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‘Star quality’? The FT paper edition for 20th/21st August has feature on some of its writers sitting some of this years’ A-level exams. Though a stock sort of piece, this much the best of its type I’ve read and is full of insights, most provided by the examiners they involved in the exercise.
For example, here’s Matthew Lumby of the QCA:
A lot of people think that in an essay question you are just judged on content and style when in fact the markers will be looking for a number of specific things.
What else is there?
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“What els is there?”
Do you Trot to get your Marx.
I’m guessing that he means form – writing by the book, so that your content (in whatever style it is written) follows the rules for writing that the student has been taught. For example, each paragraph having an initial statement that is then backed up by at least three supporting sentences.
I’m not saying that this is clever, but I think that’s what he’s talking about.
Recent research into America’s SAT exams shows that essay-length pieces are judged on length, rather than any of that silly content or style stuff.
You can write any old bullshit, and as long as it’s longer than 500 words, you’ll do okay.
So… size does matter.
I remember when I was doing A-Levels and GCSEs, for most of the essay questions most were concerned by how many pages they managed to use, and that continued through into university. I always figured that as long as you answered the question clearly, length didn’t matter – a view borne out by my grades.
No-one seemed to agree with my viewpoint that ‘making the reader wade through pages of crap to get to the salient points is a bad idea.’
To some extent, students have to make the kind of points that are on the all-encompassing mark scheme. For example, if you are doing a ‘summary exercise’ of an article in a newspaper about A Level results, you would have to pinpoint some of the specific points that arise in the article.
E.g. A question in a past GCSE paper taking an extract from ‘English Journey’: “By referring closely to J B Prietley’s account of Bradford, explain what he considers gave the city its particular character at the time he was writing.”
You aren’t supposed to quote or lift from the extract, and you’re not supposed to say anything that comes into you head. You’re supposed to relate everything in your essay to that key word: character. The mark scheme will point out all the points that should be covered for top marks, and the more you get, the higher the grade will be. If you put it in neat, decent, carefully-selected words, that’s a bonus. Getting certain points from an article is a little different to summarising the content, because you can’t just write down anything that appears in the extract – your answer has to be related to what the question asks, and can’t skirt the issue. But the difference between getting any points written down and getting points which relate to the question is pedantry, really, because it’s not that difficult at all to pick the points you need. I got 29 marks out of 30 in a summary exercise for my internal examination this year (my teacher doesn’t give out full marks!) and the extract we had to take points from was very simple to get to grips with, and it had been the same article that GCSE students had used a year before. All the content points you needed were easy to spot and it wasn’t difficult to cut away anything that you didn’t need to answer the precise question. The extract was very short too (about 400-500 words).
Essays, in any subject, are often expected to follow a guide answer (although this would be vehemently denied by my teachers). Students are pushed by their teachers, when they prepare for coursework essays, towards the ‘right’ answer. And if you ask me, that’s the bigger problem with examinations today than simply what it is that examiners pick up on.
I think Mark is essentially correct. There is a marking scheme for each question, and students only get credit for points included in the scheme. This ensures some objectivity in grading.
There’s nothing new about this. The importance of understanding how answers would be marked was impressed on me when I took my A levels 30 years ago.
Grammar, spelling, punctuation, penmanship…
Sorry staghounds, those have been ignored in British public exams for well over a decade, possibly two. I didn’t even consider he might have meant that sort of thing.