Pronouns in maths exams

[OhWhatFuckeryIsThisNow]

I scribe for GCSEs. Today was aqa maths, calculator paper. Now maths textbooks and exams have long done diverse names in the examples, eg, Sarah and Rashid are making cakes...Dafydd is planting a garden, Safira is buying rope. You get the drift. This year though I’ve noticed that gender neutral has been introduced. So Kai is making a cake, they use 50 grams of sugar. One could say that making the questions genderless is ok, and maybe so if it was consistent. So there was they their, he him and she her. A few of my fellow sribers said that their candidates were confused by the wording of the questions (especially the they/theirs, the kids thought there were more than one person being talked about). I was talking about it with the maths teachers later and all of them said why can’t it be Student A, student B? And especially why cant the exam board be consistent?

Standards are falling all over society. Sub editors are now a rare breed and simple errors routinely get published.

reflects the lived reality of chosen expression and pronoun identifier

I must say that I'm impressed at how you can use so many words and not actually say anything.

Once again, we are being shown that a faith in gender identity theory is incompatible with recognising the needs of pupils with disadvantages unrelated to gender. Instead of exam questions being written with the aim to provide thousands of teenagers (and mature students) the chance to prove their mathematical attainment under as fair conditions as possible, the aim becomes to prove that the question setter is 'down with the kidz'.

We don't want mathematical exam questions to reflect 'lived experiences'; they should be the mental equivalent of magnolia paint. We do not want 16 year old Paige, aspiring doctor, to lose marks because something about question 9 triggered emotional distress. We do not want hardworking 16 year old Andy, who has dyscalculia and maths anxiety but has been managing to get grade 4s on all past papers, to do worse than he deserves on the day, because he was confused by how many people were filling the bath in question 5.

This kind of stuff about reflecting lived experiences sounds like it's been regurgitated without examination, from a discussion of what poetry should be covered in English literature courses. That's not a debate I really want to get into, but what poems children should study in class over a two year period is wholly and completely different from how we should phrase questions in an unseen exam under test conditions.

We're not trying to get them interested in maths at the very last minute! It's too late for that. They've either decided they want to study it at higher levels or that they never want to see any maths again. Now the focus is, or should be, on giving them the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding to the best of their ability so they can get their target grades. So they can do what they want to with their lives, from college to apprenticeships. The exam candidates are real people, whose ambitions matter.

Okay. A few posts ago, I commented that screw ups happened with GCSE exam questions all the time. I said that after we were assured that if a question was on a paper, qualified people had made sure it was clear.

Suggestions said, Why do you think an examining body would provide an ambiguous question? These papers are proofread multiple times by multiple people to ensure clarity before being approved.

I've now gone and done a little bit of googling to see what other issues might have come up in this year's session with AQA specifically, because that's the board the OP mentioned.

Crikey. This is what happened last Friday. They fucked up one of the GCSE Physics papers, so it assessed subject content that teachers and candidates had been told wouldn't be covered.

AQA's public statement follows: An update on GCSE Physics Higher Tier Paper 1

The final question on our GCSE Physics (8463) Higher Tier Paper 1 on Thursday 9 June 2022 was about energy transfers and circuits.

Energy transfers were listed in the advance information (178.1 KB) as being assessed – but circuits were unfortunately listed as not being assessed.

To make sure students aren’t disadvantaged, we’ll be awarding everyone full marks for all parts of the question, which were worth a total of 9 marks.

We’re really sorry and we’re looking at why our checks didn’t pick this up. We’re also doing extra checks on the advance information and question papers for future exams.

AQA statement' on Physics paper 1

Yes Potholes "circuits-gate" was a bit of a thing. They gave everybody 9 marks for that question and apologised for the fuck-up.
They haven't admitted it, but it looks a lot like they mixed up the lists for advanced information for Foundation and Higher.

Not quite as bad perhaps as WJEC board leaving out 4 pages from the A level English lit paper.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-61737300

Thought this was interesting too - a coloured map and key in Geography that was inaccessible to colour blind students:
schoolsweek.co.uk/aqa-geography-gcse-question-inaccessible-to-colour-blind-pupils/

I’m going to go with she’s unemployable, unemployed, and generally very angry at the world.

It's good that they're doing that. Unfortunately, giving everyone full marks for that question won't undo the ramifications of nervous students being totally put off their stride. I'm fairly certain sitting an exam with questions that I hadn't covered used to be one of my recurring nightmares. I'm not sure how I would have dealt with it if I'd experienced it for real.

Perhaps AQA should have focused more on checking their science questions against the course specification than on sticking imaginary enbies into the maths papers.

That physics paper came up on here. Several mothers were really pissed off about it and their children were massively stressed. Some people told them they'd misunderstood and were basically telling them they were wrong.

I'm glad AQA has fessed up but it really showed how blindly people are convinced that there's no way that an exam board could get it wrong.

Given my disabilities and processing difficulties, I feel really angry and distressed at what a poster continues to argue. My suggestions (as per their username) are empathy training, removal of gender ideologically coloured lenses, and to fuck off with the offensive and insulting crap - please.

AQA sciences.

