I like the idea of continual assessment, but would it really work over 10 subjects over a whole year, or would it be too heavy? Kids being kids quite a few will leave a lot of it until the last few weeks (aaah the memories of Uni assessments).

My daughter's school still has the Sats at age 14, year 9. The papers are still set and schools can can still buy them even though the marks aren't counted for national statistics. Think I read that about 38% of schools buy them.

A lot of uni's are switching to continual assessment these days.

 

The uni i'm at in Brisbane is very pro-CA. One of my courses doesn't even have a final.

 

 

Personally i hate continual assessment, because my english is horrific. I'd much rather sit a short answer exam. Essay's are evil things.

On one hand doing assessments through coursework/assignments shows the standard that the child is at. Also it shows that the child fully understands what they have learnt. Exams may show this but it doesn't show it in depth, in an exam there may be closed format questions, where there is multiple choice answers, if the child doesn't know it they may guess and get it right and in that sence they either haven't learnt or don't understand it fully. Whereas with assessments a open format question will be asked and the pupil will be able to show their understanding, if it is not up to the correct standard then the teacher knows and can see from it where they may need support. Yes with an exam it will also show the teacher this, but the child may have had an understanding of the subject but not understand the question.

 

But on the other hand, since majority of all pupils have access to the internet it isn't such a good idea for the assessements through coursework/assignments due to the fact for those who already do assignments, there has been a lot of plagiarism, although at that age they won't even know what that means and think they are clever because they found the answer and don't relies that they most reword it or if it haven't been reworded it must be referenced. Also with assessments there must be a bibliograph at the end, I would hate to see anyone try and teach these child who are at the age of taking these SATs because personally I still get confussed on how to do them and I have been doing them for 2 years now, going onto my 3rd.

 

Last year on my course, with it being an OCR it was all assessed by coursework, when it came to majority of the work being marked a lot of it was copied from a book/internet literally just copied and pasted from the internet without any referencing to where it came from. Unfortunately for those who copied out of the book, it was the author of that book that was marking our work. This year with it being a BTEC national diploma and yet again all assessments through coursework we must sign something saying it is all our own work and if it is plagiarised in the slightest we will accept the consequences, half of the people have been kicked off the course and their grades haven't been registered.

 

So really there is a lot of pros and cons for these SATs, I originally said it was a good idea for the SATs to go, but now personally I believe that the SATs are good as they are not as much hassle, although I do not agree with the year 6s, I think the year 9 ones are good but assessment through coursework should also be present to see if the pupil if ready for the exam and fully understands the subject and areas learnt about.

There are strengths and weaknesses with both exams and continual assessment.

 

The weakness in national exams is that the teachers teach the kids how to pass that particular form of examination, for fear that the school will drop a couple of places in the dreaded league tables. There's no place for the kind of profeessional, creative, and inspiring teaching which pupils really need.

 

The strength of one annual exam, school-based or national, is that pupils have to recall everything they have learned and have to use that to think for themselves, solve problems and debate points of view.

 

The strength of continuous assessment means that problems can be diagnosed and kids can get extra help if required.

 

Its weakness is that it encourages people to retain what they learn for very short periods of time and put it out of mind as soon as they've done the test.

 

As someone pointed out, continuous assessments in every secondary subject is gruelling for

pupils. We've all found ourselves with an impossible load of homework at some time, because subject teachers didn't give a hoot about how much work we had for our other subjects. The same happens with continuous assessments.