13th November 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I was covering for Harriet on Monday and Tuesday of last week, so I start by apologising if any tutors or students felt that we weren’t running as smoothly as normal. I do my best, but I just don’t think I’m cut out for multitasking. I don’t want to make any stereotypical comments about women being much better at doing more than one thing at once, but Harriet certainly seems to cope much better than I do, and I’m much happier when I can focus all my efforts on one thing.
I had to laugh when reading about the ongoing English GCSE saga last week. Teachers inflate the grades of their own students’ course work.... well duh! The trouble now is that whereas before I could get on board with Ofqual’s stance: grade boundaries were raised to ensure the grade proportions were similar to last year (slightly less in fact, but not by much). They now seem to be claiming that the answer to inflated coursework grades is to deflate exam grades. Why did they just remark the coursework? I’m fully aware that it would have taken a lot of money to do that, and don’t want to appear naive, but as a scientist I’m simply seeing an obvious solution to a logical problem.
The weird thing from a tutoring agency’s point of view is that we do our best to ensure that our tutors aren’t unethically helping GCSE or A Level students with their coursework. If Ofqual are accusing teachers of over-grading their own students’ coursework, isn’t it about time we did away with the problem altogether, and came up with a way of examining everyone which is definitely fair?