1)  A central authority could outline the general requirements for a series of exam papers, such as having a suitable range of difficulty level, a range of theoretical and practical questions, familiar to unfamiliar, and a range from short response to extended.  There would be no need for the massive amount of criteria and verbal descriptors of standards that we have now.  After that, it should be up to the schools to set exams and use marks to assess the students and grade them.  Many schools believe that they must avoid using marks and use criteria sheets instead, which are matrices of cells containing verbal statements of standards.

QSA’s position is that marks can be used, but decisions on ratings cannot be made by simply using cutoff marks.  The standards matrices must be applied.  They insist that a mark of say 90% doesn’t guarantee an “A” standard of work because the student may not have fulfilled all of the “A”-descriptors in the syllabus.  However, the following extract from p32 of the Qld. MAB syllabus, produced by QSA, states that a standard can be obtained without necessarily ticking every descriptor.  I can’t see the difference:-
 
“When teachers are determining a standard for each criterion, it is not always necessary for the student to have met each descriptor for a particular standard; the standard awarded should be informed by how the qualities of the work match the descriptors overall”.

If we were simply able to award marks when assessing a well-set exam paper, it would be the job of review panels to check that suitable standards and balances have been maintained.  This is what happened before the QSA became such a powerful influence and advocate for non-marks assessment.  It worked well.  The best students got the best ratings.  We don’t need a cumbersome system in order to achieve that.  Mathematics teachers are good at setting suitably balanced assessment and also at awarding part marks for imperfect solutions and giving full credit for correct alternative solution methods.

The advantage of this would be greater simplicity in devising assessment tasks and in marking them and grading students.  There would be no loss of validity of the grades produced.  In classrooms, the change would produce better teaching and learning.  At the moment, assessment is driving the agenda, because of the many requirements to be satisfied by an “assessment package”.  That’s wrong – our emphasis should be on teaching and learning.  Young teachers including pre-service teachers, and also experienced teachers, have to spend large amounts of professional development time trying to understand QSA’s onerous assessment requirements.  But what we all need to be doing instead, is learning more about our subject and its applications and about the best ways of introducing topics to students and inspiring them in the subject.  We are prevented from using our time to the best pedagogical advantage, because of the time taken to embed a host of little detailed requirements into an “assessment package”.

The marks system is working well in NSW, Victoria, England, and other places, and in most Universities.  Some of QSA’s own QCS tests are assessed with a marks system.  It’s crazy that students suffer under QSA’s cumbersome system for school assessment, and then enter University to find that they are assessed simply and validly by using marks only.

Using marks allows teachers to differentiate between students more readily than by placing ticks in the cells of criteria sheets.  Advocates of the latter system place ticks toward the right or left edges of the cells in the criterion sheet, or in the centre, depending on how well they judge the student to have met the particular descriptor.  That’s all very subjective and unreliable.  Awarding marks according to a marking scheme, and giving credit for alternative solutions which are different from the adopted marking scheme, produces fair and defensible judgments and allows teachers to rank students in order of merit when required to do so.

2) At present there is a plethora of criteria and descriptors of standards in the syllabuses. There are dot-points such as “comment on the strengths and limitations of models, both given and developed” or “identification of assumptions and their associated effects, parameters and/or variables” which require understandings that are sometimes more appropriate to tertiary level studies.  It’s a more urgent priority for high school students to gain and apply mathematical skills to make predictions or solve problems, but these other idealistic dot-point requirements draw away from the time available in school for students to develop basic appreciations of their subject.  The tragedy of the current situation is that if a school should happen to omit even one of these micro-specifications from their assessment “package”, their proposed ratings will be reduced by review panels, even though the level of challenge in the school’s questions may be higher than that of schools who have diligently ticked all the boxes by attending to the many little dot-points.  When exam questions are designed with lots of tick-boxes in mind, the assessment can become somewhat stilted and artificial.  Questions need only be graded in level of challenge, and to be broadly divided into a basic level, suitable for students to obtain a basic “Pass”, and a higher level that would examine problem-solving skills in a range of situations and allow people to achieve the highest ratings.

3) At the website below this paragraph, you will see the newest incarnation of the standards to be applied in Years 1-10, in this case Year 1.  They are called “Standards Elaborations” and they are the means by which teachers are expected to assess their Year 1 students.  By changing the “1″ where it says “yr1″ in the URL, you can get to the other year levels:

http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/downloads/p_10/ac_math_yr1_se.pdf

If you compare the descriptors in say columns 1 and 2 for Year 1, you might agree with me that it would be very hard for a Year 1 teacher, or anyone else, to decide which column is most appropriate for a particular student’s responses.  Who wants their children or grandchildren to bring home a results sheet like this, or a single letter rating derived from this matrix?  It would be far superior and more useful for the child to bring home a spelling or other test or project marked “18/20″ with the mistakes highlighted, etc.  Marking would be much easier and more reliable, and families could easily see how the child is progressing.  Yet this criterion sheet system is now being used throughout Years 1-10 in our State.

4) External exams would be better than the patchwork quilt system that Queensland has now, where schools all set different exams from each other, and no-one is really sure whether questions marked “unfamiliar” are really so.  The NSW system combining school assessment with the HSC works very well, and it should be easy for Qld to move to that kind of system.  It ensures more reliable comparability of students from different schools.  As the National Curriculum is implemented throughout Qld schools, it makes sense for us to adopt a national assessment approach.  QSA have been setting good external Senior exams in Qld, but have announced that they will discontinue them.  It seems easily possible that they could continue to set them for full-scale use in schools.  Money saved on review panels could be used to pay for teams of markers.

5) QSA claims that Queensland’s assessment system is “world’s best practice”.  There is no objective evidence to support this.  It is the belief of academic theorists.  No other education system has conferred this compliment on QSA – it is merely a wistful statement by insiders, and therefore of little value.  If it were world’s best practice, why haven’t NSW, Victoria, the UK, etc, converted to it?  Why don’t our University Maths departments adopt it?

Let’s improve mathematics teaching in the schools by freeing up teachers’ time so they can concentrate on improving pedagogy and inspiring students, instead of suffocating in a straitjacket of unnecessary assessment requirements.  Let parents once again receive clear simple statements of marks earned by their children.