Just to be sure that there’s no mistake, I personally believe that Australian educational standards have deteriorated over the past couple of decades. I apportion no blame to any one group, whether it’s tight-fisted Righters, or “bleeding heart” Lefters. No matter which federal government was in power, the descent continued.

I first started taking notice of the education system when I went to buy some paint, believe it or not. At the counter, I spoke to a friendly younger man and asked for the colour — Beowulf — mentioning, as in idle conversation, that he’d probably run across it in his high school English classes but nowhere else. He looked perplexed. “No.”

“The classic Norse [not strictly true, I now realise] poem?”
“Never did that.”
“The Romantic poets?”
“Can’t say that I remember that either.”
(Knowing it was a long shot) “Chaucer?”
“Who?”
“Shakespeare?”
“Oh yeah, we did him. We saw the movie.”

That sparked off another train of thought and it eventually emerged that the paintshop man didn’t need to actually read any novels for his “book” reports. It was enough for him to borrow a video from a shop or library and write up a report on that instead.

Which, in my usual long-winded fashion, brings me to my current blog. The Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Sydney is running a trial that will allow English students to complete time-based, assessable activities (exams, for want of a better word) by “access[ing] information from the net, speak[ing] to friends by mobile phone and listen[ing] to podcasts”. If the pilot is successful, the College

plans to expand the exam format out to all subjects by the end of 2008

Now, considering I self-educate through all three methods myself, that’s not my beef. I’m also not really worried about a student accessing a podcast in, say, a maths exam. We used to have open-book exams in Chemistry and the book didn’t help if you didn’t know the subject well in the first place (as my mediocre grades will readily attest). I’m confident that modern students are smart enough to know that this truism will apply to several subjects. No, what I’m worried about is more intangible.

The first thing that concerns me is revisionism. The problem with the Internet is that you really have to already know what you’re looking for before you look for it. And if you think there’s been some shenanigans going on with regards to any particular subject, searching can take, not only a lot of time, but a lot of sifting. Chances are, all you’re going to get on the first page of a search is what [vested interests, whomever they may be] want you to see. Remember the post on the CIA Factbook and Singapore I did in April? To get to the truth required more time than a normal exam duration. In forty to sixty minutes, all the average student is likely to find is the skin, the mere facade, of an issue, and not its muscles or bones. So what an internet search is really doing is assessing a student’s ability to couch search engine queries, rather than her ability to investigate a topic.

Secondly, the thinking is done by the clock, with results based on how “persuasive” the student is. Does that mean it doesn’t matter whether the thinking is correct, as long as its persuasive? The answer has to be yes if ALL you’re using as an assessment criterion is “persuasion” …

They were allowed to search for information about the speech online and get friends’ points of view, but the girls were only marked on use of persuasive language. [my emphasis]

Both Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill were brilliant orators. Doesn’t mean they were right about everything. But the students are being assessed only according to that ability. Philosophically and morally, this is a very dangerous slope the College is traversing.

Thirdly, why even have such activities as time-based assessments? Students already use the net and their friends to put together assignments. Why impose a deadline on already extant strategies?

Dierdre Coleman, the English teacher behind the pilot, told the Sydney Morning Herald that children must prepare for real-world information access methods.

But, Ms Coleman, surely you know that this is already the normal way all students put together assignments? They get together in groups, hunt up all available resources (library, internet, newspapers, older siblings, parents, each other, etc.) and craft their responses accordingly. You must know this. The other teachers must know this. Which means that the only logical reason the school is doing this is to drum up more business. You have to admit, it looks good on a prospectus. “We teach our students the value of using modern, up-to-date information access methods to gain more knowledge of the world around them.” Yep, getting an A in Google searches. Not much wrong with that.

A bit more (albeit shallow) digging reveals that the Presbyterian Ladies College in Armidale struck some financial troubles and therefore merged with the College in Sydney in 2005 in order to continue operating. We’re now 3 years along. Could it be that the merged entity is still suffering some financial difficulties? Difficulties that have led to its Marketing department spinning a ludicrous method as something desirable? Were the teachers perhaps asked to come up with suggestions to improve the “prestige” of the College (and thus increase its revenue) and Ms Coleman came up with the best idea?

I have already spent more than an hour on this blog and, as you can see, haven’t even scratched the surface of the real meat of the matter, which is the whys and wherefores of the College’s new policy. The problem is, I could be completely wrong. Ms Coleman could be an absolute angel who utterly believes that she is helping train the tech-savvy female generation of the future. But if you think my arguments were in any way persuasive, then it didn’t matter that I was slighting, not only an individual, but an entire educational institution, did it? Not according to the College’s own criteria.

Makes you wonder what a teenager looking down the barrel of a ticking clock would be able to achieve with a much meatier topic.

POSTSCRIPT: The College itself, on a link from its front page to a letter from the Principal says, in part, that

An interesting sideline was to see how some reports confused ‘assessment’ with ‘examination’.

Dr McKeith, if the ‘assessment’ is time-based, assessed in comparison with other members of the same class, and contributes to the final subject score for a particular student then — I’m sorry to say — it’s an exam. I find it interesting that you seem to think that an ‘assessment’ of a student’s skills against her peers within a classroom situation is somehow not the same as an ‘examination’ or ‘exam’, if you will. (Dr McKeith’s statement is masterful in that it manages to cast light on the peripheral issues of the pilot (thus dazzling the unwary), without delving into the very real educational and philosophical questions such a pilot raises. He is, undoubtedly, well suited to the position of principal of a very large, and prosperous, private college.)