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.

If you think there’s an issue with racial discrimination from the teacher/in the school, then I’d suggest addressing that directly with the head. Fixating on the results of a multiple choice test on the canvas VLE is a distraction if the issue is you think the teacher is due grading girls of a particular race.

I haven’t used canvas but the quiz functions in similar VLEs tends to be more or less automated. You make the test, set the dates, the students take it and canvas does all the marking and gives out scores (or presumably grades if you set it that way) to the students on a certain date. There isn’t really a way to change the scores in the systems I’ve used in the way you describe.

It may be that the test was set up in such a way that it’s just not possible to give a more detailed run down of things to you.

OP,

Many of us hate bias and do not want your DD or other children victimised by it. But @HalfShrunkMoreToGo has a good point: questions from a multiple choice question bank must be kept confidential, and are usually auto-graded. Are you accusing the teacher of changing the answers on children’s papers? Or of mis-marking papers, which may or may not even be possible? I think you are entitled to know the marking process, BTW.

With your DDs best interests at heart and with a career as a university academic who has sat on a number of appeals committees, I must say that your language around a potentially serious case of discrimination is rather vague.

We could help you better if you were more direct. If you are going to pursue a complaint you will need to be at that time. (I respect your instinct but you haven’t given us any evidence - past behaviour would be the big thing, there might be more)

What exactly does this test mean to your daughter? Is it a formal exam, contributing to a Final official grade or is it just a classroom test to assess level of understanding and drive teachers decisions on areas of focus?

As I said earlier if the questions are used for other people at different times then it is highly unlikely they will release the Questions and Answers to you.

The way it works is that the test bank will have say 200 questions in it. Each person doing the test is randomly assigned 50, 10 tagged as this topic, 10 tagged as that topic and so on. So everyone gets a different set of questions. No one taking an exam can accurately remember all the questions they got so the questions can be reused over and over for this years class, next years, this month for this school, next month for that school. If however the questions and answers are provided it's possible they could be posted online or something and impact the integrity of the overall exam.

The questions and answers will be protected under intellectual property laws and a SAR would likely result in an answer of no we can't provide that and here's the reasonable justification as to why. SARS can be refused if there is a reasonable reason.

You may be able to get a screenshot of just the score on the report from Canvas but I'm not sure if that would help.

Looks like you can piss about with marks in canvas. There’s a ‘fudge grades’ feature.

But there’d be a clear record of that being done in canvas. The school would see that things had been regraded etc.

Given how busy teachers are though, I can’t imagine they manually graded anything when multiple choice quizzes mark themselves.

So you're saying the teacher is racist or other phobic, and has marked down a group of students accordingly?

Crikey, you’re ‘that parent’ aren’t you!

looks like it.

But on a virtual learning environment that will log all these kind of actions. The school have checked this and agree with the teacher. So I think the OP is accusing them of covering it up as a minimum.

I think it’s the Year 1 phonics screening 😂

Canvas is an online automatic tool. But it does list other students data too.
Accept the grade. That's what she got

@SoggyPaper that ‘fudge grades’ feature is really interesting. I would think that if there are demographic concerns, a group of parents including the OP is entitled to see how that was used on their children’s papers.

I agree with PPs from p1 - I dare not flip back to credit them and risk getting bounced out of this reply - that it would help to know the DD’s year, her overall grade, and whether she is in the U.K. (I also wonder whether the post is American - it is certainly fine if it is)

Are you in the USA op?

Yeah

I wouldn't be happy with that.

I'd definitely press for more information, or they need to find a different method to allay your concerns.

It might be they are locked questions in which case no you can’t have it.

it might be they haven’t moderated them yet

it might be they have someone coming into school to mark, internal moderation or external

it is completely fine not to give grades back

my daughters school they are getting marks and possible grades but not actual as it’s messed up and no one knows what the grade boundaries will be.

If you're not satisfied, then email HOY or HOD and ask for clarification.

Keep your message simple though, you want a straightforward answer as to (a) what the score was or (b) why they can't release the detail to you.

Once you've had a reply, then you can go back with more debate - I'm afraid your style of writing comes across rather accusatory rather than clarifying. You might well be justified in raising this issue, and your suspicions could well be upheld. But I'd recommend a soft approach initially.

Why on earth would they push scores DOWN?

Sorry, but this post is just screaming "USA helicopter parent" to me.

