I Should Be Marking

We had a group called Lindisfarne Press in school today, mostly working with the lower sixth form and running a series of seminars entitled ‘Bridging the Gap’.

They covered several aspects of summative assessment at KS5 and pointed out a few obvious (now) things that perhaps some of us weren’t aware – at least not from the students’ point of view. I know this because they also had a session after school – a cross between a debrief and a summary.

The main things I came out of it with were (in no particular order):

• Just how close some of the grade boundaries are.  28/60 might be an E but 34 could be a C. So 6 marks can have a student jump up (or down) 2 grades. So when you give a pupil with a D grade piece of work feedback, then give them the grade boundaries instead of the grade. It’s easier to go up 6 marks than it is to go up 2 grades.
• Chunking exam (& coursework) questions. We went into a lot of detail about how to break down even a short exam question into 6-8 chunks (often one word per chunk). What does ‘investigate’ mean? Is ‘and’ a joining word or a separating word? ([Describe] how the [World Wide Web] {and} [other technological improvements] have [affected] the way [people collect] [information].)
• It might be worth resitting an A graded unit if you only just scraped 240 UMS points as the potential other 60 would also carry through to other units (only 17% of people go up a grade or more from AS-A2). If AS is a lower level than A2 (and it is) then it might be worth trying to make up some UMS points at the lower level since they’re weighted equally.

Unfortunately I had to leave early (I say early, the hour long meeting was already 90 minutes old) but it certainly seemed a useful exercise. Apparently the 6th formers have been wandering around all day singing (to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle):

If you get just 3 or 4
You need to chunk a little more

If you get 5, 6 or 7
You will be in exam heaven
…yeah! (apparently the ‘yeah’ is very important to the 2 year old inside all of us)

An ocdcasional Monty Python reference is inevitable I’m afraid, sorry

I am thoroughly fed up with spam at the minute. On this blog I get the occasional spammy trackback, usually one of these cryptic ones where it’s hard to actually see the benefit for the spammer. What really annoys me is that over the last few days I’ve had over 60 spam trackbacks on my pupil blog. And not just common-or-garden spam trackbacks but really nasty gay porn type trackbacks.

Of course I can delete it, and I’m old enough and big enough to filter out the nasty stuff in my own head, but the poor 11 year old kids who log on to write about what their doing only to find that some *£%$ has essentially vandalised their work with obscene references are going to end up traumatised.

I’ve now expanded the blacklist fairly dramatically but I’m actually quite disheartened at the amount of time I’m having to spend going through and deleting 20 spam trackbacks. It seems B2E can only mass-delete comments when they’re from the same domain. I will stick with it though, I must stick with it

#spam, spam, spam, spammety, spammey spam…