Well, not quite, I think. We have national exams here, where all kids who take, for example, an A level in English will take the same exam. (More or less - there are three exam boards in England, and schools will choose to follow the syllabus from one of them, so a proportion of kids will take 1, some will take 2 and some will take 3, depending on the preference of the school they attend.)
So they're not class tests which are set by individual schools - they're set and marked by central examinations boards, and then the results for each school are published so that people can see which schools are performing better academically. Which is where a lot of the problems with our education system stem from. Schools need pupils in order to get funding to survive. If you can show you have a good academic record, you're more likely to a) attract pupils and b) attract the right sort of pupils (i.e, those from better backgrounds who are likely to take their education seriously). As a result, teachers are teaching kids how to pass tests, to keep the school's "numbers" up - hence the comment I pointed out about it being difficult to distinguish between those pupils who are "well educated" and those who are "well drilled in passing tests." This in turn is leading to "grade inflation" - meaning that some pupils are attaining results which don't accurately reflect their ability.
Yeah. It's ridiculously complicated, I know. Like you, I'm good at exams - but also like you, I suspect I'm also fairly well educated. But definitely, twenty, thirty years ago, getting marks in the 80-90% range was incredibly rare here.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2008-08-15 07:47 pm (UTC)So they're not class tests which are set by individual schools - they're set and marked by central examinations boards, and then the results for each school are published so that people can see which schools are performing better academically. Which is where a lot of the problems with our education system stem from. Schools need pupils in order to get funding to survive. If you can show you have a good academic record, you're more likely to a) attract pupils and b) attract the right sort of pupils (i.e, those from better backgrounds who are likely to take their education seriously). As a result, teachers are teaching kids how to pass tests, to keep the school's "numbers" up - hence the comment I pointed out about it being difficult to distinguish between those pupils who are "well educated" and those who are "well drilled in passing tests." This in turn is leading to "grade inflation" - meaning that some pupils are attaining results which don't accurately reflect their ability.
Yeah. It's ridiculously complicated, I know. Like you, I'm good at exams - but also like you, I suspect I'm also fairly well educated. But definitely, twenty, thirty years ago, getting marks in the 80-90% range was incredibly rare here.