How to deal with bizarre situation with teacher, affecting daughter’s grades?

[gw186]

Summary:
Teacher of my daughter gave her a C on her final exam (all multiple choice, done on Canvas). My daughter asked only to see her Canvas report, the teacher refused, saying the exam questions and answers are confidential. Sch admin says they “checked”, but they can’t show us the report. What to do now?

Background: my daughter loves science and takes it seriously, and we were surprised when she told us she got a C (after studying for weeks) on her final exam. As the exam was all multiple choice and administered/ graded automatically by Canvas, it should have been straightforward to see the Canvas report.

But when my daughter approached her teacher about her score, the teacher refused to show her the Canvas report, saying that the exam questions and answers are confidential.

My daughter then asked if she could see her Canvas numerical score (not even the whole paper). The teacher also refused.

So after some back and forth, we approached the school admin.

The school admin said they “checked” with the teacher and everything is correct, but they also can’t show us the Canvas report, or even the Canvas numerical score.

What do you reckon is our best course of action right now? Not to put too dark of a picture on this, but my daughter tells me she thinks several of her and her classmates had their scores pushed down, and maybe the school is trying to cover things up, because if they change the score back for her, they probably have to do the same for others as well when the word gets out, and then it’s going to be a messy PR situation.

Why would the school want to push their grades down? What year is she? Does this count to anything official?

Why do you think the teacher would do this? Ask yourself honestly, could your daughter not be as good as you/she thinks they are at this subject?

Do you know if any of the other students or parents were surprised by poor results? Might be better dealt with as a group?

Ok, there's a number of things here.

Firstly, it's fairly normal for students to get their exam papers back to look through, but if it is for a formal mock there will be occasions where it is appropriate not to release the papers to the student, just the grade, so this isn't in itself a red flag.

Secondly, a multiple-choice online exam is something either written by the school or from a bought-in scheme, not a past paper from the exam board (as AFAIK UK exams aren't ever fully multiple choice - happy to be corrected if so). In which case the "grade" isn't actually linked to anything other than the teacher's own judgement, as it can't relate properly to the exam board grades. Again this is fine if the grade is being used only as an indication of progress in this one area but won't affect anything nor have any bearing on her final grade. In this case it doesn't matter if everyone's grades have been brought down - that's part of the teacher's professional judgement and won't be any sort of PR issue - it's the sort of thing teachers do for internal tests/exams all the time to a certain extent.

What year is she in? Will she be taking external exams soon? Is she in sixth form, does this affect her predicted grades for university?

Thanks for your inputs! It’s great to have a range of ideas and perspectives.

Maybe just to provide more context,

I guess as parents our intuitions are very often correct, because we’ve been with our kids for years / have the benefit of long term observation etc. In this case, I trust my daughter when she’s been telling me she really thinks something is not right with the grading. I helped quiz her a few times in the lead-up to the exam, and she got majority of the answers right. So I believe her when she tells me she didn’t think she messed up or if the exam was that difficult (she mentioned it was ok right afterwards)

Even if she did get a C, from my perspective if I were to take an objective look / eg. try to view it as though it’s someone else and their daughter, it’s no problem in the sense that it’s not going to affect her long run goals or anything. If she did get a C and the true Canvas reports show that, then it’ll just mean she needs to do more studying if she wants to improve. But the issue it seems is the teacher is not even letting her view the Canvas score reports.

The situation with her and a few of her classmates I mentioned relates to a few demographic details, in short if they as a group indeed all had their grades pushed down on the multiple choice final exams, and it was discovered that the teacher had indeed done so specifically for that group of students who share the same demographic features, the concern maybe is that the teacher/ school admin would not look great from a PR/ optics standpoint.

I guess there are several possibilities
(a) My daughter got a C, we view the true Canvas report which confirms thus, no problem, knowing my daughter she’d probably just study more to improve next time.
(b) My daughter did not get a C, the true Canvas report shows she got another grade, the teacher made a mistake in reporting the score, with the transparency of grading we fix this. eg. If we don’t do anything, and it happens again it’ll be a continued series of bad grades for no reason

The situation just seems that after the teacher refused to show us my daughter’s Canvas report (even the numerical report), the school admin seems to be trying to sweep things under the rug by just saying they “checked” and there are no issues, perhaps fearing opening the can of worms on the optics situation above. But honestly, if they show us the Canvas report, and if there are any errors, have those be fixed, I don’t think we’d even bother to ask follow-up questions/ or try to cause them PR issues etc, so I don’t know what they’re fearing, in showing us the Canvas report

I think you still haven’t answered the question of why you/your daughter think the teacher would have wanted to push down the grades incorrectly? You mention demographics - do you think the teacher is discriminating against your child based on a certain characteristic?

