190. TWO STUDENTS, BOTH ALIKE IN DIGNITY - On The Illusion of Individual Exam Success
Image two students receiving their GCSE results. One gets a grade 5, the other a grade 9. The assumption is that the second student is somehow ‘better’ than the first. But even without questioning the worth of examinations like GCSEs for measuring anything that is actually meaningful besides a student’s ability to memorise and regurgitate information according to an arbitrary criteria, we can still question the assumption that the student who achieved a grade 9 was ‘better’ than the student achieving a grade 5. Does the grade truly reflect the work and ability of the student, or is it merely a result of a context and circumstance that led up to the exam over which the student is powerless?
Consider the fact that the two students might have had different teachers. This is not to say that one teacher was better or worse than the other either. Simply that the relationship between a teacher and their students is a special kind of alchemy. Unpredictable and volatile. In some combinations there is great chemistry. In others, the chemistry doesn’t work. One teacher’s personality, or way of delivering their lessons, may really resonate with a student while another’s might leave them cold. One teacher might be having a particularly bad day on a very important moment in the scheme of work and be a little off their game while the other one wasn’t.
Perhaps our grade 5 student faced that hurdle from the start of their GCSE in the subject: a teacher they didn’t connect with, even if just for a few key lessons. While our grade 9 student felt comfortable and inspired in their teacher’s classroom every lesson. Is that the fault of the student? Or the teacher? Or is it just a truism of social interaction that not all combinations of people work smoothly? Can something as unpredictable and arbitrary as the chemistry between yourself and your teacher be fairly considered a student’s responsibility? Of course not. Yet it will no doubt impact the way they engage in those lessons and have some sort of effect on the outcome. An outcome we tend to simply attribute to the student alone.
Maybe both students liked their teacher just fine, but in the grade 5 student’s classroom a few other classmates did not get on so well with the teacher? Or maybe they just didn’t like the subject? A mistaken option or something they are forced to take as a compulsory subject? For whatever reason, perhaps their behaviour in lessons isn’t great, and frequently causes a distraction to the learning and disruption to planned classroom activities. Meanwhile, in the grade 9 classroom, perhaps everyone was on board with both the teacher and the subject at all times. All wanting to do well and interested in what they were learning. No interruption, no tangents and distractions. Space and time to go even further than the exam specifications allow.
The specific classroom environment is another form of unpredictable alchemy that will impact individual students despite not being anything they can control. Take even the love of the subject or feelings about the teacher out of the picture. Behaviour might change because of circumstances in the individual lives of your fellow classmates. A sick grandparent in hospital, an impending parental divorce, family financial troubles, bullying at school, a worrying personal medical diagnosis, depression, anxiety, an eating disorder… In the combination of different pupil lives that make up a classroom, so many external factors can influence the behaviour and level of focus in the room. Did the grade 9 student work harder than the grade 5 student, or did they just luckily have a better environment in which to study because these weren’t the years that their peers lives or their own were affected by tragedy?
The timetabling of lessons also plays a big part in that environment. Is a lesson just before lunch, when students are hungry and thinking about what they want to eat? Is a lesson held last thing, when students are tired from a long school day and just want to go home? Is the lesson held first thing on a Monday when students are tired from the long weekend? And if on a Monday, how many lessons are lost each academic year because of bank holidays across the year, or school INSET days at the start of a term? Could the difference between our grade 5 and grade 9 students simply be that one student had a more favourable timetable than the other? Being awake and fully switched on each time the subject was taught instead of struggling with fatigue or hunger? Or maybe it was teacher absence. Not even long term sickness that led to permanent cover (although that can happen too!) Just the fairly trivial event of a teacher being ill, or unable to get into school because of a household emergency, at an infortuitous time. A difficult new topic that needed to be introduced with care reduced to a hurried emergency worksheet for students to do independently, perhaps? Our grade 9 student may have just had a better grasp of the particular subject which came up in the exam for the highest tariff question that year because their teacher happened to be there that day to go over it while the grade 5 student’s teacher was off with an ill-timed flu.
A curriculum can be well planned, and an academic department can have shared best practice across all colleagues to ensure equal opportunity for all their pupils, no matter which teacher they have for the subject, and still all these various X-factors can affect the way the lessons are received or carried out by the students in the room, leading to massive disparities in experience and understanding for the students regardless of all these mitigations. This is all well-known. There is nothing in this post that is not something every teacher talks about and understands. It is often the content of post-exam discussions with senior management teams. Yet there is still this widespread social understanding, including from schools, that grades tell us something important about a student’s effort, ability and overall ranking within a cohort. Even with all this knowledge about X-factors, schools will still deny students places in the next phase of their education on the basis of grades or make judgements about a pupil’s character based on what they achieve. Praise will be lavished on the students who get nothing but 9s in all their subjects, but the students who get all 5s, who perhaps put in just as much effort, had just as much potential, and were simply victims of context, are not only denied praise often, but also denied places on courses they might be perfectly capable of achieving in. Or university places. Or jobs.
Ultimately, the narrative that education is an individual meritocracy is a myth. Education is a collective experience with collective outcomes. It is an amalgam of disparate factors of individual personalities, specific environment, prior attitudes and interpersonal chemistry that combine in each classroom, and at each unique period of the timetable (period 4 on a Friday is not the same as period 4 on a Tuesday), completely differently. A student is not an isolated atom, but an interconnected part of a whole system in constant symbiotic flux. Yet we continue to insist on judging them individually. Ranking students by grades that reflect far more about circumstances far outside of a student’s control than they do about anyone’s individual ability.
The classroom is not a laboratory. Conditions are never perfect. Schooling is a constant compromise between the ideal of education and the practical logistics that come from the decision of attempting that education collectively, with limited resources, in a rigidly structured institutional setting. The grade a student gets at the end of this process is therefore a collective responsibility, not an individual one. The student plays a part, for sure, but so too does the classroom teacher, the person responsible for putting together the timetables, the fellow students they share a class with, and even the families of every member of the class whose actions influence the behaviour of these pupils. It is my view, therefore, that we have to stop this obsession with individual grades and find much better ways to ensure authentic education does not continue to be the uneccessary victim of the logistics of schooling under capitalism.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere now on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon.
My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.
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I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.
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