The idea to use instructional criteria sheets to give ‘feed-forward’ advice to senior students I would think is welcomed by many – it makes sense to tell a student what they should cover in order to get top marks in an assignment (especially when the actual task questions are ridiculously open-ended as they are wrongly required to be in recent years). But they’re not needed for a test or simple weekly quizzes and so on. However, we’re talking about Maths and Sciences here. One has to step back and also realise that criteria sheets for assignments would not be necessary anyway if we were allowed to ditch assignments altogether. That is how maths and sciences were taught decades ago and it worked – Australian students were at the forefront internationally. We expected students to answer straightforward questions and to solve them with their skills. Teachers were not forced by the Education Department to ask ridiculously vague and open-ended ‘creative’ assignment questions.

Anyway, assuming that criteria sheets are good for something, why then cannot we, teachers, simply download a template of list of content to be covered over the two senior years and choose from that? In fact, why is that we have to make up a customised new matrix sheet for everything. First, we have to make sure we loosely define the content of the syllabus we are covering (fair enough, but the only syllabus content they give is the name of about 6 topics for the entire two senior years and yet the detail of this material should have the highest priority). Then we must combine the rhetoric that makes up ‘dimensions’ from a ‘standards’ sheet they give and also subdivide them over the ‘criteria’ of Knowledge, Investigating (or whatever the QSA decided was important) and Communication, etc.

Well, enough teachers are angry about that because after the test/ assignment they have to check off so many wooly standards on a matrix (not the content which should be checked if anything). The thing is, W.A. and Qld both had OBE (the Outcomes Based Education – a failed educational fad from the 90s) some years ago, and it had such ridiculous random outcomes that we knew it was wrong. The difference now, I think, is that the new complex criteria sheets sort of incorporate syllabus topics – like ‘use of algebra variables’, and we have to check off these criteria sheets. So, some teachers are actually brainwashed into thinking they are covering enough content -which is another story.

Anyway, to add to the workload,each and every exam question has its standard or ‘quality’ pre-ordained and then a magical holistic method is used to combine all the various qualities. It’s kind of different to the way students were marked along a ‘continuum’ with OBE years ago. I remember my kids back in primary school. In one of the grades, even if they got top marks, they were deemed only ‘developing’ because they were at the beginning of a two year outcome level – finally those in charge saw reason and stopped that here in Qld. However, now it’s harder to define why the new system of marking is wrong.

No, now we teachers are forced to define vital knowledge questions as ‘D’ quality, so even if many of these questions are required to be correct to cover an entire topic of physics, say, and the kid gets them all correct, the student is still only considered a D student; therefore, students can only get an ‘A’ or ‘B’ on their report by answering several questions with many layers of critical thinking. For outliers, you can see if the kid deserved an A or E, but kids don’t always get their answers skewed towards one end or concentrated around one grade.

I don’t remember there being an entire discontinuation of using marks for the OBE for individual questions in exams, yet there is now. This is worse than before. It is terrible what students read on their exam papers – D for a half right C standard question. But also many Ds for fully correct simple questions, or a C for a half right A standard question – the kids can’t get an idea of how well they performed at a glance. Worse still, to stop them complaining, some QSA leaders and teachers don’t put any marks on their maths or science answers – just transfer the letters to their profile sheet – it would take the students a month of Sundays to see how well they did.

But then, far, far worse are the subjective judgments made, when teachers must make a decision from these ‘profile sheets’ filled with alphabetical letters, about the grade of the test paper. Some only see the letters they want to see. Others innocently cannot make a judgement – they see, for instance, a few Bs and Cs correct, but there are many Ds (on the fully correct D standards answers) and think that the latter is making the student more of a D student!). This is incredibly wrong, counter-productive, and possibly ruining a child’s self-esteem for good. And that’s separate again to the process of checking off the custom criteria sheet as well (that has the woolly standards on it). Too much unnecessary work and too much subjectiveness! Well, I think I’ve said enough.