Thirteen Theses

Somewhere else in the proximate blogosphere, thirteen points were raised about education in Atlantis.

For ease of reference, I list them below in modified form (italics) and add some comments. You can always refer to the original post for the unmodified form.

1. Examinations should exist primarily to test progress/knowledge and should not be used to impart value/rank.

That's a matter of opinion, really — and the kind of society that sees a need for examinations and is deploying them. In practice, passing any examination affirms 'progress/knowledge', thus raising the perceived value of the individual and hence imparting value/rank.

2. Our current system of exams plus streaming creates elitism, stratifies society and demoralises/devalues much of our human capital.

This is true of any human process that validates progress (how ever defined), except to the degree in which human capital is demoralised/devalued (another social construct).

3. Since only 1% of those who leave primary school do not progress to secondary school, we do not need a Primary School Leaving Examination for promotion purposes (we may still need it to fill places, but that is a different barrier to be broken). We can look at through-train programmes to Sec 2 / Grade 8 (for 14 year olds) or something.

At which point, you'd deploy another examination? If the assumption is that we still need promotions and still need to measure progress (implicit in thesestatements), then it's only a matter of shuffling the standardised tests around. I don't think this particular statement adds much to the discussion.

4. Teacher 'key performance indicators' (KPIs) should not be weighted significantly towards the exam results of their students.

One major school of thought has it that the success of a teacher is measured by student outcomes. It's the most reasonable school, in general. The key point here is that certainly we don't have to use standardised exam results as the only indicator of teacher performance, and the debate should be on what else to use, in that case.

Indeed, if KPIs are not significantly weighted towards student results at all, then there aren't any meaningful AND useful criteria by which to judge teacher performance. For example, a great teacher is often considered so by the quality of her/his students' lives later on, and their concomitant attribution of their quality of life and deeds to what that teacher taught them. But that often results only in long-delayed (or even posthumous) recognition of teacher performance.

The opposite problem is selecting KPIs that are too short-term. This tends to lead not to performance (i.e. a cohesive, coherent and concerted exhibition of professional skill) but to performativity (teaching to the test in order to extract bonuses etc).

5. We need to lower the stakes of major examinations by relaxing cut-off points for schools.

The thing about this is that the cut-off points for schools are a matter of market forces. That is, if 350 students apply for 120 places, the 120 with the 'best' (how ever determined) results get in. To relax cut-off points normally entails deliberate loosening of criteria and may lead to accusations of lack of consistency — because progressive loosening means that different people would be able to justify the entry of different students on different grounds. You could also apply random or semi-random selection or just use centralised planning approaches. Otherwise, the main point is that schools and ministries don't set cut-off points — the 'market' does; the more people want to apply to a school, the higher the cut-off tends to get.

6. Change philosophies about the value of non-academically inclined students.

Well, first you'd have do define 'non-academically inclined'. You might also want to consider changing the values of society, the values of the students, etc. And lastly, consider how 'non-academically inclined' students might not want to think about philosophy at all.

7. Since all schools are good schools, we should pro-actively begin to dismantle the concept and influence of “elite” schools, starting by bringing the SAP, GEP and IB (note: various Atlantean elite programmes — Speech Alternative Plan, Greatly Exaggerated Plan, Intentional Baccalaureate) programmes (or elements thereof) into all schools (or a very significant portion of schools).

Background first. Yes, but some schools are good for other reasons. Especially those predating such programmes. They were therefore historically chosen to host such programmes.

The thing these programmes have in common is that they cost extra to run, which is why there are so few of them. They are sometimes culturally supported only in some kinds of schools (schools for the culturally well-defined, schools for the weird and peculiar, etc). And they aren't for everybody, so why deploy them everywhere?

8. There are alternative ways to fill posts in secondary schools.

Yes, there are. See point 5 above. We need to ask whether these alternative ways are acceptable to society. Otherwise, change society and/or admit you are trying to assert a perspective that society deems impractical. Good debate to have, though.

9. Restructure education so that the wealthy make only marginal/high risk gains from investing heavily in education.

Betrays a lack of historical perspective, or perhaps just an inexact formulation. In Atlantis, and many other parts of the world, the roots of mass education lie in the long-term vision of the wealthy who saw investing heavily in education as a route to great gain for society as a whole.

At present, let's consider what happens if the wealthy make NO (or insignificant) gain from investing heavily in education. Economic theory tells us that they will stop investing in education and invest elsewhere. Then you might get really uneducated and very rich young people out there, or you might end up with a society that sees no value in education relative to other pursuits, or any combination of similar deflationary possibilities with respect to the value of education.

And how would you restructure it anyway?

