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?

And yet mainstream dictionaries, newspapers and tv and radio broadcasters are all happily acting on this awareness of this use of 'they'.

Sigh. No, they're not. They still use sex based pronouns unless specifically directed otherwise.

And if they were, so what? We're talking about accessibility for ND kids who DONT happily use 'they'.

@suggestionsplease1 - no they're not "happily acting on this awareness". They have been coerced into adopting the genderwoo for fear of being branded "transphobic". It is now becoming state sponsored which is quite alarming and fits in perfectly with the pattern of behaviour that allows fascist ideology to prosper.

Yes, Stonewall’s done a cracking job of inveigling their way into all sorts of areas. Fortunately no-one yet is forced to play along with these games, and there’s sensibly being a reversal of their work that was carried out in the shadows.

And they are constantly messing up @suggestionsplease1 because we know that humans come in two sexes. Jeopardy in the US recently got in shit because they 'misgendered' the snowflake that is Sam Smith.

The irony is that if sex is a spectrum etc. etc. then nobody would ever be “non-binary” anyway because we all would be non-binary; but if we all defaulted to a universal “they/them”, then there would be no pronouns to transition from or to, so no-one would be trans either, as we would all just be gender-neutral “theys” and the distinction between singular and plural would just, confusingly, be inarticulable.

The whole edifice, as usual, is deeply contradictory; and relies, as ever, on all the boring ordinary people doing their usual thing whilst a few special individuals have a special “identity”, which must be prioritised over the needs of anyone else who might actually need additional support or adjustment. But who cares about the kids with SEND or in the long tail when the sparkly unicorn gender people are near, amirite?

God forbid kids who are often actually bullied or anxious about learning issues be thought about, when there’s an imagined possibility to cater for of someone who might want to pretend they aren’t either a boy or a girl, against all physical evidence.

And yet mainstream dictionaries, newspapers and tv and radio broadcasters are all happily acting on this awareness of this use of 'they'.

Not in the situations where it makes a sentence ambiguous, or otherwise confusing.

And even if they use it, that doesn't mean that maths exams have to follow suit. Lots of people use 'they' as a singular for unknown people in real life. Fine. They also use slang, contractions, all kinds of different types of languge that you wouldn't use in other specific circumstances. Dictionaries have all of it, so that is hardly a measure of what should be used on exams.

Why aren't you listening to the people who work with language disordered children who are explaining that this is a problem? Who does it benefit to have 'they' pronouns in questions? Nobody. It just harms. If you think non-binary children are seriously disadvantaged by not being represented in exam questions, then include them - quite possible to do so in other ways that avoid he/she. But why this doubling down and insisting that there HAS to be they/them used and tough on those who don't understand it.

Most of them are not going to study 'pure maths' - I"m not sure you even know what that is. Most of them are trying hard to pass their English and maths GCSE. English is often a massive struggle already, and maths can be too - worded problems are known to be hard for them, and we work very hard to help. Don't make it worse, for no benefit to anyone, but to please yourself that you can use they/them wherever you want.

Another demographic who might struggle with this: adult returners. Around 55,000 adults take maths and English GCSEs a year, often from backgrounds that make school settings intimidating or difficult. And of course if you fail the government is working on plans to stop you then applying for a student loan.

When Les shoots an arrow, the probability that they hit the target is 0·3.
Each attempt is independent of any previous shot.

(i) What is the probability that they hit the target for the first time on their third
attempt?

This is the sort of language that a student entered for GCSE maths might be expected to process. What do you think is more cognitively demanding in terms of language processing in this question - the understanding that 'they' and 'their' refers back to Les, or information like "Each attempt is independent of any previous shot" / "they hit the target for the first time on the their third attempt" ?

A student who is capable of the English language processing required for these sentences is capable of understanding the use of pronouns in this problem, as it is a lower level language processing cognitive demand.

This might surprise you, but I'm actually not that averse to gender neutral language per se. I am averse to it being implemented with no due diligence as to how it might affect linguistically vulnerable user groups. Any evidence that has been done?

What do you think is more cognitively demanding in terms of language processing in this question - the understanding that 'they' and 'their' refers back to Les

they and their refer to les cos we don’t know the sex…its used completely correctly

they, when used in a question which includes more than one person could mean the group or an individual person within that group…thats when it gets confusing

you just keep mentioning easy ones referring to the only person in the question like its some sort of gotcha

I'm just going to repeat part of the OP:

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).

So children with SEN told their scribes they were confused by the wording.

But this is not enough for gender zealots like @suggestionsplease1.

This whole conversation just underlines the cultish behaviour of TRAs. Who are ultimately prepared to throw vulnerable children's futures under the bus in order to advance their ideology.

