Press Release
Date: Tuesday 14 January 2003
CCEA Chairman voices concern over marking
NORTHERN Ireland's exams body warned today that problems may lie ahead with the marking of A Levels in the wake of last term's grading fiasco at a number of English awarding bodies.
As thousands of pupils here begin the winter series of A and AS level examinations, Chairman of CCEA, Dr Alan Lennon, told the Belfast Telegraph he still had grave concerns that there would be further problems with the marking system at the affected boards in spite of the recent recommendations made by The Tomlinson Inquiry into the scandal.
He also voiced concern that the present system whereby exam boards compete in a free market for entries from schools may be jeopardising the year-in year-out maintenance of GCSE and A level standards.
CCEA played a pivotal role in the Tomlinson Inquiry, as both Northern Ireland's exams regulator and an examination body in its own right. Pupils at around 40 local schools were feared among those affected by the recent exam results row as more than 10,000 exam entries from the Province are taken with the English boards at the centre of the row.
"The exam horrors investigated by Tomlinson, last autumn, were neither unique nor were they the whole story, "explained DR Lennon.
"The entire Scottish system collapsed two years ago and in each of the last two years at least two English exam bodies knowingly failed to mark all exam scripts, because they ran out of markers.
"And we in CCEA know, from our own problems of five years ago and since (much less serious, in retrospect), that perfect exam delivery is both incredibly difficult to achieve and to sustain.
"Yet CCEA, having had the experience of sustained performance improvement and currently being independently recognised as the best performing GCSE/GCE exam body, felt justified in expressing its broader concerns to the Tomlinson Inquiry, as we saw them affecting Northern Ireland."
DR Lennon added that as a contributor to the inquiry he had two main worries on the public exams system.
"The first worry is that Tomlinson's correct identification of at least some of what has been going wrong in English exam bodies was only a minor step compared to putting it right, partly because it has been going on for so long and partly because real change can't be instantaneous," he said.
"This suggests to me that there are either more exam problems to come, openly admitted to or more insidiously, future problems may be managed internally and quietly by exam bodies for the sake of public confidence. He continued,
"The second and more intractable concern, and one not addressed by Tomlinson was: how do you ensure consistency of A level and GCSE standards over time between CCEA and three competing commercial English exam bodies whose financial survival depends, at least partly, on selling exams to schools?"
"The acid test for any system may be - if given a blank sheet of paper, would you design it this way? In the case of UK- wide public exams, which decide access to universities, if your prime concern is comparability of standards, throughout the UK and over time, the answer must be - no!
"Separating an organisation's competitive, financial imperative to survive and prosper from a societal requirement of objectivity must be close to an impossibility. Even the presence of a retrospective referee, the independent Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), can only reduce the scale of the problem, not eliminate it.
"In Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, the exam bodies are publicly funded and monopolistic. In Northern Ireland, CCEA is publicly funded and competes with the three English awarding bodies for exams in Northern Ireland's schools.
"Monopolies do get a bad name and rightly so for the propensity to restrict choice and being inefficient. Yet I am left with the uncomfortable feeling that, if free market economics are a great way to ensure that your loaf of bread from the supermarket is good value for money, this is still no way to run a public examinations system."
Media enquiries to Ruth Maguire on (028) 9026 1216, Mobile 07796947993. E mail rhmaguire@ccea.org.uk
ENDS
Note to Editors
CCEA is the Northern Ireland Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment.
CCEA places learners and those who have a concern for their educational and personal development at the forefront of its thinking. CCEA's mission is:
"To enable the full potential of all learners to be achieved and recognised"
What we do
CCEA is a unique educational body in the UK , bringing together the three areas of curriculum, examinations and assessment.
Advising Government – on what should be taught in Northern Ireland ’s schools and colleges.
Monitoring Standards – ensuring that the qualifications and examinations offered by awarding bodies in Northern Ireland are of an appropriate quality and standard.
Awarding Qualifications
– as Northern Ireland’s leading awarding body we offer a diverse range of qualifications, such as GCSEs, including the new GCSE Double Award specifications in vocational subjects, GCE A and AS levels, Entry Level Qualifications, and Graded Objectives in Modern Languages.
- CCEA also offers a range of Awards and Certificates in Education, Training and Skills (ACETS) targeted at learners who want to get
the knowledge, understanding and skills needed
to hit the ground running in the world of work.