10. Fix teacher workloads, drastically increase supply of allied teaching professionals.

This is a great point, if by 'fix' we mean something concrete to reduce teacher workload to the point where it no longer compromises their professional duties. However, if by 'drastically increase supply' we mean pouring lots of money into recruiting teacher aides who would otherwise be running other essential parts of society, I would be rather concerned. Society needs allied teaching professionals like assistant teachers, administrators, special-needs educators, educational researchers, some kinds of counsellors, etc. But augmenting the supply shouldn't mean undermining the workforce in another key area.

11. Allow technical education to lead to degrees, or diplomas.

On the surface of it, excellent. But these routes already exist in Atlantis, so a bit of a non-point.

12. Skilled craftsmen and artists should have a separate basic qualification before moving on to tertiary.

This assumes that skilled craftsmen and artists NEED (presumably) paper qualifications at all. In many cases, the apprenticeship model and other models leave the creative production of the craftsman/artist as the only qualification needed. And why would they want to move on to tertiary education if they are already skilled? I hesitate to call this point wrong or irrelevant. It's just confusing.

13. Lower the cost of national university education further.

Well, see point 9 above. Also, consider the fact that Atlantean education is already very heavily subsidized. It's a matter of degree then, and whoever promotes this point must be set to propound a specific lowering. How much lower? And how justified?

Nobody Expects

The spinach inquisition, perhaps? A source of strength and amusement, and yet serious in its issues.

The examiners noted the ambitious nature of the project, the brazen attempt to tackle an extremely large scope, and the excellent and informative presentation by the candidate. They therefore require only two things for completeness: 1) the candidate should change the thesis title to reflect the large scope better; and 2) the candidate should edit the last few paragraphs so as to be less modest about his findings and contributions to new knowledge.

England expects, and the duty is done; nobody expects, and it is done anyway.

Back to the Future

My thesis amendments have been accepted. And now they will do two things to me: they will put me to the question to find out if I really did what I did, and they will examine my ignorance to see if it is more illuminating than the ignorance of others.

In practical terms, what this means is that I have to become an expert on being me; I have to read all the stuff I thought I'd read from 1995 onwards. And I have to remember it even though a lot of it is no longer worth remembering. Sigh.

Jerusalem by the Merlion

And was that ship in ancient times
Docked at this city's pirate port,
And did the lone wolf's mighty spawn
Hunt fin and scale and fluke for sport?

And did his burning eye see true
The vision of commerce and trade
And was the Venice of the East
Indeed the slave of Mammon made?

Bring them the paper of their chains
Bring them the numbers of their bonds
Bring them the season of the rains
That fills the trading-road with ponds!

They shall not cease from mental fight
Nor shall they sleep but toil all night
Till they have learnt what is not learnt
And saved what has not yet been burnt.

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I too have seen the opposable bamboo and gazed upon his works. And so, bad poetry, mixed metaphors and a total vomitus of angst. Yes, results are out tomorrow.

Statistical Review

I was just reviewing my data about the Citadel and its performance. Wolff looked at my tablet, and laughed. There was something not quite pleasant about his laughter. In fact, it was quite pointed. So I looked at the page more closely.

In that document I saw these figures for 2009:

Table 3 above shows that our students’ grade average has increased over the previous year — 6.48% as compared to 6.47% in 2008 in spite of a larger cohort of candidates.

And so, like any conscientious researcher, I decided to see if this was significant.

First, I found an obvious and rather sloppy error. 6.48 and 6.47 were absolute averages, not percentages. The 6.48 was an average score from n=425 and the 6.47 was an average score from n=406.

Second, I found that this was not a significant increase. An increase of 0.01 over 425 students is +4.25 points — quite possibly the effect of just one student doing a lot better than his counterpart in the previous cohort.

Actually, let's suppose that every student did better by half a grade point (or 0.083 per subject) on average. Then you'd have an average score of 6.55 at least. That this did not happen tells me that the Citadel has reached a sort of plateau. It had a bad year in 2008, but 2007 and 2009 seem about the same.

Ah well. Time will tell. With a cohort of about 450 this year, we should see an average of 6.56 for a significant gain. I suspect this will not happen. I could be wrong.

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Note: Yes, I am aware that students with a full 42 subject points (over 6 subjects) can't do better than 7.00. However, one should hope that those doing badly will improve sufficiently to make up for lack of improvement at the top, since it is easier (percentage-wise) to improve a poor grade than a good one.

Tweaking the Meritocracy

Supposing you had a meritocratic state, and you wanted to adjust the academic inclinations of the populace. The best way would be to adjust the examination system so that study in specific areas would be rewarded by perceived economic or social advantage, normally conveyed by that well-established proxy, aggregate test scores.

So let's look at Atlantis. This is a state in which the young, just before they enter their teenage years, are tested to the brink of destruction (but mostly, not beyond) by a test called the Phased Stress Loading Exercise. In this test, the candidates are subjected to four kinds of load.

