Time to Start Again

Hi All,

With the election of a new state government in QLD, there is an opportunity to have another go at reforming the assessment procedures that are implemented by the QSA in the senior school. Even with the national curriculum, QSA will still be in charge of assessment.

High on the list of changes, especially in science and mathematics should be the reintroduction of a marks based system where there is a simple system to determine the rank of each student, ie. Add up the weighted marks. We presently have an extremely complicated system which nobody seems to understand, and is very time consuming for teachers. In addition students cannot ask the question “what is this test or assignment worth” so cannot allocate time accordingly.

In addition to reverting to marks, like the rest of the world, we also need to reduce the importance of assignments, EEI’s, ERT etc on assessment. EEI’s can be excellent motivational tools for students but in most cases we destroy this advantage by insisting upon massive write-ups. A little writing is fine but Physics, Maths and Chemistry must not be come de-facto English classes. Also as assignments have become a large (but unknown) fraction of the assessment, and that teachers cannot determine who actually does the assignment (parents, tutors or the student), our system is very unfair to students from a lower socio-economic background.

There are many other things to do, but to get the new government to act will require us to demonstrate that there is a groundswell of opposition to current practices. We must mobilise Teachers, Parents and University academics and hopefully get the Unions on board.

As a first step I am organising some meetings of teachers in Cairns Townsville and Brisbane in the next month. Dates and venues to be advised shortly.

Peter