Equal
rights
I'm
going to go out on a limb here and assert that equality of
opportunity is a good thing. There, I've said it. Gone are the bad
old days when jobs and privileges were determined at birth. No longer
do you have to be an aristocrat or wealthy land-owner to study
science; Michael Faraday broke that mould. Neither is being born with
a Y-chromosome still a prerequisite for academic success. While that
playing field may not be as level as it should be, at least
officially-sanctioned sexism has been abolished since Rosalind
Franklin's day. Encouragingly, I currently teach a cohort of
undergraduate mathematicians, at Leeds University, with a near-equal
female:male gender ratio of 52:48.
Belatedly,
we have seen improvements in equality of opportunity for people with
disabilities. An inspiring leap forward was made by the London 2012
Paralympics in dispelling some of our social prejudices. Meanwhile,
with the introduction of the Equality Act 2010, educational
establishments have set up new procedures to ensure that disability
does not result in inequality.
For
a simple and obvious example, consider a physics undergraduate
student who uses a wheelchair. Their inability to walk has no bearing
on their potential quality as a physicist. So their university has a
responsibility to make sure that they are not disadvantaged during
their learning and assessment. It would be unfair to arrange their
exams to take place at the top of a steep flight of stairs. Their
institution needs to be aware of their condition and make sure that
they can access the exam.
Similarly,
universities must make exams accessible to blind or partially-sighted
students by printing their exam papers in Braille or large print. It
is obvious that poor eyesight should not prevent a person being a
good physicist. So we lecturers and examiners must make sure that our
formal assessments of a physicist's abilities reflect only those
abilities relevant to being a physicist, while taking appropriate
account of a candidate's medical conditions.
A
student with a disability can visit a university's Equality and
Diversity Unit to have their needs assessed by a qualified
professional, who will write a formal Assessment of Needs: a document
that is circulated to their teachers, explaining what special
provisions are required to prevent the student being disadvantaged by
their condition. So a student with hearing difficulty might have an
Assessment of Needs containing a statement such as, "Lectures
should be arranged in a room with a hearing loop." It makes
sense, and can be very helpful.
Learning
equality
Things
become a lot more complicated where a specific learning difficulty
(SpLD) is involved because, whereas hearing or walking are not
crucial abilities for STEM subjects (Science, Technology,
Engineering, Mathematics), learning
is a university's core business. The Equality Service at the
University of Leeds has useful information about SpLDs.
It
says,
"Each
SpLD is characterised by an unusual skills profile. This often leads
to difficulties with academic tasks, despite having average or above
average intelligence or general ability."
This
makes a thought-provoking distinction between ability with academic
tasks and intelligence. It presupposes particular definitions of
"intelligence" and "academic". I don't know how
to define either of those things, but it seems safe to say that the
particular type of intelligence that is relevant to university work
could be called "academic intelligence".
When
learning is itself the subject of an Assessment of Needs, as it is
for people with Asperger syndrome or dyscalculia, for two examples,
then the assessor's own academic background becomes relevant.
Assessors and staff of Equality and Diversity Units often have
medical or humanities training. (I confess this is an anecdotal
observation, not based on good data.) So their views of STEM-subject
exams are not based on experience. Yet they and other medical
professionals are required to write Assessments of Needs that carry
the weight of law, and dictate some parameters of the teaching and
assessment delivered by the subject-specialists.
For
instance, while good writing style is deemed relevant to an English
degree, physics examiners are often instructed not to mark a
particular student's work on the basis of their grammar. The
assumption is that ability to write good English is not part of the
discipline of physics, and can be separated from it as easily as the
ability to walk or to hear. The instruction assumes that the exam
should only test the student's ability to calculate or recall facts,
rather than a holistic ability to understand an English description,
translate it into a calculation, solve the problem, interpret the
solution and communicate it well. Of course, no examiner would mark a
physicist's work exclusively on their writing style, so we are only
talking about a handful of marks at stake.
Of
necessity, when the 2010 Equality Act became law, new systems were
hastily put in place, without much time for consultation. As a
consequence, examiners were never asked, for instance, whether we
should expect a physicist to demonstrate good communication ability.
As we iron out the system's early teething troubles, we need to
address these kinds of question. What exactly is an exam supposed to
test? To what extent can we separate our assessment of a physics
student's linguistic ability from their other skills? This is not a
rhetorical question. I don't know the answer, but I do know that it
is complicated and not obvious, and should be debated before the
rules are set in stone.
Here
is a cartoon that brings the issue into sharp focus.
 |
| Cartoon courtesy of QuickMeme www.quickmeme.com/p/3vpax2 |
It
all hinges on what the selection is for.
If this is the exam for a swimming qualification, it is entirely
unsuitable. If it is a job interview for a steeplejack, then it's a
fair test that discriminates appropriately between the best and the
worst. It is easy to define the appropriate skills for a steeplejack.
How should we define a scientist?
A
matter of time
To
avoid any misunderstanding, I want to make a clear distinction
between teaching and examination. Any good teacher needs to have
empathy for their students, and pitch their teaching at a suitable
level and tempo for each individual. Being armed with the maximum
possible information about the student's particular needs and
abilities is always helpful, and the good teacher will make
appropriate provisions whenever possible. The extent to which special
provisions should be made during exams is an entirely separate
question.
The
most common provision in an Assessment of Needs is the stipulation
that a particular student should be given extra time (typically 25%
extra) to complete their exam. This raises a fundamental question. If
a person can solve a particular puzzle more quickly that another
person, although both might get there in the end, should their
university award them a higher grade? A person's intellectual ability
cannot be quantified on a single, one-dimensional scale. It is
many-faceted, and speed of problem-solving is one aspect of it.
One
might suggest that exams do not exist to test a person's intellectual
ability, but only to test how much they have learnt during a
particular course of study. That sounds like a reasonable idea but,
in fact, we do not measure a student's scientific ability at the
beginning and end of a science degree course, and award the
qualification for self-improvement, irrespective of whether they are
any good at the subject. On the contrary, the letters "BSc"
are purported to be a standardized benchmark, indicating a particular
absolute level of ability. That ability might have been innate when
the student arrived at university, or might be the result of
more-than-average hard work.
The
most common method for determining ability in any academic subject is
by timed exams. An exam tests what a student can achieve within a
finite time interval. At the end of that interval, anyone who has not
finished misses out on the marks that they were too slow to accrue.
An exception is made if a medical professional has predicted, rightly
or wrongly, that the student would need extra time for their exams,
and has written their prediction in an Assessment of Needs. This
inconsistency presents a problem. A more accurate and
individually-tailored assessment of each student's needs could be
made in the exam hall. We could unambiguously identify the students
who need extra time, as a result of their own unique abilities and
disabilities. They are the ones who run out of time!
So
there would be advantages (as well as massive logistical
difficulties) in having un-timed exams. They would allow each student
to demonstrate their abilities, whilst removing the element of speed
from the assessment of their expertise. With the best intentions, we
have stumbled into the new age of equality with a flawed mixture of
two systems. Candidates, whose needs have not been assessed, have
their abilities measured by a fixed-duration exam, while others have
the duration of their exam determined by their abilities.
The
question that must urgently be addressed is this. Do we want exams to
test what a candidate is able to achieve within a fixed time, or do
we only want to know what they can achieve when given as much time as
they require? Creating fair and meaningful methods of assessment
requires an open debate on what we want from an exam, what we want
from a degree classification, and what we want from a physicist.
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