The first kind is linguistic; it is a double-weighted test (at least at the raw score level) designed to evaluate a candidate's competence in the language that he or she will have no choice but to use in almost every public area of life (and in 60% of the cases, every private area of life too) for the forseeable future.

The second is pseudocultural; it is also double-weighted at the raw score level, but it evaluates a candidate's competence in a language that is sometimes touted as a future trade opportunity, and which is otherwise used by less than 40% of the population. The double-weighting here is a political tool which was used to eliminate that language's dialect rivals decades ago, thus severing links between the modern population and its ancestors.

The third kind is mathematical; this is supposedly easy to test, and so it is. However, the test itself has been made to discriminate better simply because it doesn't have double-weighting at the raw level and yet is probably more important than test two. This of course has inspired furious rants from those who feel discriminated against — which is what the test is designed to do.

The last kind is scientific; this is arbitrary, as most tests of scientific ability are at that age. What it does test is scientific knowledge at a simplified level, coupled with capacity for absorbing advanced concepts at an abstracted level. This is somehow supposed to be correlated strongly to future performance in science. However, this is not true except in the general sense that students who are good at memorizing things at the age of 12 are often good at doing that at age 18.

Eventually, the final aggregate score is calculated. This is the sum of the t-scores for each test. The t-scores are calculated like this:

1. Take the candidate's raw score for any test, r, and find the difference between that and the average score of the population, m.
   
2. Divide this difference, r-m, by the standard deviation (roughly, the spread), z.
   
3. Multiply this number, (r-m)/z, by 10 and add 50.
   
4. This gives the total test score for that test, t = 10[(r-m)/z]+50.
   
5. Add up all the t-scores for the four tests.

This gives the candidate an aggregate score which will be higher if the candidate does well in every test and everyone else does worse (and especially if everyone else does a lot worse with a relatively narrow spread). Note that after this process is completed, tests 1 and 2 will no longer likely be double-weighted, since the process 'normalizes' things in a way.

How do you tweak this?

Well, if you set a very tough paper, you will see record aggregate scores and be able to separate the best from the less good by a larger margin. However, it is probably easier to just adjust the marks awarded. After all, people will complain, "The paper was so tough that even I wouldn't be able to answer it!" Which of course says more about these people than it does about the paper.

A simpler paper is easier to grade, and since we haven't got enough competent markers in most populations, that's a bonus in time saved — less adjudication or moderation will be required. But you'll see lower aggregate scores and less-informed people will say, "Oh look, we've had a bad year!" and plot silly graphs which predict the downfall of society.

Actually, I have no idea how exactly any such tweaking would occur. But tweakability exists for any system, and I have just shown how this might manifest in the mythical Atlantean system. Think of it as an imaginary service for an imaginary public.

Examining the Examiners

There are simple tests for competency, when it comes to examiners. One of these is the consistency test.

Let's say that you have an examinee who presents a short work, not more than 10 minutes in length. He is examined by examiner A and this examiner gives him 16/20 according to a specific rubric. He is examined by examiner B and that examiner gives him 11/20 according to the same rubric. What can we conclude?

We can conclude that at least one of the following is likely to be true:

• the examiners are inconsistent
• at least one examiner is fraudulent
• at least one examiner is incompetent
• the rubric allows too much subjectivity
• the work presented allows for multiple interpretations

But what can we do about the examinee's situation? How good is his work?

The answer is that we can't tell. We no longer have a point of reference. The system has become incompetent to judge the work presented.

We can only appeal to a known authority who has somehow been certified 'more competent', whether by previous performance or by fiat. This happens in the legal system, in which appeal can normally be made to a higher court.

Recently, though, I came across an interesting example in the education system. Should the system produce a bad result for an examinee, that examinee gets to appeal to higher authority. But there's a wrinkle: he has about a week or so to come up with a NEW presentation.

But that's stupid, since now you don't even have the original presentation to act as a benchmark. You're starting from scratch. It is as if a person on trial in the legal system is considered guilty of X and then appeals, only to be examined in a higher court as to whether he is guilty of Y. Madness, or at the very least, injustice.

The Very Thin Line Between Irony and Truth

It's been seventeen years now since I started my teaching career. My family is saturated with English and Humanities teachers (or was — some have gone to the Eternal Library) and even an odd Minister for Education, the Gnome. It created high expectations in me for what one ought to expect teachers to do in a classroom, but also the knowledge that not all of it would be possible in every classroom. Nevertheless, the attempt to teach, and hopefully to teach well, should at least be essayed.

I began my teaching career as a trainee in what some might call a 'neighbourhood' school — surrounded by blocks of small public apartments, mum-and-pop stores, a market. The young people were rowdy but fun, and I learnt a lot from teaching them. We had discussions about football, basketball, working life, taxes, exams, and many other topics. At the same time, I worked as hard as I could to teach what I was supposed to teach.

