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Teachers can be expected to rank their students by giving them scores of 1,000 as fears arise about difficulties in grading students of similar abilities through calculated grades.
Following the cancellation of this summer’s Leaving Cert exams, teachers are asked to assign students a grade and a grade between their classes. Concerns have been raised regarding both aspects.
The Secondary Teachers Association, Ireland (ASTI) has now told its members that when it comes to the “class ranking” element, each student can be marked by their teacher from the 1,000 available grades.
“This could be useful in a situation where it would be very difficult to classify a group of students whose achievement is very similar,” the teacher union said, in detailed advice issued to members.
This is relevant in cases where several students are expected to receive the same percentage. One approach could be for the teacher to rate students 1,000 and convert them to percentages.
This would allow “further refinement” of the teacher’s judgments and automatically create the ranking for the teacher, according to ASTI.
In cases where two or more students receive identical grades, the teacher will be asked to look again to see what might separate them, the council added.
The Department of Education also asks each teacher to “draw from a variety of sources” when assigning student grades. Sources cited by the Department of Education include class assessments, Christmas exams, summer exams, mock exams, but with some caution, performances on any component of the course, such as projects or assignments, and past school results on the subject. .
However, ASTI believes that it will be “inappropriate” to include class work and homework in these calculations.
ASTI believes that a school, upon reaching the student’s grade to be submitted to the Department of Education and Skills for standardization purposes, should be based only on already published school data.
Published school data would include data already entered into a school’s system, for example, Christmas test results or summer tests. This would help to avoid suggestions of bias, since the information has been previously recorded.
The Department of Education is expected to issue a detailed guide to the entire calculated grading process in the near future. The Irish Teachers Union is also expected to issue detailed answers to their questions to its members in the coming days. This week, the union called for a protocol to be established to protect teachers from any form of lobbying or scrutiny.
Under calculated grading systems, teachers will present students’ calculated grades and a class ranking. This will then be examined by other teaching staff on the same subject.
A school principal will review the grades and, once they are satisfied that the process has been followed fairly, this information will be submitted to the Department of Education for ‘standardization’.
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