Where do I start? I'm sure that for those of you who were at school yesterday
for the Bagrut exam, there is no point in writing all this - we all went
through the same wonderful experience with the last two exams of the day. But
maybe I'll feel better after getting this off my chest :-)
When I first heard about the leaked exams and the possibility that they would
be cancelled, I was of course very shocked and upset. I couldn't imagine
telling all our students, who had worked so hard throughout the year and had
psyched themselves up for the test, that they would have to come back another
time to take the exam. I was just praying that the exam would somehow go on,
and was extremely happy that it did, despite the crazy mess that ensued.
However, by the time the tests were over, I think I would have preferred that
the tests had just been canceled, and I'll explain why.
First, I want to emphasize that this is NOT criticism of the English
Inspectorate. It's clear that they had to scramble at the last minute to come
up with some sort of solution so that tens of thousands of students would not
suffer needlessly, and in that time frame, it's impossible to come up with a
whole new test. So this is more of a criticism of the Ministry that decided
that the test must go on, although here again, I can understand their point of
view in not wanting to cancel the test. (See, I can apply the HOTS of
Distinguishing Different Perspectives.) But the bottom line is that the
alternate test questions, if they were meant to prevent cheating on the part of
those who had already seen the original test, were totally ineffective, mainly
because most of the questions remained the same.
Just reordering the multiple choice answers doesn't help anyone. As it is,
there are two version of the Bagrut, so students know that they need to
remember the correct answer, not the number of the correct answer. Even if they
only saw the questions and not the actual text, they could have translated all
the answers, in which case changing the order of the answers is also of no use.
So really, only two questions were changed in each questionnaire. Just for that
reason, I think that the exam SHOULD have been canceled, despite the major
implications that would have had for all of us, and a new exam rescheduled for
another date. There is no doubt that the results of the exam will be totally
skewed for those who did see the exam beforehand, despite the two new questions
that were given.
Additional issues that I'm sure all of us experienced:
1) Explaining all the changes to the students - My five-point students weren't
fazed at all and handled everything with grace, but the Module C students (some
of whom are of course the weakest of the weak) definitely were fazed. It
probably would have been better to just ditch the original test booklets and
print out a whole new booklet for each student, instead of having to tell them
what to cross out on the original booklet and do on the papers (especially for
Module C, where they had to do one question on page 4 in the test booklet, and
the rest on paper).
2) Correcting the mistake in the Module C papers - Question 4 gave only the
answers to the multiple choice question and not the question itself. Yes, the
question was in the booklet, but the students had just crossed out that
question in the booklet. Again, I'm not blaming those who had to come up with a
new questionnaire in a matter of hours, but this just added to the confusion of
the three- and four-pointers.
3) The overall mess for students - Having people coming in and out of the room
to explain all the issues - read the text in the booklet but don't do the
questions yet, now cross out these questions and not these questions, now let's
put stickers on each paper, now add this question to question 4, etc. How do
students focus on their exam with all this happening, especially weak students?
Now, our school is small, so we were able to deal with this fairly quickly and
efficiently, but I don't want to imagine what things were like in large schools
with multiple parallel classes. Feel free to share your personal horror stories
with me and the rest of the list!
4) The lack of information - We heard about the leaked exam from one of our
teachers who was at her other school. I passed the information on to my mother,
who teaches at yet another school. Our Bagrut coordinator (who is VERY on top
of things) called the hotline / checked online and was told that the test was
taking place despite the issues. Then my mother called me back and told me that
they were told that there was going to be a new questionnaire. I called back my
colleague and passed on the information to her. Etc. etc. The point is that
despite doing our best to be on top of things and check what was happening all
the time, things were not clear until the last minute (actually beyond the last
minute - we ended up starting around 15 minutes late). Again, I can just
imagine what was going on in larger schools.
And on a totally different note, did anyone notice the closely set type on the
Module E exam? As a publisher, I certainly did notice that they spacing was way
too tight, making it extremely hard for students to read. I can't say that I
found the text extremely scintillating either, but my students didn't seem to
mind that part.
Looking forward to hearing everyone else's take on yesterday's disaster,Rivka
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