On graduation, I deliberately set aside some offers from schools in the 'national elite' and asked for a random posting. It turned out to be what you might expect from a random posting — the unexpected. The three years I spent serving my bond in that 'random' school turned out to be unforgettable years, full of drama, teenage angst (well, not on my part) and happiness. I learnt from my colleagues the truth that dedication, passion, and professional knowledge could be combined with fierce (but not violent) discipline to help a lot of people.

Then I spent twelve years in another place. That is where I began to see the other side of the coin in full perspective. I used to believe that the teacher helped others; I learnt that some teachers only wanted to look after themselves. I used to believe that teachers could make a personal difference to their charges; I learnt that sometimes this was not a good thing. I had many beliefs, which I still hold, but I also learnt that in some institutions, some people could turn these beliefs on their head.

I found myself institutionally part of decisions which were cynical in the utmost, gussied up to look idealistic. I found myself touting 'concentration camps' as part of a holistic learning experience. Cramming, rote-learning, tests on extraneous material, tests designed to weed out weaker students so that effort need not be expended on those who wanted to learn but might find it more difficult... the list of practices designed in opposition to my ideas of teaching got longer and longer.

In 1967, the Gnome looked across into the elite institutions of Atlantis and said, "The preoccupation in [Atlantis] with examination results is unnatural and unhealthy, and we should bring it to an end as early as possible. After all, good performance in examinations only proves one thing — ability to answer examination questions. This ability is presumably related in some way to intelligence [but] it does not tell us a lot of other things about a person... which are just as important as intelligence and more important than the mastering of examination technique."

He ended that speech by stating his hope that the alumni of the Wyvern schools would bring about the reform of the system. In other places, he clarified his vision by telling people what he meant by 'creative intelligence'; he said it was the ability to think and solve problems without persistent recourse to references or instructions from others. It was clear that by reform, he did not mean doing away with examinations, but teaching intelligently and nurturing a corresponding intellectual vigour.

Sometimes, I look at all that. I look at what we call reforms, and what we call education, and what we call 'holistic'. And I realise that we use these terms with a kind of unblinking irony, like actors in a charade. We know full well that the reform is incomplete or aborted, the education is limited to a narrow spectrum, the brain is being taught to churn out variants of the same things and not waste effort in speculative analysis. The Gnome failed, and his bitter words to his daughter-in-law — 'it is all in the past, let's not talk about it' — are emblematic of the current state of our battlefield.

Yet, once you have taken away the pagan symbols and the ruthless authoritarianism, there might yet be hope: if not of a better age, then at least that the best is yet to be.

Self-Examination

Behold.

I am not aesthetically pleasing. I had a sharp face with a large nose. Now everything broadens. I am nondescript. My hair was fine, grows coarse; was brown, grows grey. My lips split in the winter of 1980 and the dark scars remain. My right shoulder is lower than my left; the muscles holding it in place were warped when the ligaments tore in 1985. My neck hurts all the time because of this, my tendons and the sternocleidomastoid have hypertrophied over 25 years.

My fingers are like mushrooms, knobby, at odds with each other. Cupping my hands for water merely spills it inefficiently. I bruised knuckles, twisted joints, hit walls with fists one time too many. I wrote too much, and the contact points of pen and hand are shiny with elision. I have not wrinkled yet; I fear I am too parched to do that, the small scars of glass and stone like pebbles in a pond of rippling skin.

My hips creak alarmingly; I sense the firing of my knees a scant second before they sound off like pistol shots. The X-rays show no permanent damage from shoulder to ankle; even the childhood asthma and TB have left no trace. I stand relatively upright, having learnt to hide my deformities.

My legs are different. Each knee has different contours, is an imperfect reflection of its twin. My big toes are bunioned at the joint, swelling most in the afternoon, desperate nodes of compensation for flat feet. More scars line my shins and ankles, the legacy of barefoot games and bad healing. I used to have a mole beneath one sole, but it too has gone away with time.

The toe I broke, should a more alert reader inquire, still stands aloof from its peers. It had a taste of near-freedom, and now sulks and twinges in remembrance of the past.

And this is all I see, but how can I describe what I feel of me? "Much has been lost, and there is yet much to lose." "We are not now that strength which in old days..." "I am old." But it is not me that I fear, nor yet the failing of the light, but that I will be trapped in the ruins as they collapse one day.

I have gained four kilos, almost nine pounds since I was a teenager. It has not settled well. It is the same with all the books, nearly 15,000 of them; all the thoughts, far more than that; all the knowledge, so useless at times; all the memories that I kept in the hope that they might some day be something in reserve.

I thank God I have friends. Perhaps something of me will survive because of them. Perhaps they will remind me who I am, and who I might yet be. I choose, at this point, to end the examination before it does more than scratch the surface.

