The Impact of Bureaucratic decision making

Since I've entered the field of education, there has been a great deal of talk about changes taking place. Theoretically speaking, secondary teachers are not simply expected to "teach to the exam" (I'm sure this was never officially the policy, but it was, in fact, the practice for many teachers). Rather than focusing on evaluation via standardized testing, teachers are now to focus their efforts on getting students to successfully fulfill a number of prescribed learning outcomes for every course they take. Also, particularly around my school district, there is a big focus on Assessment for Learning (rather than evaluation of learning), where teachers take in assignments and look at them to learn what they need to focus on more in future lessons, and students receive analogous, non-evaluative feedback so they can focus their efforts on improving specific facets of the skills they are expected to acquire. Most of these outcomes are concerned with skills and concepts rather than the memorization and rote regurgitation of facts and figures. No longer are teacher expected to get students to memorize a series of facts to be recalled for a trivia-laden final exam. Nope... the concepts are the key.

Although this philosophical shift has been taking place in the theoretical environment, the fact remained that students were expected to take a standardized examination for most subjects at the end of their schooling (particularly in high school). In order to graduate and put oneself in a position to go on to college, a student had to successfully write a standardized provincial exam in all core subjects in order to be considered for any post-secondary programs and, in reality, graduation as well. For many subjects, a large portion of the test would likely be fact-recall based (particularly in history/biology). If you failed the final and the average of the final and the school mark were below that infamous 50%, no credit was given. So, the problem remained that the theoretical talk of concepts was overshadowed by a need to perform on a standardized examination. Again, this is somewhat specific to the course, but was a reality all the same.

Another part of the problem was seen to be the relevancy of the exams in general. In the OK Valley, only about 15-20% of high school students are attending post-secondary programs after graduating high school (college and university included). So the question being begged is this: why should students who have no plans to go on to post-secondary education be forced to write standardized academic examinations if they were successful in completing the learning outcomes for the course as designated by their classroom teacher? Also, the pressure issue was also in question... if students can satisfactorily complete the outcomes for the course as designated by their classroom teacher, why should the province require them to write an extremely stressful marathon-length exam in order to prove they deserve the mark they've received? This was even more so the case because the skills and concepts being taught might not connect with the content of the provincial exam at all. The Ministry of Education in BC thought long and hard about this and they came up with a response: students were no longer required to take provincial exams (other than English Language Arts 12 and BC First Nations Studies 12).

Now, the recommendation still stood that if, in fact, students were expecting at ANY point to attend university or college anywhere, they should still write the provincial exam in all of their examinable subjects. The reason was that universities and colleges still required a combined mark of the classroom grade and the grade from the provincial exam in any relevant subjects in order to be considered for admission. Also, since ambitions and attitudes about education changes in the minds of young adults, they were generally encouraged all around for anyone with the ability or interest to go on to post-secondary studies.

Even more interesting is the change that took place this week. The University of Victoria, my alma mater, recently published this notification on their website which states that the writing of any optional BC provincial exams is no longer required for entrance into the university. If an exam was still required for completion of the course (English 12 and First Nations 12), then the blended mark would be needed and accepted. Otherwise, the higher mark of either the classroom grade or the blended exam/classroom grade would be taken as the application grade for the course for non-mandatory exams. In essence, students could bomb their Bio/Chem/History 12 finals and as long as they performed well in class, they'd be fine (again, if they were only planning to attend UVic).

Now, this has some big implications for students and teachers around the province. Although I haven't been able to come close to sorting them all out, it will still cause quite a big stir. An interesting thing is that no other universities or colleges (to my knowledge) in BC have changed other than UVic... UBC Vancouver just recently rejected the possible amendment to admissions but apparently the vote was quite close.

My first worry is about transitioning to university. If writing those big standardized exams is no longer required, I'm worried that some students may crash and burn under the pressure of testing that takes place in university. Those people who have attended university know that class sizes are often large and impersonal, learning if generally a self-directed pursuit, and exams are based solely on lectures, reading assignments, and personal research. At least, that was my experience.

Another curiosity... are these bureaucratic changes going to have any effect on the way universities run classes or test students? My first response is a vehement NO. Since most university profs have no training in the teaching of their subject (but uber-amounts of training in the study of their subject), are they really going to change the tried and true format of lecture, assign readings, evaluate on examinuation? Again, my personal thoughts are, well, it's not likely. However, I also didn't think that university admin would aquiesce to the changes made by the Ministry of Ed here in BC.

I think I'm just curious about what the talk is going to be like around the schools... I think there's going to be a big division among teachers on how they are going to take the news.

As for me, I think I'm a bit ambivalent. I guess I'll just wait to see how it all comes out in the wash...

T