10th February 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
All I seem to be writing about at the moment is assessments, but I experienced something so strange following a London assessment date that I it’s been at the front if my thoughts for the last few days. The assessment itself wasn’t that unusual. Unfortunately the applicant didn’t appear to have grasped the essence of tutoring, and lectured for the whole of the assessment, only pausing to ask “do you understand?” to which I always answered yes; all of our assessors have to answer yes to that question, because we need to ensure that the tutor confirms understanding, and doesn’t just ask us to judge whether we have understood ourselves.
Anyway, after the applicant had received his assessment result and feedback, he emailed to complain on the grounds that I had scored his assessment incorrectly. Now I’m not saying that I never make a mistake when assessing – being an assessor is tough and sometimes requires a lot of careful thought – but in this case it was a no-brainer. The really strange thing was that the applicant appeared to be using the criticism of his assessor (me) to persuade us to increase his assessment score. It’s quite common for prospective tutors not to realise that I own Blue Tutors; I do look young, and I suppose am quite young. However, the really bizarre thing was for this tutor to try and make a case for his lesson to receive anything more than it did. I can only think that he hadn’t read our teaching guidelines at all, even after receiving the assessment feedback. It was the equivalent of someone crashing the car 10 seconds into a driving test, and then criticising the examiner for not giving credit for the driver putting their seatbelt on.