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Candidate takes himself too seriously. Fortunately, he does not know the rubrics by which we judge him. Then again, he would probably laugh them off. He is quite convinced that God heals all scars, and has faith that he will pass because of this. Since this is the case, I concur with the opinion of the preliminary panel. Keep his status unclear until some future time. He has been a naughty man.

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Planting rice is never fun.

How to Prepare for an Examination

Some time ago, a student asked me how I prepared for my own examinations, since (to this student) I was obviously an example of someone who had been successful in examinations. I thought about it for a while, and then decided to come clean.

I've never been particularly solidly prepared for an examination. There are, however, two exceptions to state and then put aside.

Firstly, I have always been prepared for practical examinations by virtue of being interested in the details of praxis. That is, I pay attention to things that need to be done and how the results are processed where material objects and actions are concerned. I'm good with lab work. I once scored a near-perfect score and topped my batch in it, while still being crap elsewhere.

Secondly, I have often been well-prepared (relative to others) for examinations requiring an ability to solve problems from first principles without having to study a lot of material. The kind of questions you have probably found in this blog, questions like, "How would you run a school?" tend to appear in these examinations. So too do all the questions in a typical Theory of Knowledge Prescribed Essay Titles list.

Those two exceptions aside, I've always prepared for examinations in three inter-related modes: chemical, biological, psychological.

Essentially, you wake up and remember that the body needs glucose and glutamate (more or less) in order to think. You also need a good circulation and metabolism to get things going. Caffeine is good for this, and has never shown any provable negative side-effects as long as you keep intake (very approximately, and subject to things like your natural metabolism and fat percentage) to less than 200 mg per 60 kg body-mass per day (that's about three normal-sized cups a day, or four if you have a mass of 80 kg). So snack healthily, and maintain good fitness.

You need to do some running or aerobics or something. The brain needs oxygenated blood, or else all the other stuff doesn't quite work.

You need to programme your brain to handle text and conceptual diagrams. This means you should NEVER play video-based games or watch television while preparing for examinations, unless you intend to do transition programming in between sessions. Transition programming is like warming down; it's like switching from full video to CNN to newspapers before studying textbook material or notes, and it takes quite a bit of time.

That said, never study for more than an hour at a time. Your brain has a 20-min warm-up cycle, a 20-min warm-down cycle. It is independent of your conscious desire to study. Some people have an 'iron backside' which enables them to work for hours apparently without ceasing. This is possible, but has a detrimental effect on sanity. The best textbook learners also tend to be despotic, unstable and of peculiar psychological tendencies in social situations.

Don't study for less than 30 minutes either; it will never be profitable unless you are doing the mental equivalent of anaerobic respiration — i.e., the last minute short-term cramming just before a paper, which takes 10 min, lasts 20 min, and is forgotten totally within 24 hours. My advice to you, if you are taking an examination which uses a data booklet, is to become very familiar with the data booklet and thus remove much of the need for certain kinds of memory work.

When it comes to literature and the humanities (or the inhuman social sciences such as economics), it is best to study while walking around and/or drawing little diagrams. This is because these domains of knowledge are uncertain and shifty; you can score by writing answers from one perspective and also score by writing answers from a diametrically opposed perspective in some cases.

You therefore need to loosen up your brain so that in can handle ambiguity, and the best way to absorb the impact of ambiguity is through subconscious subcontracting out to the rest of your body. Watch a person twirling his pen one way, and then another, during an English paper, and you will get what I mean. Dancers and gymnasts have an advantage here, since their performances require physical flexibility, and that allows extension of mental flexibility.

If you can keep this up for about five days, you will have studied at least 40 hours profitably. I know this because I plan such schedules for people who can't do it for themselves. Heh heh...

We Now Need Opportunities To Think

Some of you will be aware that I've been working my way through the new CIE IGCSE course on Global Perspectives, preparing resources for teaching it. It's a pretty interesting syllabus, and it's spiced up with material that looks like it's been taken directly from the IB. For example, on page 5 of the 2010 syllabus guide, you'll find this:

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Young people in countries across the world face unprecedented challenges in the 21st century – not least in how they will come to terms with accelerating changes in that world, that will impact on their life chances and life choices.

The rationale behind this syllabus is to provide opportunities for enquiry into, and reflection on, those changes. A prime emphasis will be on developing the sorts of skills and dispositions of thinking that active citizens of the future will need.

This rationale accords not only with the international ethos that underpins all of the IGCSE syllabuses but also with the thinking expressed by UNESCO in its seminal reports on education:

Education must include activities and processes that encourage awareness of, and commitment to, the solutions of global problems. This should be done in such ways that people learn solutions are possible through cooperation at all levels – at the levels of individuals, organisations and nations. — UNESCO (cited by Walker, 2002)

It should be particularly noted that developing awareness of this sort is not a question of how to get everybody to think identically. On the contrary, it is a matter of opening minds to the great complexity of the world and of human thought, and opening hearts to the diversity of human experience and feeling.

