The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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STUDENT MOTIVATION 14 The Linguist Vol/57 No/5 2018 ciol.org.uk/tl O ne of the press rituals of late summer is the frenzied response to the release of A-level and higher education (HE) results, followed by an equally frenzied debate about 'standards' – rising or falling? Cue articles by Simon Jenkins about how few people are doing modern languages and why this doesn't matter, 1 and the confusion is complete – until the slog of the new school term or university semester kicks in, and the entire matter can be safely forgotten. In this article, I want to reframe the debate around 'standards' by focusing on the culture of assessment in education in general, and in modern languages in particular. In a recent article, one of the UK's leading Germanists, Martin Durrell – the man who revised Hammer's German Grammar – came to a sobering set of conclusions about the school curriculum for German in England (and, mutatis mutandis, the other nations of the UK). 2 He argued that no systematic attention is paid to the acquisition of elements of grammar or vocabulary, with the result that there is a focus only on what is necessary for the exam. He criticised the concentration on written German based on texts in exclusively formal registers, lamenting that students completing A-level programmes lack the competence – and, crucially, the confidence – to deal with informal colloquial speech in real, everyday situations. Without subscribing to every point, I would broadly agree with Durrell, and suggest that one of the key reasons that this problem of a lack of confidence has arisen is because of the increasing focus on examination and assessment. This year has seen reports about stress levels among students at the University of Bristol in the run-up to end-of-year exams, with as many as 10 student deaths in just over 18 months, a number of which have been confirmed as suicide. 3 As Davershi Lodhia has argued, 4 the combination of tuition fees and the stress of securing a job means that students are fixated on exam results, rather than on their intellectual development. At the other end of the spectrum, there are reports of increasing mental health problems and extreme stress among pupils taking the new GCSEs. 5 This summer, newspapers reported on primary school pupils shaking and crying because of the Scottish national standardised assessments, including a child who "soiled themselves". 6 The creation of an assessment culture Perhaps it is useful to remind ourselves that examinations of this kind are relatively new in education. At Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, no one had to sit an exam. According to Derk Bodde, China was the first country to implement nationwide standard tests, when the Dui dynasty established the imperial examination in 605. 7 Although this exam was abolished in 1905 by the Qing dynasty, the British had adopted a similar examination system in 1806 to select candidates for the Civil Service. This system soon spread to education, and it has resulted in the testing regime with which nearly all countries and cultures are familiar today. It's worthwhile noting the essentially bureaucratic roots of the examination system because it helps us to understand what is emerging in today's anxiety about assessment, the crisis in the culture of assessment, and the debate over the importance (or otherwise) of systematised testing. Anyone who has been involved in teaching language subjects for some years will have evidence of a shift in student aims from acquiring skills to passing the exam (preferably with the highest possible grade available). Whereas students used to ask, 'How can I get better at German?', they now ask, 'How can I get better grades in German?' – a subtle but significant shift. One should not blame students for focusing on the exam rather than on the acquisition of real skills, since the entire institutional culture around them is focused on assessment, from mapping individual student progress to national and international league tables. In the latest development, the assessors themselves are assessed in the form of the National Student Survey (NSS), which ranks student satisfaction across all HE institutions in the UK. Not everyone is happy about this, but it is the logical outcome, not just of seeing education in terms of a market, but also of believing in the power of assessment to 'drive up' standards. But surely we need exams? Not necessarily. In 2015, the University of Essex's School of Philosophy and Art History took the decision to scrap all formal exams in philosophy for second- and final- year students. Its Head of School, Fabian Freyenhagen, argued that formal tests can't measure complex ideas and creative thinking, so it's time to ditch them. Pre-empting the inevitable accusations of 'dumbing down', he sought to challenge the popular link, so often made, between exams and rigour. While advanced plagiarism-detection software can stop students from cheating in their coursework, he pointed out, it doesn't stop them memorising the work of others and regurgitating it in exams. 8 And there's a bigger picture too. Assessment has become the tail that wags the dog of education, as one discovers when trying to develop new courses. The advice is to determine the kinds of assessment first, and to construct the course around that. What is the point of our system of assessments, asks Paul Bishop, and is it working? IS IT TIME TO examine the exam?