Shake up of Scottish exam system

[GTTSR]

I don’t know how to feel about this. Will come in 2031…just as my child hits 4th year of high school. The whole Scottish education system needs overhauled… not sure tinkering with exams is quite going to cut it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz6yzp1dl1jo

It’s like putting a used plaster on a gunshot wound.

And still no mention on AI?

All universities have taken a stance on it, the idea that individual schools can be accountable for its use is insane!

The mention of getting rid of longer exams, also goes it direct contrast to what AI is causing in tertiary education as there is a move away from course work weighting to invigilated exams, as imperfect as they are, are the only way to ensure the work hasn’t been written by AI.

It’s just a rebranding of the SQA with the sane staff and same qualifications. Total waste of money.

Surely replacing CfE with something less obviously shite should be the priority?

You would think so…then figure out the right qualifications once you have the quality ingredients…but as ever…that would require some degree of coordination which we seem completely unable to achieve in this country.

I’ve said this before, but thank god my kids are in secondary school already. The exams just now aren’t great but knowing the SQA…oops QS, it’ll be even worse than what we have. I am also intending to resign as a high school teacher in a few years so I will not be around to see the shitshow it becomes.

How can you judge QS when it’s a totally and utterly new body though? Not just the SQA with new stationary. No, no, no, no,no!

Shame on me @Lillitut Imagine thinking that this is just an SQA rebrand 😂

I drove past the SQA (QS) building at sherrif hall yesterday. Lovely new sign. Pity the education system is so awful.

It's not hard to fix, really.

Provide small classes for children with asn.
Move very violent children from mainstream into specialist schools
Provide a curriculum similar to England where all children have the same focus (eg place value) at the same time of year ( I'm talking about primary ).
Put in place requirements for additional support in the classroom ( PSAs or team teaching) as teachers cannot support the children now sitting on mainstream classes.

They do need to throw the CfE out of the window. Theres no point teaching analysis skills without teaching actual knowledge too. A lot of the social science / English exams are dire. So many marks for laying out your answers rather than the knowledge you’re trying to show. It makes no sense at all.

I would agree that all of that is necessary but surely that is down to government policy rather than the qualifications body.

The Qualification body is a quango whose results are the responsibility of government. They build qualifications based on government policy.

Did we not just have a qualifications review? That seemed to ignore the actual exams and just say you should only take an exam at the highest level you intend to study that subject at and build a weird sort of official CV supposedly to ‘close the gap’ but clearly something students from privileged backgrounds would be able to do most towards?

From what I've read this is going to be more dumbing down. You'd think the Scottish education system had reached rock bottom, but they just keep on digging.

I was shocked to discover pupils can copy and paste from the internet for the easier exams. Nat 4s.

Nat 4s aren't exams though - all continuous assessment.

Yup. You can literally get a full N4 in an afternoon. 😬

Only if the teacher accepts that - I certainly wouldn't. It's open book so using your own classwork is fine, but not pasting in without understanding.

My kids seem to have picked up loads of nat 4 s along the way without seeming to do anything for them. Sort of devalues them for those for whom they were designed. Also my kids seem to get really high marks just for memorising whole essays and spitting them out. No curiosity, no understanding. They can tell you how to answer every type of exam question but couldn't convincingly argue a different point of view or research anything. It's a rubbish system. Although I do agree with trying to keep it broader than a levels. 3 subjects for final two years is far too narrow.

Someone who is completing Nat 5s shouldn’t have any issue picking up Nat 4s in those subjects, after all he should have studied beyond Nat 4 level so all his work should show at least a Nat 4 level of understanding. But what is the point of that? The SQA has tried to discourage dual presentation like that. Nat 4s (and Nat 1/2/3s) are for people unable to obtain a qualification at a higher level at that point. Once you have the next level of qualification they become pretty irrelevant.

I agree about spitting out rote learnt essays in exams. They spend months learning how to answer each of various question types following specific formulas, but the actual subject matter is barely passed over.

The Curriculum for excellence system of just six Nat 5s in S4 is ridiculously narrow - so much so that it is widely ignored with many schools offering eight. I like the idea of five subjects thereafter offering more breadth but the courses are much too short and combined with the aforementioned crazy exams I don’t think are good qualifications. A levels across two years gives you much more space to get to grips with the subject, rather than just a few topics, and you don’t effectively waste the summer term of the equivalent of S5.

I'm guessing that part of the problem is that the system doesn't trust, or is overprotective of, examiners. Examiners should know the curriculum inside out and should be able to judge an exam paper on its genuine merits, not on whether the exact right 2 words have been used in the right place. I remember someone taking geography as an adult and finding that they got a mark for rain but not for precipitation. Do children have the freedom and confidence to write essays the way we used to - just given free rein to write whatever came to mind? I remember being great at essays and we were never taught how to write them. We just wrote them in our own style and got high marks if they were good.

presumably that's what continuous assessment would achieve?

They have to be consistent across different examiners, and that's how they achieve it.

It's hard to see the balance between exams, which encourage rote learning, and coursework, which encourages cheating/AI.

Universities are looking at going back to vivas, but that seems extreme for children at school

I don't think exams have to lead to rote learning, if they're well designed and there are good and trusted examiners, who can do more than just check that exactly the "right" word has been put into each box. Think about university level exams - a 3 hour paper to write 3 essays (which you won't have been able to rote learn for). Examiners are able to mark those. That's possible at school level too.
As well as a lack of trust in examiners, what has destroyed the system is the obsession with closing the gap between weaker and stronger pupils, to reach an equal outcome. This hasn't worked. What has happened is that all pupils now achieve less, while the gap has in fact widened. The government's response is to keep on digging - to make education easier and easier. We've heard that they're now considering getting rid of exams in some subjects and giving marks for things like taking part in sport outside of school. Anything that they (wrongly in fact) believe will help the lower-achieving (often socially disadvantaged) children to score higher.
I believe that in England schools are required to aim to help all pupils to reach their potential. In Scotland the aim is for all pupils to achieve the basics. That's very unfair on children (the majority) who have the potential to achieve more, and it's very unfair on Scotland itself. Do we really want uneducated and unchallenged and unmotivated people to be taking on our top jobs?

If you're used to the Scottish system, I think it's easy not to get just how low-achieving it is. There was a useful thread on MN recently where lots of people who'd moved to Scotland from other countries with their children all said that they had found Scottish education to be far easier and slower than the education systems their children had been in in their original countries. Even the poster from the US said that, and US education is renowned for being poor. Scottish children are on a whole different level from other children around the world. If you leave your child's education to their Scottish state school, they are highly likely to end up less well educated than most people on the planet, and they may well end up demoralised, without a good work ethic, etc.