I teach at a Christian Brothers boys school in Brisbane & have done so for 32 years.

For the last 4 to 5 years I have spoken out about the very serious flaws in our current Physics syllabus.

The first was (& still is) the constructing of criteria sheets to accompany every assessment piece. I’m a reasonably intelligent person but no matter how many inservices I went to (I’ve given up now) on what they were to be achieving and how to construct them, either my Science coordinator or a review panel would always have some problem with them. I’ve lost count as to how many times interpretations have changed. These things take hours to formulate & with ordinary typing skills & no secretarial help any more (all teachers have to do All of their word processing versus more efficient typing staff doing it for us in the past) this is a very onerous task which turns out to be a complete waste of time as very few students read them, let alone follow them to the letter!

Secondly, the syllabus dictates that we have alternative assessment pieces called ERTs & EEIs which stand for Extended Response Task & Extended Experimental Investigation respectively. Four of these must be set over the 2 senior years, their drafts marked and obviously the final submissions marked.  The last of these that I set took days to design (content & criteria sheet), the draft commenting took 1½  weeks of most of MY free time & then each of the final copies took ~ 1¼ hours. WITH OVER 50 STUDENTS TO MARK THIS TOOK NEARLY 3 WEEKS!! (I have four other subjects that have to be addressed professionally during this time also!). Lets not forget that the students (OR THEIR TUTORS?!) are also putting in excessive amounts of time to complete these tasks.

Thirdly, and probably the most important issue for the students, is that all of this should have some fantastic benefit for the students’ learning. BUT THIS ISN’T SO. I can categorically say (remember, 32 yrs teaching) that this system is flawed in another  major area. When the EEIs & ERTs are being done by the students they are the only assessable item in that term. Other topics still have to be taught BUT because the students know that they won’t be assessed THEY IGNORE THEM! This leaves our graduates with large holes in their preparation for tertiary studies – this never happened prior to this syllabus.

If you, via your paper, can bring the huge problems this ridiculous QSA syllabus creates for teachers, students & their parents, to the attention of the public & our politicians I will be forever grateful (my wife says I’m a fool for continuing to be part of such an impost on our lives & that I should get out of the profession!).

Teachers name noted but withheld