Poor handwriting in schools is holding pupils back

[GranolaGal]

Story in The Times this morning saying that kid's handwriting is so bad that they are being marked down in their exams. No wonder as everything is done on a laptop or an iPad!

From the story: Poor handwriting in Scottish schools is holding pupils back with bemused assessors increasingly deducting marks from “indecipherable” exam papers.
Scottish assessors have noted a “significant” decline in the presentation and legibility of test papers in recent years.
Handwriting is becoming a lost art in the age of social media, texting and emojis, but legible writing is a prerequisite for some universities.

Would be interested to hear everyone else's thoughts?

Poor handwriting in schools is holding pupils back

I moved my sons from Scotland to England and they had to have urgent handwriting intervention. I think the problem is particularly bad in Scotland where cursive isn’t taught or emphasised (not taught at all in our school, but may be in others)

as a lecturer I still don’t find most scripts that bad to be honest but students do write a lot LESS than they used to

Exam boards are increasingly behind the times in requiring everything to be handwritten.

It’s almost the only way possible to stop AI writing all the exam scripts.

Story in The Times this morning saying that kid's handwriting is so bad that they are being marked down in their exams.

Just the one kid? 😁

Of course people need to know how to write legibly, but at the same time there's little point focussing so hard on learning something that you simply won't use (much) once you leave school.

It's crucial from an academic integrity pov. I'm a university lecturer and have next to zero faith in anything that wasn't produced with a pen and paper in an invigilated exam hall.

My handwriting is pretty dire but it didn't stop me getting a first class degree from a top university

My children have much more tidy handwriting but sometimes I feel that has been at the expense of children just enjoying getting their ideas down. Same with the focus on grammar over creativity.

There's a happy medium somewhere

Agreed with this, I think there needs to be a rethink about coursework really too

I had a scribe for exams her handwriting was lovely, my sons all have similar handwriting to me it is legible though except my youngest who writes strange big letters and holds his pen very weirdly, thoughts he is dyspraxic and his very hypermobile fingers seem to make holding a pen uncomfortable. All the kids at my son’s school have laptops too which likely doesn’t help with handwriting.

I am not at all surprised. Our son's primary school (central Scotland) really doesn't seem interested. We complained to them that they'd just reinforced the idea that handwriting didn't matter. We self-referred him for occupational therapy, and the OT was appalled at the school’s disinterest and his handwriting. It's slowly improving, but only because we get him to practise at home.

It's not only words though that are badly written, I mark GCSE Maths and the number of marks lost when 0 and 6, 4 and 7 etc are not clear is huge. I will sometimes realise later in the script that the candidate always writes an idiosyncratic 4 and go back to change marks but I am sure some are missed.

Couldn’t agree more @SweetSakura . At parents evening last year the teacher was pretty brutal about DDs handwriting being terrible (she was 5 at the time btw!) and I felt had totally missed the point that DD loved writing and was producing story books and making loads of effort to write. Being left handed also seemed to create some challenges that weren’t really addressed.