And it really demonstrates why this has no place in education.

exactly @RufustheFloralmissingreindeer

Obviously there are some questions where it might not be that hard, but very many where it would be, especially as they get more complicated. We are telling you that language disordered children already struggle with many aspects of language, including at times telling what pronoun refers to what - so why insist on making it harder for them? Yes, sometimes you can create a sentence where it doesn't interfere as much. Other times you can't, or you don't realise that it doesn't. If you were the one in charge of writing questions, you wouldn't know what sort of difficulties these children have - often very subtle - because you don't understand DLD ,and you aren't listening to people who do. Unless you are going to get language experts in to help create questions that use they/them pronouns in a way that doesn't add to any confusion, it's better and easier to just use pronouns in the way that most people expect them to be used, and avoid adding that extra burden to an already difficult exam for some children. You can put your gender neutral questions elsewhere - people aren't objecting to the fact that you might not want to keep using divisions between boys and girls, or that you might want some names that you can't tell if they're male or female, or whatever. There are lots of ways to include non-binary people if you honestly think that is a huge enough issue to require changes in a maths exam - but don't throw students who struggle with language under the bus when doing so!

And remember of course we are talking about a completely imaginary non-binary they / them who has only popped up in the maths paper for the purposes of eating sweets or shooting arrows. You're not even potentially "misgendering" a real person vs making the question clearer for various groups to understand.

And no, understanding pronouns isn't necessariily easier than understanding concepts like 'independent probability'. If you read up on DLD, you'll find that there are all sorts of subtle difficulties to do with abstract language, including functional words like pronouns, tense, etc.

Moroever, you have to take your simple sentence that might be understood correctly even with 'they' and put it through a filter of slightly scrambled syntax and reading, and mix in the fact that language disordered children already find maths and word problems confusing, so might be assume they haven't read something correctly, or imagine some other scenario without realising they're doing so, etc etc. - so many other ways it could go wrong. You are looking at it much too simplistically.

Still grammatically incorrect though, so why bother? Unless indoctrination is just more important to you than standardisation, clarity and correctness.

The trouble is, this is an ideology. Otherwise it wouldn’t be pushed so much by people who fervently believe it’s somehow “progressive”. But if you don’t happen to believe in gender identity ideology or that any people, let alone children, can mysteriously “identify” as imagined indexed beings, what purpose does it serve other than complete linguistic confusion?

If we all switched to “they” in every instance do you think it would really be some kind of genderless utopia of neutered beings wandering around without genitals? If not why on Earth would you think it “progressive” anyway? What purpose would it serve? @suggestionsplease1

(In any case linguistics as a discipline shows that when you erase one distinction in language people attempt to recreate it by inventing new descriptors that take its place - it’s a process called “grammaticalisation”, where if you lose part of a functionally semantic part of the language, then people “intensify” their usage to reinvent it again. So even if we all switched to “they/them”, people would then invent new sexed pronouns so they could specify sex. It’s gloriously fruitless, what the genderists are attempting to do.)

Unsexed not indexed 😂

It unfortunately likely highlights the failure of the OP's school to adequately prepare their pupils for exams. But now they know, so they can take the right steps going forward and practice questions that follow a similar format.

Wow, you really are coming across as quite the swivel eyed loon, @suggestionsplease1.

I will be writing to AQA. I don't want my children's school indoctrinating them in this crap so that they can pass their GCSEs.

The curious mix of hyper stretching and absolute entrenched immobility to avoid conceding a cm is a sight to behold.

It unfortunately likely highlights the failure of the OP's school to adequately prepare their pupils for exams.

No it doesn’t.

It unfortunately likely highlights the failure of the OP's school to adequately prepare their pupils for exams. But now they know, so they can take the right steps going forward and practice questions that follow a similar format.

What steps would those be? If years of work with SALTs haven't managed to cure a child of a specific language disability, which includes difficulty with pronouns, tenses, categories vs elements, word order, etc. - how will practising a few questions of one type help them understand pronouns in a different context? Because somewhere else 'they' might mean two people, or an unknown entity. If you have this magic cure, then let us know.

Why are you so keen to include they/them? Do you have any evidence that non-binary children feel erased because maths exams don't use them as examples? Even if there are plenty of gender-neutral names they could identify with, or plenty of examples of groups of children with unspecified gender that they could identify with? Is this causing difficulty for them, to the point that this is the necessary solution? Or has someone else like you just decided that this should be the new way of writing? Because there obviously IS evidence that there are a number of categories of people for whom language and wording does cause problems.

Anyone else finding it hilarious that someone apparently thinks if they provide enough examples of questions where "they" isn't ambiguous, that will prove that there cannot exist any such questions that are?

Keep going please, I love seeing TRA logic hard at work.

Exactly. Yet another case of "it doesn't happen, and if it does, they're lying/racist/old/ stupid".

“What do you think is more cognitively demanding in terms of language processing in this question - the understanding that 'they' and 'their' refers back to Les, or information like "Each attempt is independent of any previous shot" / "they hit the target for the first time on the their third attempt" ?”

Well, if they’ve been revising probability of dependent and independent outcomes (and it was on the advance information, so they should have been) it won’t be the technical language of ‘independent’ or ‘first time on third attempt.’

Independent will tell them to keep the same denominator throughout, ‘first time on third attempt’ that they need to use a probability tree, third attempt that they need to multiply the probabilities of the ‘miss, miss, hit’ branch only.

Spotting that Les is a non-gender-specific name in English, so ‘they’ is the appropriate pronoun … that might be a problem. Students won’t have revised gender-neutral English personal names for any exam that I can think of.

The question very much assumes a particular cultural background.