All school assessments have pros and cons

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/02/2023 (982 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With the pitting of examinations at the Grade 12 level against the idea of “progressive assessment” once again in the news, I feel I have experienced it all.

My teaching career began in the mining town of Snow Lake in the days when the Manitoba High School Examination Board set the final exams for every Grade 12 subject, and they were worth 100 per cent of a student’s marks. Assignments, tests, and even midterm exams were just for practice. Teachers had no input into the marks given to their students.

My second post was Gordon Bell High School, back when it was designated as an experimental school. Exams were strictly forbidden. Traditional marks, both percentages and letter grades, were also forbidden. Students were evaluated on the basis of assignments and short unit tests. At the end of the year they received a grade of Superior, Satisfactory or Fail.

My final school was St. John’s-Ravenscourt. In my first years there, every school determined its own method of assessment. Later, provincial exams were reintroduced for mathematics and language arts, but were worth only 30 per cent.

All of these had their advantages and disadvantages. In the days of the 100 per cent final, many students fell by the wayside because they were not good at writing exams. Students in remote regions of the province had particularly low exam results.

But there were a few advantages. Universities and scholarship-granters felt they could compare students from different schools. (This was a bit of an illusion, since some schools had better teachers and consistently produced better exam results.)

Another advantage is that it put the tortoise and the hare on equal footing. A student might find a course difficult at the beginning. But a time comes when everything falls into place and it all makes sense. They write a near-perfect exam. In the old days, that would have been their final mark, but today they are penalized for the slow start.

The years at Gordon Bell — without either exams or traditional grades — had several disadvantages. Each course was a series of individual units that were not tied together and often forgotten. There was never a need to review material covered in the past.

But there was one interesting benefit in the way many students felt free to follow their passions. These were student involved with extracurricular activities. When their activity became intense — before a big game or a major production — they would neglect their regular schoolwork and focus on the preferred activity. Since final marks were limited to Superior, Satisfactory or Fail, they had little to lose.

In some ways those were glorious years at Gordon Bell. The school put on superb musical productions, produced Reach for the Top teams that went to the national finals, nurtured outstanding athletic teams, and came first in Canada in mathematics contests. All this from an inner-city school.

Which is better? A system where students, from time to time, feel free to follow their passions and neglect everything else, or a system where they must show restraint in pursuing their interests because there is a need to do well in everything all the time? That’s a tough question.

At St. John’s-Ravenscourt, we had traditional exams, both midterm and final, set by the school. Teachers were treated as professionals, free to decide how much the exams were worth.

I would usually count the exam mark for 30 per cent, but I would often tell my students I would count their exam mark for 100 per cent if it was higher than their term mark. This inspired many of them to work very hard at reviewing the course. It also gave the tortoise a chance to catch up to the hare.

Leaving assessment up to each school had one major failing. Some schools did not cover the entire curriculum. Special events, bad weather and field trips often resulted in cancelled classes. It was easy for teachers to drop a unit or two from the syllabus. I heard many complaints from university mathematics professors about students who had credit for Grade 12 pre-calculus but had not covered the entire course.

The fact that such complaints come mostly from the mathematics department is not surprising. It is a subject where success in the next course requires a mastery of the one that came before it.

Examinations have been a contentious issue for many decades, and will continue to be. To me, the greatest advantage of an exam is this: in preparing for it, the student gets a bird’s-eye view of the entire course, something that does not happen when they are dealing with one topic at a time.

John Barsby is the author of Fifty Years in the Classroom and What I Learned There.