Due to the ravages of the epidemic, starting in 2020, the UK has cancelled A-Level and GCSE tests for two consecutive years, and instead teachers will evaluate students' performance.
The change of the test rules is not a big challenge for the parents of Jackie Chan and Wangnu Chengfeng, and many parents even turn their firepower to the person who "handles" the score - the teacher.
Changes in ukiyrka policy
The two major examinations, GCSE and A-Level, have always been known as the British Secondary School Entrance Examination and the College Entrance Examination.
As soon as students enter secondary school, they begin to prepare for various examinations such as physics, chemistry, and mathematics in order to get the ideal scores to prepare for college applications.
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However, in 2020, after the British Ministry of Education announced the cancellation of A Level and GCSE due to the epidemic, it initially wanted to develop a system of algorithms to predict the score of the A Level test based on students' school performance.
As a result, many students' grades suffered Waterloo, a decrease of about 40%, causing widespread dissatisfaction among parents.
Education Secretary Gavin Williamson also acknowledged the system's shortcomings and proposed a "school assessment and prediction of scores" scheme, allowing teachers to estimate how many points each student would eventually get based on their performance in school.
The specific scoring criteria are mainly based on the results of previous public examinations and the overall performance of students in school, and then standardized in a statistical manner to obtain a final score as the basis for students' advancement.
The British government's 180-degree turn in the candidate's performance policy can be said to put the decision on students' test scores in the hands of their teachers, rather than calculating them through objective tests.
This made some British parents anxious, and began to find ways to approach the teacher, trying to privately "lobby" the teacher to achieve the purpose of giving their children high scores.
The British tiger mother pressured the teacher to get a high score
British journalist Tanis Carey published an article in July titled "How the epidemic has spawned a new type of "tiger father and tiger mother"" in July.
In the article, she explained the acquaintance process with an "English tiger mother", who proudly recalled a "battle" she launched at school in just 10 minutes after the first meeting, so that her 16-year-old son could get the high GCSE score he deserved.
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The mother not only often asked the teacher on the phone how her son's grades would be evaluated, but also sent an email to the head of the school department to remind her son of his abilities "kindly".
Barton, secretary general of the Association of Secondary School Principals (ASCL), said: "From the first day of announcing the cancellation of the GCSE and A-level exams, we saw some parents email teachers saying: 'My daughter is going to be a doctor in the future, and her GCSE chemistry class is going to get a 9!'"
A private secondary school principal revealed that a parent had emailed him and wanted the school to refund nearly £80,000 in tuition if their child did not achieve the expected A-level results.
ASCL Chairman Richard Sirleaf pointed out that there have been many "dictatorial parents who claim to have lawyer friends" in the UK, who want to persuade teachers to give their children an ideal GCSE and A-level score.
It is worth noting that this kind of parents who give a hand to teachers and put pressure on the school are not in the minority, and most of them come from wealthy families.
The Sutton Trust, an education charity, conducted a poll of 3,221 teachers in the UK and found that:
Teachers in 23 per cent of private schools said that during the past school year, at least one or more parents had approached or pressured their children because of their grades.
In contrast, data from the public school system reflect educational choices between different social classes.
In public schools in Britain's wealthiest regions, 17% of teachers have reported being pressured by parents for their students' grades; In schools in poor areas, only 11% of teachers said that parents had contacted their children for their grades.
Some parents' actions are even more direct and intense.
In May 2021, six families in the UK filed a class-action lawsuit challenging their children to get "wrong" GCSE and A-level grades and thus miss out on college and career skills.
Teachers give points that are not good for disadvantaged students
Rich parents can "find another way" and do their best to win high scores for their children, so what is the impact of this way teachers estimate points for families with weak socio-economic status?
Teachers estimate points, the reference is usually based on the student's previous test performance, since it is the baseline, then the scores obtained by students this year may be affected by the scores of the previous students' tests.
If the students themselves are studying in the school district, the overall socio-economic status tends to be weak, and the test performance of previous students is not ideal, the scores obtained by students this year will naturally not be too high.
Two scholars from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics and Economics, by collecting information on candidates in the UK in 2020 and comparing the data of the past 3 years, found that only 16% of the teachers' estimation of points was accurate, 75% was overestimated, and high-achieving students from disadvantaged families often got lower than expected scores.
Lee Elliot Major, a professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, said that even if teachers try to ensure fairness, they will still unconsciously develop prejudices, such as blacks and minorities will get lower scores.
In addition, if you only rely on the performance of the school to evaluate, this will make students from low-income families lose the opportunity to sprint in the final exam room.
Even if students can appeal after the test, the appeal process is time-consuming and cumbersome, with a maximum processing time of 84 days, and it also requires the school to appeal and pay a certain fee.
For students with disadvantaged backgrounds, the time cost to pay is too high, and they can only silently accept the assessment score given by the teacher. And parents who have the resources and know how to appeal, after urging the school to successfully appeal and get a high score, are bound to have a trend of "blackmail", just like children who can argue have sugar to eat.
It can be seen that under normal circumstances, the test is more fair than the teacher's assessment of the score.
Fortunately, after two years of exam chaos, the UK government announced that the 2022 GCSE and A-Level exams will be held as scheduled, but the threshold for students to achieve high scores will be raised.
The percentage that receives the highest score on the A-level GCSE exam may be reduced by about 10% and 4%.
This is in consideration of the impact of the epidemic on students, and it is hoped that the overall grades will gradually return to the right track in a transitional form – by 2023, the grades will return to the level they were before the epidemic in 2019.
Regardless of how inflationary test scores are, the 2022 summer exam is just around the corner, and the only way to cope as a student is to make more efforts and not let yourself be the one who is eliminated.