A PERTH principal teacher of art and design has claimed that the much praised Scottish exam system has failed lamentably to save his Higher students from a similar mauling to A-level candidates north and south of the border.
The Scottish Qualifications Authority’s extensive system of checks and balances should detect rogue results among students and markers and be fairer to candidates but Dougie Hamilton, of Perth High, remains baffled why 30 of 40 presentations failed art and design.
Most were Standard grade ones and twos the year before. Only nine succeeded on appeal, mainly those on the passfail border.
Mr Hamilton was for the second successive year a marker for part of the course, along with a fellow member of the department, and maintains he has yet to receive a satisfactory answer to his mystery results. At least three other secondaries in the Perth and Dundee areas are affected.
He believes he has kept pace with course changes and was reasonably happy with last year’s performance. Over the 10 previous years, his department had one of the highest Higher pass rates in the school at more than 80 per cent. “Pupils were absolutely gobsmacked and I had no idea what to say to them. The SQA is telling me nothing,” he said.
One girl estimated to be a B candidate failed completely and was given nothing on appeal. She was said to have failed the written paper, although it is only 15 per cent of the total marks. Others were down for an A and got a C.
“The whole presentation dropped by between two and four bands from the estimates that were submitted to the final results from the SQA. It’s extraordinary. The occasional candidate going up or down after the external assessment is the norm, not the whole presentation. No candidates were awarded an A and only one candidate was awarded a B,” Mr Hamilton said.
The school’s SQA co-ordinator was apparently told of a change in assessments after results were standardised - the same process which hit thousands of A-level results.
Mr Hamilton said he was told at the markers’ meeting in the expressive activity folios to mark positively and give students the benefit of doubt. Now he finds his own students disadvantaged. One of the explanations could be that the course has three different sets of markers, he suggests.
The SQA system is intended to pick up differences between teacher estimates and exam performance and adjust them in favour of students if there are discrepancies and if the department is deemed to be in line with national standards. But Mr Hamilton says the system failed.
Off the record comments when he was marking at the SQA suggest that only a handful of schools in Scotland have departments that are “concordant”, or in line with standards. Mr Hamilton is pressing for a breakdown of results and a full explanation of where his department has gone wrong.
“Morale is at an all-time low,” he said.
An SQA spokesman said the authority would be responding privately in the next week.
Letters, page 2Assessors’ reports, page 6
What the assessor said
There are still too many students entered for Higher who are really at Intermediate 2 level, the principal assessor for art and design says.
“Alarmingly, a few appeared to be at Intermediate 1 level in some components of the course,” the assessor’s report states.
