Whether parents are justified in their recent criticisms of the content, format and results of the General Education Diploma, or not, Oman’s educational authorities would do well to heed their concerns. It may well be correct that, as the Ministry of Education has said, there is a statistical anomaly at present due to the actual result being dependent upon the results achieved across the entire academic year. However, 10,000 failures must not be ignored.
Exams are not just an indication of what a student knows, but what they have been taught and what they have retained from their learning. Assessments, as many exams are referred to today, also reflect the students’ ability to express what they know, how to put what they know into words and that is often a greater issue than subject and topic knowledge. To this end, exams are not an ‘official test of knowledge,’ or are not only that, but they will determine the ‘ability of learners to express their depth of knowledge, their understanding, their skills and intelligence.’ In measuring so much of an individual, it’s therefore imperative that the structure, content, purpose and difficulty of exams takes on a complexity far beyond simply writing a series of questions. Today, they are tools for learning, as finding oneself in any examination tests so much more than knowledge, their resilience, ability to perform under pressure, to manage their time effectively, are all challenged.
As a teacher, lecturer, exams officer and having produced hundreds of test and exam papers across thirty years of school, college and university, I can categorically state that in terms of complexity, setting exams can be a devilishly difficult task, especially without a depth of guidance and support that is needed to meet their objectives. We also need to be very clear who is being examined, on which subjects and specialities and with which resources. We must be confident that their teachers have taught all the different learning styles in a way that ensures all learners have the same ‘learnability.’ For example, students usually function in one of three primary styles, as visual, they see things; aural, they hear things; or kinaesthetic, they do things. That’s why teachers vary the way they present information, so all learners benefit.
All exams, to be effective, must encourage the learners in their introductory stages, with simple question types, such as true/false questions, multiple choice questions, gap fill and matching formats, with appropriate imagery and activity requirements to meet all learning styles. The very best exam papers also offer very clear guidance as to how students should answer the questions and it stands to reason that we must be confident that the students have had their learning checked, not once, not twice, but several times, in several different ways, because ‘telling’ students something is not teaching it! After all, how many times and in how many ways, do you parents need to tell kids to keep their room’s tidy? Exams therefore should evolve towards a more demanding phase of open-ended, leading and funnelling questions, rhetorical, recall, evaluation, inference, comparison, hypothetical, interview, survey and process questions, which become progressively more demanding and seamlessly evolve into a final essay type question. Most of the time, the student has evolved during the exam and is, again progressively, more able to respond and give of their best. Yet, conscientious teaching and committed learning, will count for nought if the exams are presented to them in a way they have never seen before, if their expectations are shattered upon opening the paper and seeing a ‘foreign’ set of tasks.
To be honest, seeing the media and social media comments about the GED, I believe that is exactly what has happened here. Someone has found a new level of exam setting but failed to ensure that it fairly assesses student learning and the question styles and formats have not been made available to teachers and through them, to the students. Today’s assessment processes are proven, foolproof and the students will be well-prepared if they have had opportunities to practice all the formats and know the how’s and what’s.
I am confident, that if future exams meet expectations, are not complex and are no mystery... the next set of results will be far less controversial.
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