Exam board AQA has apologised for including an unanswerable question in its A-level Chemistry paper. Pupils sitting the exam this afternoon were told to leave out one of the questions in the paper.Schools were contacted about the mistake before today's exam to ensure students could be told, AQA has said.But some pupils on social media claimed that they were only notified in the middle of the exam - and some say they were not told at all.As reported by the Times Educational Supplement

I suppose we might all get higher grades in maths if the correct answer could be 3,4, or 5

Examining boards should use language that reflects the variety of lived experiences of the times, and schools, colleges etc should prepare their students adequately.

Why? why is that purpose of examining boards, to reflect lived experience, and not to test students' skills and knowledge? Sure, try to keep them vaguely relevant, fine. But not as the main purpose.

People have said that this particular use of language has caused problems, despite you saying that it "shouldn't".

Either you don't believe the people saying that it does

or

You think that there is such a need for representation of non-binary people in maths exams that it should over-ride any difficulties that language-impaired students have.

Can you explain further which of these is your position, and why? Why would you ignore lots of people saying that there is a problem, even if your students don't have this issue? Or if you do believe it's an issue, but you think that the rights of non-binary students to be represented in maths problems in a way that has to include pronouns takes precedence over anything else - can you explain why? What harm is being done to them by not having this? if it's not harm to them, what other reason is there that you want so badly to have neutral pronouns included? Is it so that they will be more accepted in other circumstances? Is it so that she/he become seen as old-fashioned or irrelevant more generally? Or is it specifically about the students taking the papers? I don't really see why you are so dead-set on having them despite the problems.

In the example I linked above of the coloured map causing issues to colour blind students, should the response be 1) I don't believe it causes a problem 2) the school should prepare them better for exams 3) this qualification clearly doesn't suit them they should be entered for an alternative or 4) change the map so that everyone can make sense of it?

Well clearly suggestions thinks that children with learning difficulties, disabilities or slight impairments should not be accommodated based on what has been said. Whether it's Irlens, autism, dyslexia, language processing disorder etc they've expressed the view that these children don't deserve GCSEs if they can't access the paper without any provisions made.
A view that would get you sacked if you expressed it the way suggestions had and would marr a reputation in education so you'd never worn again.
So I can conclude either they are lying about their job, or they keep quiet about their disgusting views at work or else it'll only be a matter of time before a student, parent or staff member calls them out and ends their career.
Although there are toxic environments in education, so I guess they could be in one of them.
This type of view was certainly around 20 years ago but is virtually non existent now thank goodness.
Anf they call us the dinosaurs.

3. they should take other subjects, and other A-levels, and then a degree, and then finally do a post-graduate module that covers the same content as GCSE Geography, at the cost of however many thousand pounds for the course.

well I've never had any colour blind students that couldn't see those colours, so it's clearly not a problem.

and if I do get any colour blind students, I'll train them in advance that colours might be used, and therefore they'll be prepared, unlike poor schools that don't think of this.

and of course they should be able to see the colours in the map, because seeing colours and identifying them is on the Early Years curriculum, and much much easier than the level of knowledge needed to answer the geography question. so it's not a problem.

and if they still can't do that, then they should go back to pre-reception level geography work, becaues this is not a suitable course for them, and I will advise them to try something that suits better. I've been advising students for ages and they're all very happy with these suggestions and with me.

Quite right too. If they're up to doing GCSE Geography and recognising oxbow lakes, then they can differentiate colours. It's a lower cognitive demand!

If there are ever awards for "most well-suited" and "most ironic" Mumsnet usernames, I think I may have a nominee for one of them.

Not quite as bad perhaps as WJEC board leaving out 4 pages from the A level English lit paper.

Interesting DD1 complained an entire topic they said definitely wouldn't be examined this year turned up in the WJEC AS maths paper she sat. Staff were looking into it and it was all over twitter apparently.

20 + years ago I remember picking up my History GCSE course work for one of the English exam board and being assured by the head of department they'd made an official complaint about one question that was on a topic not covered by the course content - I was bemused as it was a source work question so historical context was almost incidental and topic very quickly touched on by my teacher. Apparently stronger student like me had just got on with it and treated it as source work skills test but the rest had been very upset by it.

Ideally exam board wouldn't make mistakes but there are usually some every year - though there are a lot of exams each year. Here it wasn't a mistake but poorly chosen wording and it's easy to see how that could slip through - hopefully people complaining will alert board to problems for future exams at very least.

I work at a university. Exam questions and the answers (STEM subject) are triple checked, but the course leader still has to be on hand during their exam in case of a query. You would have to be alarmingly simple to assume that papers are always perfect.

Suggestions thinks that everybody, doesnt matter who, has to bow down at the TRA altar, even if it means failing exams and reducing potential career prospects. Because nothing else matters.

And the government is planning to ban student loans for students who fail English and Maths GCSE, don't forget.

No English and maths GCSE, no university student loan, plans say

I'd forgotten about that AuxArmesCitoyens.

Sounds like it was a deliberate decision by AQA to move to gender-neutral language in their assessments, after consultation with various groups - notably, a great many different diversity and inclusion groups, rather than a great many groups representing students with various disabilities.

They do say they consulted teachers and examiners etc ,but my bet is that is was all about how to increase diversity, rather than on any problems it would cause.

And just to be clear, I don't have any problems with the principle of including diverse content etc. Even gender neutral language can be managed successfully, if it's done carefully and well. But it's the fact that the need to be seen to be neutral and inclusive overrides genuine concerns about accessibility that bothers me.

www.aqa.org.uk/news/equality,-diversity-and-inclusion-in-our-qualifications-weve-listened-and-acted