The following short essay by secondary school teacher Véronique Marchais highlights a very serious problem common to Western education systems and most advanced in the UK and the US. An obsession with targets, performance and objective measurement is changing the aims of education. The capacity of teachers to exercise judgment on the quality of their pupils work is being undermined by the use of strict ‘objective’ criteria, standardised marking schemes and regular standardisation exercises among teachers.

Increasingly, teachers and markers of GCSE and A level exams are asked to follow government schemes, rather than trust their own judgment, in order to assess their pupils’ work. The exercise of professional judgment by the teacher is contemptuously called ‘impression marking’ and it’s considered an obsolete and unprofessional practice. This leads to a very formalistic kind of assessment that measures ‘competences’ in isolation. But as Véronique Marchais argues, these competences should not be considered as ends in themselves as they have only meaning when used together to complete a complex task.

The division of complex tasks into smaller simple tasks in the production of material goods has led to great increases in productivity, with invaluable benefits for humanity – the most important of which was freeing human beings from hard labour. However, applying modern production processes to education treats human beings as objects in a production line and devalues our highest capacities for thinking and for judging complex situations. Paradoxically, this leads to transforming higher forms of human action into simple labour.

In our obsession for measurement, we might have lost sight of what it is that we want to measure in the first place. GCSE and A level results might be going up year on year, but what do they mean?

Michele Ledda

Evaluation of competences: why pupils will never achieve their targets
Véronique Marchais, secondary teacher of French language and literature, Sauver Les Lettres website, September 2006

In the last few years, the evaluation of competences has become the new credo of l’Education Nationale (French ministry of education). It has surreptitiously moved from primary to secondary school and from the key stage entry evaluation to the national examinations. Its latest version, the decree on the common knowledge base, reaffirms this notion of competence by recalling article 9 of the Law of 23 April 2005: 'Compulsory schooling must at least guarantee to the each pupil the means that are necessary for the acquisition of a common base of knowledge and competences which is indispensable to master in order successfully to complete schooling, undergo training, build one’s own personal and professional future and be successful in society.'

What does this mean?

First of all, we will explain what evaluation of competences is by means of two examples: evaluation of the ability to read and evaluation of the ability to express oneself clearly in writing.

The principle is the same every time: the evaluation of competences proceeds through reductionism. Every complex task, as reading unarguably is, is divided into a multitude of competences that are mobilised by the pupil in order to complete the task. The underlying assumption is that a pupil never fails in every single task and we will be able to value him and motivate him by underlining, besides his difficulties, his partial achievements. This is a commendable objective, but one that leads to some aberrations by confusing the diagnosis of the main sources of difficulty in the pupil, the relativisation of these difficulties and the evaluation of his work.

So for example, in year 6, in order to evaluate the comprehension ability of a young reader, we find the following items: identify the story setting; identify the main character; identify the forces that act in the story; understand the situation; identify the genre of the text ... Besides the total absence of relevance of certain items – e.g. one can understand very well a text without necessarily identifying the genre – one can ask the reason for such division into bits. Indeed, who doesn’t understand that a pupil who only masters part of these competences, a pupil that, for instance, has identified the main character and setting but doesn’t understand neither situation nor the actions of other characters, simply does not understand anything about the story? Yet, this kind of evaluation leads one to the conclusion that such pupil has been 50% successful in the comprehension of the text. A success that means absolutely nothing.

Similarly, with writing we find items such as: correctly employ verb tenses; personal pronouns, articles; be able to handle information; link ideas with one another ... Again, one will understand quite easily that writing properly means coordinating all of these competences. Taken in isolation from each other, these competences have no meaning, no value. Incidentally, it is a curious contradiction that official documents that keep repeating that grammar should not be taken as an end in itself, multiply the grammatical items in the evaluation of pupils’ written expression.

The first conclusion we can draw about the evaluation of competences is therefore that this evaluation does not allow us to measure what it purports to measure. When it states that a pupil is 50% or 60% successful in a particular area, this doesn’t mean anything and in any case it does not guarantee the existence of any real abilities.