Schools don't mark down, they have absolutely nothing to gain (quite the opposite) from poor exam results. I suspect you are that parent (dad?), the more useful context here would be why you don't trust the school and why you feel that they need to 'prove' the results to you?

I guess it can be emotionally challenging to deal with the non-zero possibility that teachers/ school admin are humans, not perfect all the time, have personal prejudices too like everyone else, etc

To be honest I didn’t expect some of the replies to be so against even the action of merely asking for the numerical score reports

I’m sure some of us, in their experiences so far, have been fortunate to be in worlds where everything and everyone are perfect all the time, but it doesn’t invalidate the experiences of others

If everything is just as it is, why is it such a travesty to ask for the Canvas true report. It takes maybe 3 seconds to print out a sheet of paper

To add, my daughter is one of those types who has super thick skin (LOL, if i say so myself), so it’s not like she’s too emotionally sensitive to “handle the truth”, because sometimes i hear the stuff she and her friends say to each other and teenage girls can be brutally honest

If she got a C and the true Canvas reports actually show that, I think at this point she’d actually be relieved to find out her and my suspicions are not true.

But, & this coming from someone who’d dealt with types in the real world who have no problem lying until forced to produce real evidence, it’s not crazy in this day and age to think about the non-zero possibility that things like this can happen, intentionally or not

The situation just seems that after the teacher refused to show us my daughter’s Canvas report (even the numerical score report to confirm the # correct graded by computer), the school admin seems to be trying to sweep things under the rug by just saying they “checked” and there are no issues, perhaps fearing opening the can of worms on the optics situation above.

We’ll think about it more and probably decide something over the weekend

But if you had the numerical score - what would that tell you? What is a C, or an A or a B...? You don't know what the grade boundaries are, or what each question is assessing so without that the numerical score is fairly useless. I suspect you're right that the school doesn't want you to compare them with other students' scores but not because they have something to hide, but because you don't actually know what those scores means.

You say it is final exams - is this in the UK? No UK course bases its final grades on a teacher-administered and marked exam. If it's an internal one, it's meaningless (in the great scheme of things I mean).

I've not heard of Canvas.

I guess next steps depend on:

• is this internal exams or some sort of external provision


• will this grade impact options / sets going forward


• will they have the same teacher next year


• how much you are willing to rock the boat


• whether other parents would support rocking the boat

If the teacher is downmarking all the black students, or all the students from the council estate then that would be atrocious, and you think would potentially come up in monitoring (why is this type of student doing poorly / worse in this type of exam). It would be a highly unprofessional thing to do.

Is there a head of Department you could talk to? 'DD doesn't understand how come she did so badly, please could we/she see her test, even if just in a secure room that she can't take away with her?'

To clarify, is there a group of pupils who sense that perhaps their marks aren’t right? If so, do those pupils share a demographic characteristic? This alone makes the situation worth clearing up with respect for all parties involved.

As a parent you probably do have a good intuition for how your DD feels about her performance. About the performance itself on the day, it would be best to clear your mind of any assumptions and approach this objectively.

No matter what happened it would be awful for these children to carry a suspicion that their teacher has been prejudiced against them and no one has taken this seriously. Action is much more likely to be effective coming from a group of parents.

I agree with PPs however: you need to answer to yourself, and preferably let us help you assess, why such prejudice would exist. Teachers skew liberal and idealistic. Although there is a fair amount of unconscious bias, you are hinting at something much worse and rather shocking. What makes you think this fear is realistic?

Having said that, I don’t understand why, in order to prevent a group of children from feeling stigmatised at a sensitive time in life, someone at school cannot figure out a way to show these pupils they were fairly treated. I would hope that putting it to the school that way might get you some clarity.

I understand that you and your daughter feel that some of the class have been given lower grades than they should have.

What was the motivation for giving this demographic group lower marks?

Wouldn't the teacher look better if the marks were higher?

Thank you all, I'll be back tomorrow/ regularly to post updates, etc. Unfair things do happen & while we cannot protect our children from stuff all the time, at least i want to know i've tried to support them when they truly feel like something is wrong/ can benefit from an adult stepping in.

