Teachers being taught to exploit exam system

A-Level and GCSE examiners are running a lucrative trade giving teachers

At £200-a-time seminars held in London and across the country, teachers are
being taught how to be "generous" in grading their pupils' coursework - by
just enough to avoid arousing the suspicions of exam watchdogs.

Examiners are telling teachers to "script" oral exams and give pupils a
"Burglar Bill swag bag" of key phrases that are guaranteed to score more points.

These are among the claims made in a book to be published next month entitled Education By Numbers: The Tyranny of Testing, which was written by education journalist Warwick Mansell.

One expert said today that while this was not cheating since it was allowed under the rules, the practice was certainly "unethical" and demonstrated why universities and employers were finding exam grades were increasingly unreliable.

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University said: "The gap between deep
education and results is growing all the time. These examiners are, in my view unethically, contributing to that process."

Professor Smithers said examiners' contracts should explicitly forbid them from coaching teachers in how to exploit gaps in the exams they set.

But ultimately, the blame lay with Tony Blair's government for its obsession with exam result "targets", Professor Smithers added.

He said the over-emphasis on testing encouraged schools to behave like athletes who took performance-enhancing drugs.

"It needs to be controlled in the same way that drug-taking by athletes needs to be controlled. Just in the same way as drugs give a false
impression of the capabilities of athletes, so does this kind of intensive preparation and teaching to the test give a false impression of abilities of children."

Mansell said he was allowed to attend two seminars held by French and history examiners, on condition their identities were not revealed.

These people are involved in deciding the content of the exams, and the setting of grade boundaries, according to his book.

The French examiner told teachers to advise pupils on what to write in their coursework, by giving them a store of key phrases to write into their exercise books, ready to transfer into coursework later.

Some schools called this the "Burglar Bill swag bag", the examiner said.

"If you do that, you are in with a shout. Children ... like this idea of stealing."

Coursework is marked by teachers and then a sample of the marks is checked - or "moderated" - for accuracy by external moderators employed by the main exam boards, Edexcel, AQA and OCR.

At the French GCSE seminar, the examiner urged teachers to be "realistically generous" in marking coursework so as not to attract the
attention of moderators.

And the examiner advised against teaching low-ability pupils much French grammar because it did not attract many marks at GCSE.

Mansell said that when one of the teachers at the seminar asked "if you judge them to be a 35, can you ... give them 37 or 38?", the examiner
replied: "That's right, if it's within the [exam board's] tolerance."

The teacher then said, "so, be generous?" and the examiner responded: "Yes, be realistically generous."

The French examiner even told teachers to give pupils 42 questions and answers to learn by heart over the two year course - and then select some for their oral exam.

The history examiner told his seminar attendees not to bother aiming for the highest quality work because it was not necessary for achieving an A*-grade.

And he said their performance in the end-of-course exams could be boosted by ensuring coursework assignments closely matched predicted exam questions.

The examiner said: "This is realpolitik, a question of ends justifying means. The grade boundaries are lower than you might think."

Professor Smithers said the problem was state schools were held to account via exam results which dictated their league table positions.

Private schools could afford to offer a much more rounded education because they did not depend on league table positions so completely for pupil numbers - and the money that came with them.