Thread by @doctorow

High stakes tests serve no pedagogical purpose; however, they do serve an important SOCIAL purpose, namely, they convert cash into the appearance of academic achievement.

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Since scores on these tests can be improved through expensive prep, tests can be a way to preferentially advance the children of wealthy people without coming out and admitting that you don't want poor kids in the best schools.

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Nowhere in the English-speaking world is this more true than in England, where the majority of secondary and even primary educational assessments are based entirely on tests - often a SINGLE test for a whole year's grade.

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I remember political scandals in the late Blair/early Brown period when a few select courses were to be evaluated based on "continuous assessment" - class work, teachers' rubrics, etc. This was deemed dangerously "subjective" and widely decried.

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Enter the pandemic, which made it impossible for students to sit their A-level exams - these being the highest of the high-stakes tests, the key to admission to postsecondary institutions.

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It's a darkly hilarious fact that your A-level grades aren't what get you into uni; offers are made based on your PREDICTED grade, which is based on your historical performance compared to other students at your school and your school's performance relative to rival schools.

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But with huge data-voids left behind by the lockdown in the last school year, the Office of Qualifications (Ofqual, and yes, this is a real fucking thing) told teachers to just make up a grade that reflected their best guess.

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It's the worst of both worlds: the "objective" measure ("how much did you pay to prepare for the exam?") is replaced with a "subjective" one ("does your teacher think you're smart?") with no formal rubric or framework.

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But the Tories found a way to make this even worse. They created a black-box algorithm that then "adjusted" the teachers' estimated scores, giving upward nudges to students in exclusive private schools, and downgrading students in state schools.

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This was justified by saying that it reflected the historical scores from each type of institution, which is so on-brand for Tories: on the one hand, it's an admission that the system exists to promote rich people.

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And on the other, it implies that the reason to promote rich people is that they're just better - the toff's cod-eugenics that is perfectly in keeping with the idea of a hereditary aristocracy and monarchy.

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But this was too ghastly for the Tories to get away with (a high bar to hurdle in 2020!), and, after students mobbed the Department of Education offices chanting "FUCK THE ALGORITHM" (yes, this also actually happened), the Tories reverse course.

theverge.com/2020/8/17/2137…

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This is nice, and I've got a warm schandeboris glow, but let's not lose sight of how BONKERS the whole high-stakes testing apparatus is.

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Yes, it's great that we've got them to stop using phrenology to overtly discriminate against the poors, but let's dare to dream of a phrenology-free future, shall we?

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