Chris Betcher: Inside Track on PLC, Sydney

Posted on | August 20, 2008 | 4 Comments

If you want the inside track on the Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Sydney (see my earlier post), and its attempt to drag examinations into the 21st century, then you won’t get better than this – The Truth is Out There – from Chris Betcher, who teaches in the school. He has done a great job of explaining the thinking behind the initiative.

Chris is worried by some of the comments that have been posted in response to the Sydney Morning Herald’s piece on the PLC move. He has no reason to worry, unless, like me, he simply feels concern for the evidently lamentable understanding of the nature of knowledge and the purpose of education of all those who are criticizing the move.

I tried to add my own comment, but the SMH’s comment page would not let me post for some reason – so I append the comment I wrote here:

“If you want to understand the effects of the ludicrous examination systems we have been smothered by for so long, just read the comments here from all of those who believe that education should be about filling young people’s heads with ‘knowledge’ and that examinations are therefore surely about testing how much of that ‘knowledge’ a child can retain in his or her head and then vomit onto a piece of paper on command – with a pencil (a pencil !) – all within a very short space of time – and with no recourse at all to the wonderful and abundant sources of information available to us all today.

Exams as we know them are simply ludicrous. Such nonsense should have been thrown on the scrapheap long ago. There isn’t a soul in the world of work anywhere that I can think of that has to do their job in this way – even the doctor I went to see a few months ago for a very minor ailment had Google open on her laptop and used it as I described symptoms! I took comfort from the fact that a professional medic was willing to consult with Dr Google to test and confirm her own theory, and no doubt to check that she was not missing something.

The young students of PLC are being treated like the thinking, thoughtful people they are, simply by being allowed to learn, and to prove what they have learned, in ways that reflect the reality of the lives they will lead in the years ahead. I do not expect my doctor to hoard every tiny nugget of medical information she has ever read, and no one should expect young people to be able to retain vast stores of pointless information for an examination.

So, please ignore the bleating of those who talk of cheating and those who talk of laziness and those who think it’s all a joke, etc – they are fools who simply do not understand the realities of the world we live in. At least the students of PLC, if such eminently sensible practice can become standard practice, have the chance to grow up with a better understanding of the nature of knowledge, and the processes by which knowledge is applied in the real world, than any of the gradgrinds throwing their crass and negative comments around in this space.”

It would be good to see a few more positive comments in favour of the plain good sense of the college – click here and get writing. Let’s help ease Chris’s concerns about the world’s reaction to the wisdom and courage of his school.

Technorati Tags: Presbyterian Ladies’ College, chris betcher, examinations, assessment, sydney morning herald

Category: assessment, education, epistemology, intelligence, journalism, knowledge

Comments

4 Responses to “Chris Betcher: Inside Track on PLC, Sydney”

Robert Jones
August 21st, 2008 @ 5:01 pm

Hear hear John! And yet I feel uneasy. I wonder why that is. I think it’s because I have no idea of the totality of what our current system achieves, and so I have no idea what we might be throwing away if we abandon the requirement for young people to retain any information personally.

Maybe we’ll lose nothing, and gain a huge amount. Or maybe it will be a repeat of the primary school calculator fiasco, that resulted in many young people struggling to perform basic mental arithmetic. One thing for sure is that all the people making these decisions – decisions which will have such profound consequences for our children – have themselves managed to negotiate the modern world despite having been through the examination grinder themselves.
John Connell
August 21st, 2008 @ 6:32 pm

The point I would make, Robert, is that it’s not an either/or situation. We automatically assume that moving from one situation to another means renouncing everything that has gone before – not so!

I would contend that the exam as we know it has actually dumbed down education for a long long time, for the simple reason that a more rigorous form of assessment, one in which students would be expected to be able to go looking for whatever information they need to supplement whatever knowledge they already have, would raise the stakes in terms of the tasks that could be set. Instead of dumbing down, exams that reflect real-world situations, in which we have to know where to find the information we need, and in which we need to know how to apply it, could presage a much higher standard of task than the usual ’splurge onto the page’ exam.

At the end of the day, of course, we as adults all know that very very little of what we memorised so assiduously for our exams is either retained much beyond the end of the examination itself or, if it is retained, is of much use to us in our real lives. Knowledge that is, and that remains, useful to us is acquired only rarely by memorisation.

Even I, though, acknowledge that there are exceptions – a knowledge of the basic multiplication tables is a valuable life skill – and I don’t yet know of a way to learn those other than by rote. But then, we need not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Bronwyn
August 26th, 2008 @ 10:16 am

I’m one of the students who took part in the assessment and i’d just like to say thanks for supporting both myself and my class. Its really great to know that there are some people out there who agree with the experiment. However, it was only an experiment in an assessment situation not an examination. The future of the open technology task is unknown to my class at the moment but many of us enjoyed the task.
Thanks again for writing such nice things and not calling my classmates rich private school snobs like some on the SMH website.
John Connell
August 26th, 2008 @ 5:17 pm

Bronwyn,

I dislike prejudice and snobbery of any kind, and that includes mindless reverse snobbery. Thank you for keeping me right on the exact nature of the experiment – it is a brave, but I think, very necessary step for schools to take, and you can be proud of the fact that PLC is one of the first to do so. I would bet that there will be many more that decide to follow PLC’s example over the next few years, so your school is certainly in the vanguard of such a change.

John