exam-factories

Exam factories? The impact of accountability measures on children and young people5.3.2 ‘Gaming the system’The pressure to help pupils succeed in high stakes tests leads teachers to engage in a variety of practiceswhich American research has referred to as ‘gaming the system’. This includes a wide spectrum rangingfrom legitimate practices such as question spotting and teaching the topics you expect to come up inthe exam, to practices that are clearly cheating, such as giving students hints during a test. The difficultyis that many practices are perfectly legitimate, but ethically questionable. For example, it is obvious thatstudents should be given some preparation for a test, but at what point does test preparation becomeproblematic? In the USA, the National Research Council’s Committee on Appropriate Test Use expressedconcern about “teaching so narrowly to the objectives of a particular test that scores are raised withoutactually improving the broader set of academic skills that the test is intended to measure” (quoted inRavitch 2010 p.159). Offering more coaching to students on the pass/fail borderline could also be seenas a dubious practice since other students will then be comparatively neglected.In England, an Ofqual survey (Meadows 2015) of 548 secondary teachers investigated teachers’ viewson such issues. The teachers were asked to rate listed strategies to improve exam marks in terms oftheir acceptability (Table 2). Those shaded green are at the most acceptable end of the spectrum, whilethose shaded pink were generally considered not acceptable. However, when teachers are underpresssure to achieve good results, strategies in the grey area of the list are used, and even some fromthe pink area. The Ofqual survey asked teachers to indicate whether they had experienced each of thelisted strategies, and showed that some of those in the grey area were widely experienced. For example,80 per cent of secondary teachers had experienced a focus on borderline C students. Similarly, in theteacher survey conducted for this research, 79 per cent of the secondary teachers reported that a focuson C/D borderline students was an explicit strategy in their school (as shown on Figure 4).Table 2: Secondary teachers: Selected strategies to improve exam results ordered by theirperceived acceptability, adapted from Meadows (2015).MOST ACCEPTABLEBecoming markers to gain insight into the examination system‘Question spotting’ what might come up on an exam and tailoring teaching accordinglyTargeting enquiries about results to pupils just below key grade boundariesNot covering all the specification content so as to focus on those areas most likely to be examinedSwitching to what they believe to be ‘easier’ exam boardsFocusing efforts on borderline ‘C’ studentsGiving students the benefit of the doubt in awarding marks when assessing courseworkConsidering school league table performance in deciding which subjects to offerHaving students use revision guides as opposed to text booksEncouraging students to memorise mark schemesEncouraging students to rote learn answers to likely exam questionsGiving students writing frames to use in their controlled assessmentTeachers giving students hints during controlled assessmentProviding wording of sections of coursework to studentsOpening exam papers before the specified timeLEAST ACCEPTABLE­36