Academic honesty - or good old fashioned cheating

So, I pop onto Twitter, and the algorithm has cast up into my ad-feed a message about Proctorio, an on-line invigilation system. I follow it up, because we have about 120 students at my school who should be taking public exams which are now mostly cancelled, adjusted or adapted in some way. This all means we need to have reliable internal assessment and in the latest round of tests, there were some startling results from students who have been surfing the ocean floor in terms of their academic progress for the past year of lockdown.

I am sure their gaming progress has improved hugely, and maybe they will end up winning the equivalent of the Olympics at gaming tournaments, in which case that is probably a better investment of their time than cramming for GCSE exams that will never have much credibility.

But then I began a bit of due diligence, and discovered that Proctorio is one of numerous on-line invigilation services claiming to use AI and key-strokes and various forms of biometric recognition, but that all of these services are also the subject of numerous videos, blogs and articles explaining exactly how to get round them.

Having been involved in examining and assessment for decades, I know that cheating never goes away. One of my early jobs was as an examinations assistant in Beijing. I enrolled people for a range of professional and language proficiency tests that once passed would be the Wonka ticket to study overseas or to secure residency in Australia. There were many gifts, mainly of the low grade variety: embroidered kittens, lacquer chopsticks, a little display of dessicated crickets pulling a carriage also sculpted from cricket cadavers. The arrangements for preserving the integrity of the exams were complex, with locked cupboards and filing cabinets stored in a secure room with a big steel door which was in an internal office space, as if some Tom Cruise MI guy was going to break in and steal our IELTS papers.

Ever since, I have been uneasy with the high-stakes test as a measure of competence. Before anyone thinks that I never want pupils assessed, that is not the case. I like a good low-stakes test to check that e.g. my pupils have read the book, done the research or had the discussion, but that’s an ongoing, evolving measure of progress and engagement, not a summative certificate of competence.

I have a child at the raw end of this deal - he is probably one of the last children to have sat the traditional GCSE exams, as I think that whatever else happens as a result of coronavirus, the pandemic is likely to have scuppered them as a worthwhile measure of ability. He is filling in applications for university now, and needed his results. He doesn’t even remember the grades (nor do I). He took the exams in good faith, no cheating, as the scraping through Science and Maths make abundantly clear. Yet, out there are people who will be claiming a full clutch of A* and level 9 grades who bought their results one way and another. Which is the person you want to employ? The honest person with uneven grades or the apparently stellar student?

But whatever means we take to measure ourselves, there will always be spin, economy with the truth, and a touch of exaggeration. There is a worthwhile and interesting organisation Rethinking Assessment which is looking at a whole range of ways of ensuring that when we look at people applying to university or for jobs, that we are given a chance to see the whole person. Whether we are looking at Digital Portfolios or individual websites, or character scores, there are ways, especially if it is electronically measured and stored, to interfere with these records.

The fundamental is that this goes to the core of our human nature. There are some of us who want to get to where we want to go by any means necessary, and there are others who want to follow a path of complete integrity, and then, I am guessing there are the vast majority on the spectrum between. So the real training we all need as humans is first, in awareness and understanding of where we are as individuals, self-knowledge, and second, in sensitivity and judicious evaluation of where others are on the spectrum of honesty.

We can never combat cheating, lying, conmanship - I’m reading John Le Carre’s uncomfortable account of his father who embodied the type - but as employers, as colleagues and as humans, we need to be able to recognise it and call it. Unfortunately, as the election of unsavoury characters, from Putin to Trump, with Bolsanaro and Boris Johnson in between, education in country after country has clearly failed in this fundamental respect.

Engrenages is over....

86 episodes, 16 years, and it's over. And it was wonderful. I am a renowned spoiler, but on this occasion, I can say nothing more except that Season 8 was terrific, compelling and clever. 

I will miss the characters very much - and we did feel the disappearance of Juge Roban. But Berthaud, Karlsson and Gilou were compelling as ever, and it was good to see new guys Beckriche and Ali creating chaos for themselves as well. The wonderful thing about this series throughout has been the skill of the writers in depicting the consequences of the understandable but flawed decisions and actions of the characters. I was also delighted to see a raised profile for the crumpled and world weary Edelman. 

Thinking of the TV series that have remained with me over the years, Engrenages is the one I would most willingly re-watch. All 86 episodes. Even though there was that ridiculous season where they all headed off for some implausible stakeout in Spain. 

Adieu, et bonne continuation. 

Lockdown, learning and English education

Last week in The Times, a columnist, Ian Martin, wrote about the impact of remote education drawing on his arsenal of hyperbole - education is wrecked, a generation damaged, a disastrous blow for social mobility, dire consequences, disaster, cataclysm, catastrophe and on and on.

The thing is, it doesn't have to be like this. And Martin, a right-wing commentator, doesn't begin to confront the underlying mess that is education in the UK.