In this day and age, I know a sensitive matter when i see one & the demographic issue is the specific one which I think might be the fear of the school admin in releasing the true Canvas report. ie. Literally my daughter and the small group of peers who feel the grades for the multiple choice exam have been lowered are of the same demographic (a few other boys of another demographic had remarked in class they did surprisingly well), and yes, if the true Canvas reports when produced show that they had their marks pushed down, it's going to look ugly

But to be honest, at this point,

• We'd probably be relieved if our suspicions weren't realized, when the true Canvas reports are shown to us, which the teacher, then the school admin refused so far (they just said they "checked")

• If the marks had been pushed down, I reckon as long as they fix it, we wouldn't press on with too many questions, because I know as an adult in this day and age once the demographic issue gets reported/ brought out in public, the discussion can be really triggering and nothing hardly gets done by way of real progress it seems in terms of people's private attitudes, but that's just my opinion

It seems pretty fucking obvious to me that this is a race issue. Is that correct Op?

It's completely reasonable for the school to refuse to provide a copy of the questions and answers if these are live questions that will be used again. Many online tests are made up of a large bank of questions that are pushed out repeatedly in a different order to different exam takers over years. They are not like GCSEs where once the exam is over the questions are retired and so past papers can be given out to use as practice.

If they give you the questions and answers they will have to retire them from the bank and won't be able to use them again.

If the test has been auto scored by the system then there is no room for the teacher to have marked them wrong out of bias, and if they have been double checked by a second person then that should give you assurance.

I can completely understand the frustration of asking for information which is about you and ‘belongs’ to you, and being refused for no reason which holds up under scrutiny. Would there be any right of access to the information under the GDPR by submitting a Subject Access Request to the school?

I'm a secondary teacher and I agree that it's v odd they won't give further feedback. It's useful for your DD to know where she can improve - this is the line I would take with the school. Is this a private or state school out of interest?

Do we know how old OP's DD is yet? Do we know if it's an internal mock? Do we know if other classes have still to sit the exam hence the school not wanting to release any more information? Do we know why OP went to the teacher and then the school office rather than the HOD or HOY?

So many questions ...

It’s hard isn’t it if there is wrong doing and it’s being covered up by the head…

It would be worth contacting Ofqual with your concerns. They deal with exam malpractice in secondary schools. They might view you as a whistleblower and investigate the school. If they can’t (if it’s outside their remit), they will help you determine what authority you can approach to investigate the school.
www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ofqual/about/complaints-procedure

You could submit a subject access request, as if there was any discussion by email where your DD was named, that might give an indication of any underlying issues. Or reassure you.

My instinctive reaction is that it is less likely in an automated marking system and everybody can have a bad test without realising it at the time, but that doesn't mean there isn't an issue somewhere else.

It makes a huge difference what type of test this is, what year group and what level! Ofqual won’t give a damn about the administration of an internal test, not least because there’s no requirement for standardisation among one class. I imagine a class all twittering about certain groups doing better than others would make the school less likely to release the scores - it’s not up to students to pore over perceived mistakes. Also it really depends what the test is for - I’ve sometimes had borderline test results where I’ve marked one student on the border as a higher grade and another with the same number mark on the lower grade because I knew that one needed confidence and one a kick up the arse. It’s perfectly normal for that sort of thing to happen internally because you sometimes want a very accurate set of grades and you sometimes want to highlight that a class aren’t working hard etc.

I was going to suggest subject access request.

Plus I've never heard of students being refused access to exam results question and answers (they can't be that confidential as she was shown questions and typed the answers herself!)

But without knowing what was right and wrong how do they know what areas to study extra on?

I'm also curious to know what age your child is and if this is a formal exam or just an internal assessment.

DS's school have refused to return their papers or provide anything other than a grade in their Biology mocks A levels in year 13. I am pretty cross about this because it means he hasn't learned where he went wrong, if there were any weak spots in his knowledge etc. The feeling amongst the pupils is that the school messed up the level of question setting (they were internally set, not past papers) and had to fudge grade boundaries. I contemplated getting involved to see his paper and how it translated to his grade but instead chose to buy the text book and encourage him to increase his revision.

Are you in the UK? This post comes across very US - a cursory Google suggests canvas is used more in the US too. If so I’m Nita sure how useful most of the advice will be on here.