Alternatively, a USA poster fed up of blatant discrimination.

Yes, I definitely would try and be as amicable with them as possible, there's no benefit to making it an altercation. Part of the reason for being a bit tight with identifying details is the situation can be delicate right now with people (sorry)

It's really the sense that something is amiss that we decided to jump in and get involved ourselves, it just didn’t seem right.

To clarify,

The exam was run on Canvas as a multiple choice exam.

After the exam, the teacher “muted” the automatic score report for Canvas, which would have been available to indicate the computer graded # correct.
Then, they verbally told the students what they got, the numerical grade for the exam.

My daughter was told she got a numerical grade which translated to a C.
The “checking” the school admin did so far was to literally email us a reply saying they “checked” (no Canvas printout, which is specifically available by the way, for the numerical score), and they left it at that, saying they “checked” and nothing was wrong. No documentation or Canvas printout of the computer scores, which we specifically asked for.

That’s why the situation got totally bizarre, it takes 3 seconds to print out the page from the website, but even now the official numerical score from the multiple choice exam is still “muted” for us on Canvas

My daughter and I think a few of her peers (ie same demographics) who are in the same situation are worried as they have the same teacher next term, and especially if there's more "discretionary" type grading thrown into the mix (this time it's just all multiple choice), my sense is they should resolve the situation asap

Theres another possibility. Your dd isnt good at multiple choice tests. I tried a couple online through an online course and I was surprised at how tricky they can be. So she might know her stuff but just have misread some questions, or missed some nuance in the answers.

How old is your daughter?

Are you in the US

I’ve never used Canvas so I’m not sure how they work.

However my students don’t take GCSEs in the normal way and do a topic at the end of every term which I mark and then send off to the examination board.

Once they’ve done their tests they’re not allowed to see their test papers only the grade, as they’re confidential. I assume it’s because they use similar questions so it can be classed as an unfair advantage if they re-take it or if they tell their friends.

If it’s a practice paper then you can see what you got wrong to improve next time.

As I say I don’t know if this is the case.
If it’s a proper exam then you can ask for someone to check their marking and appeal.

What you are suggesting here though is that

A - the teacher lied and deliberately gave a lower score verbally than the system says your daughter got

B - the other member of staff has been into the system and confirmed the result then again lied and given you and your daughter a lower result than the system says.

If you have so little trust in the school that your daughter is attending, shouldn't you be looking for a different school?

At this point you seem to believe the teacher is discriminating and the admin staff are facilitating and supporting that discrimination.

How old is your child?

As the exam was all multiple choice and administered/ graded automatically by Canvas, it should have been straightforward to see the Canvas report.

Sorry just saw you wrote this - so it’s automatically graded.
Therefore the teacher couldn’t have lied.

If you’re really concerned then speak to the head of year to double check but it sounds like it’s definitely the correct grade.

Sometimes we can know everything there is to know about a topic but then exam day comes around and we do worse than expected because we’ve put too much pressure on ourselves, the right questions don’t come up, we’re not feeling great, we’re too stressed etc.

Exams can be so difficult and your daughter did fantastic to get a grade C.
Congratulate her for doing so well and don’t be too hard on her.

I don’t know if I should post this as I have no wish to start a bunfight!

Reading between the lines, I would guess the OP’s daughter and the other girls from her demographic are probably either white or middle class; they are typically the high achievers of the class but in this particular exam have been done more poorly than expected.

Some boys from another demographic (the black boys? Or the working class boys?) have done better than expected.

OP doesn’t know if the marking has been fudged (possibly because of some race or class related reason) and that is why her daughter has done poorly - or if indeed her daughter did get a more average mark than usual - and she feels she can’t work this out unless the school are transparent about the marking and give her a print out.

My thoughts are: maybe previous exams were marked by teachers and so unconscious bias meant the white girls did better and these are in fact the first ‘true’ marks? Or maybe the school are feeling embarrassed that some sort of combination of poor teaching/unconscious bias/certain demographics doing better or worse than others has actually resulted in a big disparity between results, they have realised this looks bad so they have dumbed down the results of certain people. However this seems like a dreadful idea ethically, and is it even possible with a computer marker exam?!

I think if this is an internal exam that doesn’t count for anything I would be reluctant to delve too deeply, I’d ask the teacher on detailed feedback on areas your DD needs to work on instead.