Students undertaking this course must consider the themes and issues from local, national and global angles whilst developing their own personal perspective.

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It's obvious to me that this is nothing more than what internationalists have been saying all along, their voices now made more urgently commanding (some say 'shrill') by the weight of that huge and badly-defined phenomenon known as 'globalisation'. If the rationale behind this syllabus is indeed to provide opportunities for "enquiry into, and reflection on, these changes", then I can only mourn the fact that we live in an age when people need pre-packaged opportunities to think about life and the world around them.

Do we really need to have this syllabus? Or is it just a great sales opportunity thought up by the clever people who toil in that glass-fronted building along Hills Road in Cambridge? I used to pass by that building every day on the way to school, and wonder what these people did. I wonder no more.

It was at the last paragraph quoted, though, that I really began again to wonder about something. What are 'angles' and what is a 'perspective' in this context? If you consider all these "themes and issues from local, national and global angles", you are obviously considering them from someone else's perspective. This implies, therefore, that the students doing this subject have to learn how to synthesize their own point of view after examining other people's points of views.

And yet, here I am, synthesizing material from many different points of view so that people teaching this course will have a place on which to stand while shoehorning students into an acceptable frame of mind. It's one of life's little ironies, I suppose.

Value-Addedness

It struck me the other day, as I was reviewing the statistics on school performance, that something was going rather wrong with certain calculations. Let me explain.

Here is how we calculate something called value-addedness in a nationwide high-stakes standardized examination:

1. You get everyone in Grade 6 to be tested in Math, Science, English and a second language. This gives you a score for the entire country.
   
2. Then you test them again at Grade 10 and Grade 12 (well some skip the Grade 10 test).
   
3. This gives you a statistical measure of what kind of performance at Grade 10 or Grade 12 students ought to produce, relative to their score at Grade 6.
   
4. If a student has got a significantly higher score than this expectation, this is called 'value-addedness'.

For example, if Jack scores 250/300 at Grade 6, he is in the top 10% and is expected to get straight As at Grade 10, and so on. The method is a bit more well-refined than that, and a little worse. For a start, they don't actually factor how well Jack did in individual subjects at Grade 6, but they do track how well Jack's seniors did in individual subjects at Grades 10 and 12. They use a rolling average over n years to computed the expected score, which is only useful if there is no clear upward or downward trend.

If the trend is upward, then the rolling average is actually lower than the current expectation; if the trend is downward, then the rolling average is actually higher. If a school policy means that everyone must take subject X, the chances are that X will regress towards a mean; if a school policy means that only the elite can take subject Y, the chances are that Y will have so high a mean score that it becomes meaningless to think about what value-addedness means.

What if, however, the results for the whole country are said to be better than before, every year? Well, then that's very odd. It means that value-addedness should be declining. Actually, if the statistic is distributed normally, then half the population should be above the mean and half below. If the country is doing better AND the value-addedness is rising, then there must be a very long tail or something.

But the interesting thing is, what if the entire national population is in the top 50% of the world at Grade 6 (or 10, or 12), and it isn't anymore after Grade 12? Does that mean the system is screwy (or screwed)? Something to think about...

Advice for the Perplexed

I have a simple piece of advice for the twenty or so of you who have asked me the same kind of question. That question, roughly put, is this: "What if my supervisor/reader looks at my essay and grades me according to measures I can't see in the rubrics?"

In this particular context, your supervisor/reader actually is only assigning a preliminary grade and someone out there will independently be marking your essay and assigning a real grade. Therefore my advice is this: ask for an explanation based on the rubrics, and if such is not forthcoming or the person begins to blather, prevaricate, or otherwise show ignorance of the influence of the rubrics, ignore this person. On the other hand, if the comments he/she makes are linked (validly and usefully) to specific items in the marking rubric, pay careful attention.

It's that simple. I have little patience for people who forget the use of marking rubrics and decide they want to shape your stuff according to other considerations.

Two Days

Well, we're almost there... I figure that if I have shifted something like 50 litres of water a day over a distance of about 50 metres, that makes it 2500 kg-metres. Since I have been lifting it against gravity, I have therefore burnt something like 25 kJ of energy. That's about 6 food calories, and one Oreo™ cookie would feed me back another 40-50 food calories anyway. ARGH.

Fortunately, I am an inefficient human being, and I therefore know that I have burnt a lot more than 25 kJ of personal energy. In fact, I am so inefficient that I have probably burnt a whole lot more than that. Yay, me. I can now go for dinner tonight and eat a lot with minimum stress and lots of joy.

