Readers of
Socialist Appeal would have heard the headlines this week about the delay in
supplying the SATs results for schools and the damage that this is causing.
Apart from the late delivery, and the whole issue that SATs as a form of
assessment are not good education in the first place, one of the critical
issues about the current situation has largely been missing from these headline
reports. That the chaos being experienced flows directly from the privatisation
of the SATs marking and that the quality of what will be eventually produced is
open to serious question.
Teachers and
educationalist are receiving a large number of incidental reports that the
marking will be inaccurate. The commercial firm that gained the privatised
contract, ETS Europe, has tried to manage the SATs marking on the basis of
cutting costs and boosting their profits. They have recruited markers at low
rates and consequently attracted a large number of more inexperienced teachers,
who were looking to boost meagre salaries. Full time teachers with more
experience, who would normally undertake exam marking, have largely avoided the
imposition of these new conditions. Consequently, the operators have allowed a
far higher proportion of errors. The
Times Educational Supplement indicates that for KS3 Maths this was eight times
as many as in the past. In addition teachers are being asked to mark papers
for subject and key stages with they do no teach or have no experienced
knowledge of. At the administration offices of the contractor panic and chaos
seems to be the order of the day with temporary and unknowledgeable staff being
hurriedly recruited to input the results, inevitably leading to even more
errors and mishap.
Comments
from the chalk face
The following are extracts from an
online discussion board of English teachers referring to the marking of SATs.
The comments are typical and are repeated in other subjects across the internet
and within schools.
“We’ve just
got our results and they are rubbish! 20% down on last year (L5+). We
have looked through all papers and found major discrepancies in the Shakespeare
paper and some in the writing tasks. We have also found several errors in the
basic addition of marks – one candidate was 16 marks adrift. This took her from
a low 6 to a mid 7!”
“I am in
touch with a number of SATs senior examiners and they have been appalled by
some of the errors made by the company running it this year. There are
still 50,000 scripts awaiting marking – they are being marked by a marking
panel of 20 markers each weekend – so we may get the remaining results in
2012.”
“As an English KS3 SATS marker and an experienced
English teacher may I make a few points:
The incompetence of the system was enormous. There were no master
lists provided to enable us to check the papers from schools other than an
online list which required you to physically check the papers against the
display. In my case this was two schools of 300 each and the system
kept timing out and losing the data! We had no indication of who had taken
an exam except for those online lists.
I was short of one school and despite numerous phone calls and emails, they
never materialised, so there is one school of nearly 300 out there somewhere
possibly unmarked, but not for want of trying on my part.”
