Letters From A Tory

Dear The Independent,

Dear oh dear.  Your leading article on the new exams watchdog, which is designed to end the debate over the ‘dumbing down’ of exams, was very poor.  I can only assume that you don’t really understand the mechanism of exam scripts being marked, because if you did the flaws in the proposal for a new watchdog would have been plainly apparent.

Having an independent body responsible for ‘reporting’ on exam standards, plus a separate body for the National Curriculum and ‘monitoring’ subject syllabuses sounds great but achieves little.  No-one has explained what powers these new bodies will have, which threatens to render them useless as their role appears to be ‘reporting’ and ‘monitoring’ the major exam boards.  It sounds as though the exam boards will retain control of setting their own questions, writing their own syllabuses and marking their own scripts - which means that any attempt to crack down on any one of those functions will simply allow them to give more slack in another area.  For example, if an exam board like AQA is told that they are making the syllabus easier, they can nod and smile politely and leave the syllabus unchanged, but make their marking more lenient.  How will this be stopped?  Any changes made by exam boards to questions and marking are very subtle and not easily identifiable from one year to the next, leaving this new regulator helpless.  The exam boards will take every opportunity to push their grades a little higher.

If you really want to deal with falling exam standards, scrap the exam boards in favour of a single non-profit independent organisation and let university professors and teaching unions write the exam questions and set the syllabuses.  That way, there is no political meddling or interference and the days of exam boards ‘dumbing down’ the syllabus or exam papers would be over.

Yours sincerely,

A.Tory