Teachers and their managers have now been wrestling for decades with three major issues:

1. Underfunding. It is true that under the Labour government, schools received their highest ever awards from governments. But that simply addressed the gaps that arose from earlier Tory rationing of funds in the Thatcher/Major years. We are now even further back than we were in 1997 in terms of real funding per student, thanks to more than a decade of austerity.
2.  Partisan policy-making. In England in particular, the impact of politicians with a limited understanding of education such as Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings, has been counter-productive, reductive and has actively held back the development of a coherent school system that genuinely equips children with the knowledge, skills and character they need to ensure that our society thrives. There are undoubtedly amazing schools that enrich and alter the lives of the children who attend them, but the quality of schools is patchy and it is a scandal that there are children leaving primary school unable to demonstrate basic literacy and numeracy, and still more that there are secondary school children unable to fulfil their potential and demonstrate real capability thanks to the uneven quality of education across the UK. 
3. Retention of exceptional teachers. Although there are great teachers - just as there are great schools - in the UK, many are mediocre. Their subject knowledge is limited, they lack passion for their specialism, they can't be bothered to keep up to date or interested in fresh pedagogical ideas, and most shameful, they underestimate the appetite and capacity of the children in their schools for learning. 

So how to address this? 

Step One - the Secretary of State for Education should be in a supervisory role only - with the job of ensuring that the head of the Department for Education is a genuinely capable and informed educational practitioner with a long-term remit to embed excellence into education in this country. 

Step Two - the head of the DfE should be appointed for a 5 year term with an extension capacity to take them to a 10 year tenure. The job should be awarded to an educational professional with a clear vision that encompasses every school and every school-child. 

Step Three - schools should be properly funded. Frankly, the mechanism doesn't matter, in other words, whether it is academy trusts or local authorities collecting the money, the key is that every head-teacher should have full control over their budget and discretion to allocate it effectively, and every school should have a capable and creative financial director to support their head in that task. 

Step Four - Ensure that teachers are properly, systematically trained, and like lawyers and doctors, subject to regular ongoing training. Ensure that underpinning that is a decent salary that recognises the level of work that teachers do. This means addressing the irritating canard about long holidays and short working days, and then looking at the pretty paltry rates of pay for a qualified teacher. 

How much do teachers actually work compared with the average English worker?

Teachers in most schools work 50-60 hours per week during term time, and probably 20-25 hours per week during the school holidays for at least 6 of the 12 weeks of school holiday. A rough calculation suggests that most teachers work for 2500-2700 hours per year. The average worker in Britain according to Eurostat, works 42.5 hours per week, averaging out at about 2000 hours per year. However, according to the Office of National Statistics, the average for the UK is 37 hours per week, taking most workers in Britain to 1550 hours per year.

Now let's look at the money. A qualified teacher in the UK will be paid between £26-£41K. A qualified doctor's salary starts at £41K, and the average salary for a doctor is £54K. Doctors pretty much work a similar 48-56 hour week.

You can argue that doctors have more intense training, but the best teachers will have a first degree, requiring 3-4 years of study, a teacher's qualification which will take a further year, and a Masters either in a subject-related area or in educational management or pedagogy, a further two years. Many teachers are doing the equivalent of the 6-7 year training required of doctors.  

Ensure that teachers are supported with their training and reach the minimum standard expected in e.g. Finland, Japan, Singapore. Then follow through with proper pay and conditions. Make sure we have a long-term plan based on educational evidence that ensures that all schools approach their management and planning from a coherent, visionary perspective, and fund the schools properly. 

It looks easy. Sadly, we have had decades of educational mismanagement and skewed priorities. That is the real cataclysm and it has led not just to one horrible year for pupils and teachers, but to genuine generations of wasted talent and potential. 

Cultivating the garden...

I wrote various posts in response to the events of 6 January and Covid and remote learning and education in general and junked them all. The past fortnight has been dominated by work but I've been carving out sanity with a new story, drawing bears

and some reading and viewing linked through a Polish connection I've only just noticed. 

Reading: The Dawn Watch

This came out in hardback a couple of years ago, and DH got it for me last year in paperback. It's for Joseph Conrad lovers. Essentially, it is a mix of biography and literary exploration of Conrad's writing. I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are reviewers who believe it is a bit too apologist for Conrad's prejudices and racism, but I would disagree. Jasanoff directly addresses the context in which Conrad operated, acknowledges his flaws and limitations but really provides insight into how and why he is so highly regarded by so many other writers. He was not an easy man, but then, he did not have an easy life, and the insights into how he transmuted his life experiences into his fiction is fascinating. Jasanoff writes beautifully as well - this is an accessible but rigorously academic book, with no academic jargon, but plenty of references and interesting supporting evidence for her view of Conrad. Highly recommended. 

Currently reading: A Kiss Before Dying - Ira Levin's first novel. Cracking thriller. Amazingly loathsome central character. 

Film and TV

How did I miss the Gilmore Girls for all those years? I don't know. But I'm really enjoying it now. Half way through S1, huzzah! 

And this week, I finally watched Cold War, by Pawel Pawlikowski, which is not exactly chirpy feel-good lockdown viewing, but is one of the best films I've seen recently, and am watching a spate of good films. Here's the trailer. The back-story is fascinating too. You can read about it in the Guardian here and another great article from the New Yorker here.