of smart high-school kids in Bahrain who were competing for places on a state-funded university scholarship scheme. Those who made the cut could take their choice from some of the best universities in the world. I helped to design the programme, and we took special care with the rating criteria.

But it was still a tough and often subjective exercise, made all the more difficult given the stakes for these sixty kids. Fortunately the ratings were only recommendations, and no doubt other considerations were taken into account when the government made its selections.

There’s another factor that I hope the teachers will take into account, though I’m not sure how they will do so. Again, my life experience informs me.

I was bright enough at thirteen to win a scholarship to the private school where I spent the next four years. But thereafter I winged it. There were too many interesting extracurricular activities that distracted me. I did OK in my exams, but only because I had an excellent short-term memory that enable me to get way with last-minute revision, sometimes all night before the exam. If I’d been assessed on my performance in normal class and project work, I would have been in deep shit.

But I did enough to get to university, which was not as easy in those days as it is today, and the rest is history. Well, my unspectacular history anyway. Suffice it to say that if I’d screwed up those exams, my life would have been very different. Not worse perhaps, because there’s always the chance of redemption in adult life. But just different.

So I hope that teachers are able to find a way to accommodate the hares as well as the tortoises, because if I had been in the same position as many kids today, I might have been bitterly regretting all the acting, cricket and other less mentionable stuff I did in the run-up to my exams.

While it’s true that there’s more course work these days than there was in the Sixties, if exams are not still critical determinants of grades, you wonder why students still get nervous about them. And, as we all know, they are.

I hope the whole process of awarding grades goes smoothly, but I fear that whatever measures are in place to ensure fairness, this is going to be one of the issues of the summer. And naturally, the media will happily gorge on it.

So while our attention has mainly been focused on children whose education has been affected by lockdown, let’s not ignore the tsunami of recrimination and complaints that might well roll over our teachers as they struggle to do the right thing.

They need our support and sympathy as well.