The drawings of a young artist and aspiring teacher have gone viral after he “thanked” the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) for a lower-than-expected mark in art and design.
Aberdeenshire pupil Sean Robertson’s tweet with four of his sketches has been retweeted nearly 22,000 times, and prompted hundreds of messages of support, after he wrote “Cheers for the C in art”.
It was reported that he had been on course to study primary education at the University of Aberdeen.
The tweet came as the SQA came under huge pressure for its approach to downgrading around 125,000 estimates by teachers of students’ grades.
Michael Marra, a Labour councillor in Dundee, tweeted: “Thing in my head all day after seeing this: Picasso could be reincarnated in Pollock (sic) and da Vinci reborn in Dundee and the SQA would have knocked them down from an A to a C.”
Young people are also voicing their frustration and anger through a petition which, by 1pm today, had gathered around 32,000 signatures and describes the SQA’s approach to grading students as “completely unacceptable and wrong”.
One of these is to run alternative exams, as is being planned in England, but that option was ruled out by education secretary John Swinney when Tes Scotland asked him about it on Tuesday (see video below).
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