I have also managed to spend enough time at the flat to put part of my library into functional order. That makes me happy, and if the Hierophant were there, I am sure he would have been happy too. The only problem is that the flat has NO coffee in it, unless you count those frozen beans which are a little useless without a grinder of some sort. Sigh.

In breaking news, I am about to embark on the writing of two new modules. Just to refresh everyone's memory, I recently finsihed writing modules on 'Belief Systems' and 'Humans and Other Species' for the new IGCSE subject, 'Global Perspectives'. I am about to begin on 'Water' and 'Conflict and Peace'. I wanted to do 'Law and Criminality', but that's off the agenda for now.

Life is good. My brain has worked very hard, and it is happy.

Everything in Moderation, Everything in Flux

I remember this post fondly. In fact, all I have of it is memories, because I was told to censor it, and it is no more. However, I remember what was in it, and I suppose it is about time I remembered it here.

In that post, one of those which led to an unpleasant episode at the hands of certain interests, I pointed out that a lot of grade adjustment (what was called 'moderation' at a place I used to work in) was arbitrary. In fact, students would have been horrified to see what went on in those closed rooms.

Essentially, a list of potential targets for moderation was drawn up. Teachers would plead a case for specific targets to gain x points so that they would move across a grade boundary. Some teachers would fall asleep, bemused by the machinations of their colleagues; some would be rabidly alert, watching out for students they felt were undeserving of such ascension. A sideboard laden with food rich in sugars and fats stood by, along with appalling coffee, many months gone sour in its 'instant' glass jar.

The whole thing was more like a bourse or a slave-trading station than anything else. It was also clear that some people favoured other people. It was clear that the ability of the student, or even the potential ability, was not the deciding factor. Rather, it was whether people agreed with the idea of a particular student getting the bounty of a free mark (or three, or five, or in many cases, more than ten). In some cases, as boredom, ennui and fatigue set in, the main factor became stamina and the threat of having to stay in a room full of the temporarily insane for more than an hour or two in excess of the time already wasted.

Meanwhile, the department heads sat there, first to arrive (well, some were) and last to leave (well, most were). They manipulated, avoided, or counterattacked as their personalities allowed. Essentially, each one struck some sort of balance between being 'too easy' or being 'too difficult'. You had to show you were a team player — for the right team. You also had to maintain some semblance of integrity, although some were no longer capable of it. Occasionally, there'd be unedifying spectacle of several teachers and heads ganging up on another one just to make that person cough up a mark or two for a favourite son.

I sat through twenty-five sessions like that, and others of similar nature. At the back of my mind, I used to think, "How unreal this is. There are grades here that could never exist in real life, and some for which there is no justification at all. We are giving students resumés that are fake just as an exercise in bestowing largesse upon the favoured and showing who the fount of every blessing is supposed to be."

After the operation, most of the candidates would have survived. The post-op phase would begin, with people desperately running around to rig the scores, adjust the grades, calculate new distributions, re-mark some papers. Being somewhat computer literate, my projections were always done even before this phase. It was easy to see in advance who would be promoted, having powerful allies. I remember one head saying, "He's quite a cute boy, very well-behaved!" as if that had anything to do with academic potential. I noted such comments, since they were often clues as to what grades would be changed in the end.

And so, after a few hours, with some self-congratulatory comments about how kind we were, the whole party would be dismissed like a bunch of vacationing prostitutes no longer giving out favours to all and sundry. The problem, I suppose, is that if you accede to such practices even tacitly, you are joining the party. You may feel unclean for a while, but eventually you will feel better and begin to justify the whole process. I remember the chief of the operation saying, "If we don't do it, remember that other schools will, and that will disadvantage our students!"

Ah well, no point complaining. If the taint covers enough people, it ceases to be a taint, but a norm. No wonder we are told not to conform to the pattern of the world. It is very hard indeed to escape it. Even as I write this, arbitrary moderation is in full swing where wyverns once ruled their world. After all, if you have continuous assessment, you can have continuous moderation too!

Subjects Cambridge Does Not Want You To Take (Part I): Soft Landings

What a tasty morsel for a person who is curious about the term 'areas of knowledge'!

Although this news article is almost venerable, being dated 7 Jan 2008, it is interesting to see that Cambridge University actually produced a list of 20 'A'-Level or IB subjects which it advised students not to take if they wanted to get in. The article says, quoting them: "Applying with two of these A-levels 'would not normally be considered to be acceptable.' "

What is this list of the sub-academic? Here, have a look.

Accounting
Art and Design
Business Studies
Communication Studies
Dance
Design and Technology
Drama and Theatre Studies
Film Studies
Health and Social Care
Home Economics
Information and Communication Technology
Leisure Studies
Media Studies
Music Technology
Performance Studies
Performing Arts
Photography
Physical Education
Sports Studies
Travel and Tourism

Interesting, isn't it? I wonder if any school actually tells its students about these things?

