[etni] Results of Modular Bagrut Exam
- From: "Maxine" <maxine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "ETNI" <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 12:16:44 +0200
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At the risk of repeating what others have said, I would like to make some
comments about this year's Modular Bagrut exam and the less than satisfactory
results received by many 11th grade English Speakers :
1. Those taking the Bagrut exam in the 11th grade are presumably the most
proficient English language learners in this country; that is precisely why
they have been given the "privilege" of taking the exam early (a dubious
privilege,
as it turns out). If so many of these pupils received grades 10, 20 points
lower than 12th graders, who we can assume as a group are inferior to them in
language ability, then there are three possible conclusions:
1) our English Speakers are not as good as we thought they were, despite the
grades of 90+ that their teachers gave them. That is, we don't know
our pupils and in the
test the bitter truth came out "at last."
2) their teachers are lousy and/or didn't do their job properly (we are
talking about some
of the most capable and experienced teachers in the country here).
3) the test was not valid. According to the Chozer Mankal only pupils
whose teachers deem them capable of achieving a 90 should be doing the
Bagrut in 11th grade. Does the fact that so many pupils got grades lower than
90 show that for two years they managed to pull the wool over the teacher's
eyes? I doubt it. These pupils by every yardstick SHOULD have been
getting 90s - certainly not 60s and 70s, which is what many teachers have
reported - and if they didn't the test did not test what it was supposed to
test: English language proficiency.
I remember writing here several months ago that I didn't understand why the
11th grade English Speaker teachers were so anxious about the new Bagrut
because they were English Speakers, after all, and how different would the exam
be from recent Bagruts anyway, which were already looking pretty different
from Bagruts of two, three years ago? I was wrong. This test was
substantively different and not enough time or materials (one mock exam wasn't
enough) were given to prepare pupils for it. The teachers I know did a
stupendous job with the resources at their disposal but one year wasn't enough
to internalize, even to UNDERSTAND, what the new Bagrut was all about. There
was an unfair expectation that since they're English Speakers, they'll manage,
they'll do fine. All of this, together with the fact that this was a new
type of test, unchartered territory, as it were, put the 11th graders at an
unfair disadvantage. They should have been compensated for this; they should
definitely have received a "factor."
2. There should be several more questions on various levels, as Sharon Tzur
pointed out, with fewer points for each. Increase the
duration of each module from 1 1/4 hours to 1 3/4 hours, like in Math, which is
also modular. In order that we don't have to be at school
until 2:00 AM, make the English Bagrut in the morning, like in
Math!
3. While the Inspectorate has put a great deal of time and energy in preparing
teachers for the NBA, the
courses that have been given have dealt exclusively with project work and
not at all on how to
prepare pupils for the actual Bagrut: helping us to teach our pupils
how to approach questions that
require a very high level of conceptualization and really make them think
(if this can be done is another question...)
The new Bagrut exam itself was just kind of ignored and expected to take care
of itself. I suppose the assumption was that the
research pupils did for their projects, plus all the extensive reading the
pupils did (?), would have a backwash effect and the pupils would just kind of
naturally become better readers. This obviously hasn't happened, at least
not yet, and if it hasn't happened with the best students of English I doubt
it's happened with the rest. I strongly recommend reducing the emphasis on
project work in future NBA courses and spend at least some time on training
teachers in the actual Bagrut, which has a lot more bearing on the pupil's
final grade than the project does.
4. As a marker, I felt more strongly this year than ever before that when
grading an unseen I am taking off too many points for aspects of
language other than reading comprehension itself. By the time you've taken
off 3 points for grammar, 1 point for spelling, 1 point for extraneous
information , the pupil has lost
half the points at least and you KNOW s/he understood the text! I really
like many of these questions which challenge the pupils and
make them think. But sometimes I wonder if there should
not be more multiple choice questions on the unseens, like on the TOEFL or the
psychometric exam.
Test vocabulary, spelling, grammar, in the writing activities and make sure
that the reading comprehension,
oops, sorry, access-to-information-from-written-texts section, really does test
reading comprehension.
I only hope that the English Speakers who took Moed Bet do better this time.
The questions were as
hard as Moed Aleph - some even more so! - but seemed fairer, less ambiguous.
Let's hope for the best! I also hope some
of what we've written the last few weeks will be taken into consideration for
the sake not only of next year's 11th grade English Speakers but our poor
"regular" 12th graders. If they have to take an exam like this year's,
oy... I don't want to think about it................
Regards, Maxine Tsvaigrach
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