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?

How embarrassing for them @suggestionsplease1.

Oh and yes to ‘paper’s should be written clearly’

obviously!

the whole point is they aren’t

This will not relate to confusion over the correct calculations, which will be perfectly understandable from the syntax and grammar of the text.

That is exactly the problem that children with developmental language disabilities have! They find the syntax and grammar really difficult to process at the best of times. Add in missing out words and other complications, and of course there is potential for confusion - unnecessarily.

You can phrase the questions to avoid dividing things between boys and girls, sure. Use year groups instead, or split a group into those who came by car or by foot, or whatever. You can use names that might be more gender neutral (but still easy to read), and use them in problems worded to avoid he/she if you must - Alex and Sam split £40 in the ratio 5:3 - how much does each child get?

But adding in complexities like 'they', that require the context, syntax, word order etc to get right - that is just taking the hardest things for a child with DLD and making them harder, for no beneficial reason.

You really aren't understanding the degree of language difficulty that some of the students have - and it's quite subtle in how it manifests, so it's often not apparent to the student or to the teacher exactly what's gone wrong or why. Sometimes I have thought that my pupils were really confused about some aspect of the maths, but it's only on very careful questioning that I have worked out that actually they have misinterpreted some part of the language of the question (often alongside a maths difficulty, which makes it even harder to work out). The children don't have normal knowledge of grammar and syntax, and if they struggle with maths as well, they aren't going to immediately predict what the examiner means because they are familiar with the type of maths questions.

There are plenty of ways of avoiding gendered language if you feel that is a real issue in maths exams - but things like using 'they' can really make life harder for language-disordered students.

I find it mildly confusing when 'they' is used to refer to a person that has previously been named. It disrupts your flow of thoughts, not to mention that little tick of irritation and accompanying eyeroll.

At least the exam boards can't be accused of misgendering an entirely fictional person. Because that would be literal violence, as far as I understand it, and obviously much, much worse than confusing students unnecessarily.

In my law degree where we are discussing the liability of various people, you pretty much always use the name to make it clear who you are speaking of. A he or they could refer to several different people and it may be obvious from the paragraph but best to be crystal clear.

yes - and even more so for students who are already used to feeling confused with maths questions, and know that they often misread or leave words out, and on reading 'they', could well subconsciously assume that they've missed part of the question about the other people involved.

People defending this use are assuming huge levels of natural language knowledge, reading skills, etc. If you are already getting a scrambled version of the question because of language comprehension, and then trying to figure out what maths to do on it, that is a challenge in itself. Don't make life worse for them, just for a few students who don't want the words he/she in an exam.

Lol yes @MagpiePi - let's not forget the real victims here (those fictional exam subjects who are probably struggling to "see themselves as a boy or a girl"). The real life students are just collateral damage. Would indeed be funny if it weren't actually true.

Is it just me or does anyone else sometimes feel like they are living in a 21st century version of the Truman Show?

This so describes my DD.

I think some people on this thread are being willfully obtuse about the difficulties that some students experience. It's a maths exam, the questions should be written in the most straightforward language possible.

In some sentences it’s really clunky. And I have a VERY woke friend who often ends up referring to my NB friend as ‘it’ because she can’t get her head around whether it should be ‘they are’ or ‘they is’. I just use my friends name because otherwise it sounds try hard/ like I subscribe to an ideology that I don’t subscribe to. They regularly refer to themselves as ‘she’ so it’s a lot of conversational stress for nothing!

I feel like suggestionsplease1 lives in a very middle class, white suburb, or possibly a university city. Maybe I’m wrong.

I feel like suggestions please is an abomination to the education sector.
Spouting ablest nonsense I haven't heard in education for at least twenty years.
At best, someone working with children spouting that crap about Sen would be sent on training. A senco or similar could reasonably be dismissed for such discrimatory views.
Your sacred caste are not the most marginalised ever, that's the Sen and children with disabilities you penalise and belittle
Honestly horrified you are anywhere near children.