Interesting Diseases

In all my life, I've enjoyed poring through reference books. After a while, reference books about the purely factual began to pall. I began to look at more interesting reference books, like Michael Newton's The Encyclopaedia of Cryptozoology and Diana Wynne Jones's A Tough Guide to Fantasyland. However, Jeff Vandermeer's The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, with contributions from a stellar cast of inventive and awfully creative people, was the zenith of the genre.

I find that I cannot do better. But I have some humble contributions, which I've discovered over my years as a teacher.

1. Markosis: the dulling of the senses that comes with too much immersion in grading procedures.
2. Rudella: the redness that descends when one's hand holds a red pen and the white paper is covered with diseased writing and you just have to write comments about it.
3. Orthoporosis: painfully obvious holes in a supposedly structured argumentative essay because there is no meat on the bones.
4. Appendocytosis: creating addenda to your main argument because you used up your word limit writing nonsense and have to squeeze in the real stuff somewhere.

Maybe I should stop here. Heh.

2008 IB Results (Coda)

The International Baccalaureate Organisation has been commendable in its approach to keeping IB results announcements at a civilised and low-key level. It makes it hard to dig around and get specific data for schools unless you go to the schools themselves. At which point, you find some lovely surprises.

Let me introduce you to a school somewhere near the heart of my education (which these days is but a faint memory of Highbury in North London). This North London school, founded in 1850, has posted an average IB score of about 42 out of 45 points over the last THREE years. (As a benchmark, 40 points will get you into Cambridge, Oxford or just about any university in the world.) This year, I hear they had an average of 41.3, which I suppose is a bit lower than usual. That average comes from a results distribution in which 90.1% of ALL their grades were 7 on a scale of 1-7.

They do have the advantage of a small cohort. But I think that from what I've heard, they have the greater advantage of being a small, well-knit and positive community, full of interesting educators and even more interesting students. They're also, interestingly enough for an IB school, a girls-only school. I'm sure some people might consider that an advantage too.

What I'd really like to know is what their subject statistics are. My guess is that they must be exceedingly good at Groups 1 & 2 (Literature/Language) and Groups 3 & 6 (Humanities and Aesthetics). That's not to say their other results are not good; I'm just speculating here about where the highest of their many high points might be.

The Secrets of Educational Success

I have to thank a person I don't know for a sudden flash of insight as to how educational success is attained. An article in Chessbase.com written by Lin Zhigen claims that there are seven possible 'secrets' to chess success.

In order of obtrusiveness (or something), he lists them as:

1. Computers will solve everything.
2. Maximise the opportunities for your opponents to make mistakes.
3. Dress like a grandmaster and you will play like one.
4. Use computers for analysis, especially of your own games.
5. Team chemistry.
6. Caffeine.
7. Chinese chess.

And that list immediately leapt into my brain as the essential list of things that students should consider when trying to ace examinations.

Now we know why Asian scholars are so efficient once you get them into a good school (or any formal structure at all). They all use computers, hang around waiting for others to screw up, dress alike, analyse their performance, have odd social chemistry, drink tea (or coffee) in large amounts, and play chinese chess. Haha...

It makes me proud to share that inheritance.

No Child Left Unexamined

The current (and not for long) US President once instituted an educational plan with the tagname 'No Child Left Behind'. In that, he seemed to be creating a hugely magnified echo of the Atlantean examination system. (For more about Atlantis, search this blog for 'Atlantis' or 'Atlantean'.)

The Atlantean examination system came from obvious origins. Atlantis was colonised by a sea power of old, a leviathan that once encircled the world with its mighty lamps and scales. From that power, the prescribed examinations for the elite were borrowed. An examination meant for the top 10% of the population became the norm. In saying this, I am merely recounting what the official story has proclaimed. There is nothing scurrilous here.

But take a moment to reflect. Right at the beginning, the form and substance of examination was already pegged to the top 10% of the world-spanning elite. This very same examination was then refined, made tougher, made more substantial, tweaked in arcane and dangerous ways. It is the current means of testing in present-day Atlantis. And hardly anyone complains that it is hard.

The warlords and savants of Atlantis (sometimes, they are one and the same) have so deeply ingrained a culture of imperial national examinations in the populace that local students are on average far better educated in technical subjects than their peers overseas. This happy state of affairs means that almost any child of Atlantis can, if he wishes to and finds it affordable, go elsewhere to make a living.

In that sense, no child has been left behind; every child is exposed to the system early, and hardly anyone is left on the hillside for the wolves. But there are still gaps. The cost of overclocking the central processing units of an entire nation has yet to manifest fully; let us hope the burnout is containable, and that there is indeed a better age ahead.