Exam Results Reveal Failure In Educational System
Its bad enough when plagiarism rears its head in an educational exam, even worse when the plagiarism has been enforced by the teacher during the exam.
The pressure on the teaching resource in a struggling school can be immense. Performance in exams have a critical role in assessing the performance of the school. This has led to a degree of manipulation by schools in the spotlight to maximise the points scored in exams. The infamous and widespread “teach to test” syndrome, where children are drilled for around nine weeks to pass exams, occurs at the expense of further learning. The debacle then faced by children taking the GCSE and “A” level exams where exam papers have been wrong or information has been missed out making it impossible to answer the question has been matched perhaps on the plus side with the realisation that one GCSE paper comprised entirely of questions that all appeared in past papers.
Apart from the trauma this has caused the examinees the department of education has asked the exam boards to, once again, review their systems and procedures. Only three years ago a central examination company was sacked from its contract having failed to mark the papers on time and with any consistency.
This all takes a step back compared to recent activities in Jakarta. During an exam the star pupil was forced by the teacher to share his answers with the other students in the exam . This rather clumsy approach indicated that perhaps the teacher was not sure of the answers himself. But the problem does not stop there. The Indonesian authorities are concerned about the level of plagiarism occurring in degrees courses and subsequently the number of teachers who are unqualified or have fraudulent certificates.
With the level of technology that now abounds we must surely come up with a better system to school and examine children. We owe them a responsible education and the current mess centering on exams clearly must be the starting point.