And perversely many of the children who are in the grip of using their self declared pronouns will also be amongst those who have difficulties with language complexity. So some well meaning (I'm being generous) gender ideologist who thought it a super idea to throw in this inclusive language to a maths exam, has potentially, caused them much confusion.

‘Legitimate confusion’, Suggestionsplease?

Students who are confused by plural vs singular pronouns in maths are illegitimately confused, then,?

SEN adviser apparently

Well said @RumpBelle - I suspect that suggestions please "identifies as" someone who works with children with additional needs and actually has nothing to do with them. Let's hope so for their sakes.

Yes, I wonder what amazing qualifications you need to essentially tell Sen children buck up your ideas or you are not good enough.

Wording in Maths questions is so important. People - children and adults - struggle with it without additional unnecessary complications. Of course this is madness, as is the whole genderist delusion.

"education" system.
department of "education".
I send my children to school so they get an "education".

And as I've pointed out, it is also commonplace for them to be written about in a way that makes it unclear as to whom is being discussed. In newspapers, reports, by professionals.

Just because you're sloppy enough with language that you haven't spotted it doesn't mean others haven't.

It's pretty ableist - "well I understand it just fine, how on Earth could anyone NOT?"

And stop trying to equate 'foreign' names with words that genuinely have several meanings - it's embarrassing that you reach for racism and ageism when you don't have an argument about what's actually being discussed. If it's clear it's a name, then it doesn't raise any questions about how many people are being discussed. Everyone knows that but you seem to pretend not to.

If the name was "X" or "pi" then maybe that would cause confusion in trigonometry questions. So presumably they don't use words that are ambiguous for names.

I am well aware of language difficulties students might face and I am also aware that qualifications have competences that must be met.

So within some maths qualifications there might be several different areas that are tested, and a student might excel at pure maths that does not require contextualization. If they have barriers with language they will not experience so many difficulties here.

However the maths qualification might also cover areas of applied maths, for example questions on probability and statistics that require extensive text description of scenarios, and of course that is likely to be harder for students that experiences barriers with language to do well in these.

However, if it is a competence that is being assessed in the qualification the student cannot opt out of these questions. Well they can, but they will lose marks. Maths qualifications may have a remit of preparing for real world scenarios, and they often do situate problems in social contexts.

If there are massive language difficulties teacher or parents might make the decision that a different type of maths qualification is appropriate for them, one where they can more readily demonstrate their competence in their areas of strengths.

However for most students this is an area that can be addressed with appropriate preparation and reasonable adjustments in the timed examinations themselves.

If a teacher or apparent anticipates that a student might face difficulties with pronouns for whatever reason the right way forward is to spend more time preparing for questions so that they are in a strong position to tackle them on the day.

It is not the right way forward to change the exam paper altogether just in the same way it would not be the right way forward to change the character names used because there will be some students that might struggle with names that they are not familiar with. Adequate preparation should address any potential issues.

It is not the right way forward to change the exam paper
Except that's literally what was brought in with the character introductions when Sats was introduced as the need was recognised.
And you are the one advocating for papers to change as using plural pronouns as singular is not standard practice or even necessary.
You can bleat on about competency all you like but understanding of gender ideology doesn't measure comprehension at all.

So my DD who can understand clearly written English should be penalised in a maths exam because someone wants to use gender waffle pronouns obfuscating who is being discussed? Don't be ridiculous.

I am well aware of language difficulties students might face and I am also aware that qualifications have competences that must be met.

But you've essentially called them liars in this thread. You are maintaining that there is zero possibility that anyone would be thrown by wording that doesn't make it clear what the question is asking for.

In your own example questions you included odd phrases that genuinely would have made me spend more time questioning what I was being asked or if the question had typos - yet you don't seem to accept these are problematic?

To anyone that works in this area - what is a student supposed to do if they suspect a question in an exam is worded incorrectly, ambiguously or has an error? Just do the best they can and take the time to explain their thought processes in writing on the answer sheet?

I'm not sure, but a few years back a GCSE Eng Lit question muddled up Montagues and Capulets...