To hate controlled assessments

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My daughter has one in English today. It is such a ghastly farce. With advance notice of the title, the children pre-write their answer, reduce it to the crib sheet they are allowed to take in with them and then do their best to learn it off by heart. Result: all spontaneity lost, no chance to demonstrate skills (except for memory and regurgitation), massive waste of time at home, pointless stress, 8 hours of wasted teaching time, demolition of any residual enjoyment of the text.

The only thing my daughter has learnt from this exercise so far is how many words fit on a typed A4 page, as the word count is disabled for some bizzarre reason - farcically in case it helps them! This after giving them the question in advance.

And asked to help, I offer her ideas, only to be told she had better not include them in case they dont match the marking criteria.

Why they don't just do a completely blind open book 8 hour assessment? That at least would be a proper test.

I've spoken to teachers who think it's a grand waste of time too. They spend so much time invigilating the assessments, that could be used for actual teaching instead. Isn't there a plan to scrap them very soon?

I just don't understand them. Ds maintains that they must not have help under any circumstances, but I keep banging on that everyone else (I sound like the teenager now!) has their work checked/or even done for them at home and certainly do not wing it on the day with a few notes.

How can it possibly be fair if one kid is producing all his/her own work and another has had their essay primped to within an inch of its life by teachers or parents?

I thought they were brought in to replace coursework because parents and teachers were helping too much with coursework.

As long as your daughter is bright and unflappable, I suspect she will do better not to have done all this preparation. As an adult, I know that nothing kills a piece of good work like having to rehash it over and over again. Controlled assessments must be like that feeling you get when you spend ages typing something good and then the computer crashes and you have to resurrect it.

The one that got me most was the "creative" writing - good god - they wrote their entire piece and then learnt it off by heart - who knows what they are doing with the whole 8 hours - counting and shaving off words, by the sounds of it. And the saddest thing is that my daughter's creative work is very good, but it will have lost its edge by becoming an exercise in how good your memory is. And she is too young to understand that the preparation may not be such as good idea, since everybody is doing it.

And the word count thing really gets me - all those children counting their words - for gods sake, why don't they just say "4 sides of A4" or whatever.

I'm an English teacher (on maternity leave, don't flame me for MNing at work!) and completely agree that they are an absolute joke. I remember the meeting where the head of dept explained them to us:

"So they write it in lesson using a vague essay plan that we've all discusssed together we give them feedback, then they rewrite it in the next lesson and we mark it again?"
"Yes"
"WTAF?"

To be fair, the old system of coursework was equally useless as we'd spend half of our marking time googling sentences from pupils' work to confirm that yes, it had been copied and pasted from Wikipedia.

I quite like the idea of the long open book exam suggested above, but can't see how it would work alongside all the assessment requirements for other subjects.

The word count thing annoys teachers too. I see so many pupils counting their words and just want to scream "write, don't count!"