Good knowledge of the English language no longer required

[QThe state of the SATs marking crisis was illustrated yesterday after examiners awarded a higher score to a child who had written an essay full of mistakes than a student who had made far fewer errors.
A composition littered with spelling mistakes, poor punctuation and shoddy grammar received one mark more than the work of a child at the same school, who produced an impressively literate, coherent and imaginative piece of writing. [/quote]

Essay 1 - Scoring 8/12
Quote:
Pip Davenport lived near to a town. He lived on a street called slewsbury. He wrote book with his wife Hettie. He loved writing books it was one of his favarout thing's he did.

If he wasent doing enthing els hed help his uncle Herry at the funfair during the day. And then hed stoody at nigh on other thing he did was invent new rides. Becoues he invented a lot of new rides he won a prize.



Essay 2 - Scoring 7/12
Quote:
Have you ever heard of Pip Davenport? Pip Davenport is the reason we enjoy the fairground today. On the 4th of January he was born, living in a small terraced house in Slewsbury.

It just so happened that the Davenport family owned a funfair. He and his uncle Henry went every day since he was a toddler. Pip loved it there: he would rather come to the fair than go out with his friends.

When Pip was four, he and his family went to watch a horse race. He asked his mother afterwards if he could go horse riding, and she agreed. Quickly, it became apparent that Pip was a fantastic rider: a complete natural. But it was his love of horses that led to a tragic accident. An accident that would change his life forever. At the age of 7, he was training for a local competition when his horse, Mandy, swerved sideways unexpectedly throwing Pip on to the ground, paralysed.

Distraught, Pip decided to design a fairground ride involving horses. He named it a carousel. After many years, the ride was finally made. Pip, plucking up the courage, showed it to his Uncle Henry. Impressed, he asked Pip if he could use it in his fairground. Pip said yes, and he was amazed to see that his creative invention was a huge success. Despite being in a wheelchair, he continued his education at night school, spending most of the day at the fair and designing new inventions for the fair.

By the time he was 25, Pip, who had never considered women before, fell in love with a lady called Hettie. Hettie was a kind woman and also had a shared interest in the fairground.


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Perhaps this is an extreme case where there is ludicrously inconsistent marking, or undertrained/undersupervised marking. However, this is the latest in a string of criticisms of the UK education system. Most notably, many universities are abandonning their support for the conventional school-leaving exams (A level) in place of their own in-house examinations; they claim that so many pupils now receive the highest possible A-level grades, that they offer no selective value.

However, I'm somewhat concerned, that in an English examination, there isn't at least some effort made to score pupils on their grasp of spelling, grammar and puncuation. More and more frequently, I've been hearing teachers saying that they're not interested in spelling 'because everyone uses spell checkers'. This hardly seems an appropriate example to set.

The cynic in me believes that a lot of this stems from the UK government's desire for 'equality through mediocrity'. This certainly seems to be the case with private schools, as this government has imposed new taxes on private schools - presumably because they go against their socialist beliefs. The same is true, in my field of interest which is medical education. Previously the aim of medical education was to select and train the most able, so that excellence could be achieved. This government has recently restructured medical training, and now there is no recognition of 'excellence'. The only grading is whether a studen or doctor achieves satisfactory 'competence'.


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