Such an absurdity is pushed as far as the national examinations, where, in order to mark the papers, teachers receive stricter and stricter instructions: in the writing of a letter, a number of points will be given to a pupil who has put a date in the top right corner, to those who have used an introductory or greeting formula, to those who have used paragraphs ... It matters little if these paragraphs do not correspond to any particular organisation of the pupil’s thoughts and if the letter as a whole is pure gobbledygook. The logical consequence of the multiplication of items linked to positive evaluation – another dogma which we will not discuss here – is the attribution of points for everything and anything. The quality of the whole of the pupil’s work disappears behind the myriad competences. That’s how we end up giving a C grade to papers showing a positive lack of effort and reflection and serious ignorance of the language. That’s how pupils can achieve 80% of success in an exam. We have already said above what we should think of such success.

We can now state that the evaluation of competences, either coincidentally or very usefully, contributes to the devaluation of examinations.

In spite of these serious limits, with the evaluation of competences the education system gives itself the illusion of greater objectivity, of greater fairness and, as we’ve already said, of respecting more the pupils who allegedly have so far been traumatised with humiliating and incomprehensible marks. It is an unwarranted assumption based on the idea that teachers have had to wait for the evaluation of competences before they could justify their marks or be able to explain to the pupil on what aspects he should work in order to improve. We cannot accept this.

And there is something much worse: controls in the past have never pretended to assess anything other than the ability to complete a task at a particular moment. The pupil as a person was never in question, and the teacher could explain this, reassure and help the pupil to resume his work. Now this has completely changed with the evaluation of ‘attitudes’ installed by the decree of implementation of the basic common knowledge: we must by now assess, among other things, the ‘willingness’ shown by pupils, their ‘taste for sonorities, for playing with meaning,’ their ‘interest in reading,’ their ‘desire to communicate,’ their ‘self-confidence’ or ‘desire to succeed,’ their ‘curiosity for discovering the causes of natural phenomena,’ ‘the respect of rationally established truth,’ – this last item leaving the author of these lines quite puzzled given the scope for debate on the relationship between morality and reason or between reason and truth. A curse on shy, discreet swots who do what is asked of them without showing great enthusiasm! The assessment of their work has been turned, in an unwarranted and dangerous way, into a judgment on the person and into a prescription of tastes and opinions in complete contradiction with the principle of individuals’ freedom of thought.

And that’s not all. The evaluation of competences is not happy with degrading examinations and dangerously changing their object. It also empties out the fundamental purpose of education. State education as it was devised by its founders had always had the aim of developing human intelligence, allowing it to arrive to more and more complex understanding. It is this progress of the mind that teachers used to evaluate in an era which now seems to have almost completely disappeared. That’s what the teacher did when he gave regular assessments to his pupils which where also complex tasks of gradually increasing difficulty: calculus, solving of problems, composition, questions about a text ... The concern of the teacher wasn’t then to know whether the pupil could complete a mechanical exercise, nor was it to know whether he called into play one particular ‘competence’ or another. Rather, the teacher wanted to know to what extent the pupil was able to use his own reason and the knowledge he had acquired in order to solve a problem or complete a task. The teacher used to judge the overall quality of the pupil’s work, according to a number of criteria: exactitude of the result obtained, relevance of the method employed, quality of reasoning, abundance of examples, clarity of written expression, precision of the answers ... such criteria allow one to judge the degree of the development of thinking achieved at one particular moment. That’s what was assessed, because that’s what constituted the aim and because every kind of teaching – of language, of arithmetics, of science, of literature, of drawing even – everything contributed to the same objective: to train the human mind, allowing it to show the measure of all its potentialities.

With the ‘basic level of common knowledge’, state education doesn’t set for itself the objective, both broad and ambitious, of developing intelligence as far as possible, it is just happy with aiming at transmitting a minimal baggage made up of a list of ‘competences’: ‘analyse the grammatical elements of a sentence,’ ‘understand instructions,’ ‘employ tools’ such as a dictionary, ‘link words with logical connectives’, add up fractions, formulate hypotheses, deductions ...

Intelligence means, etymologically, making connections. It develops with the capacity to coordinate one’s own pool of knowledge. By disconnecting everything, education is being divorced from intelligence. With the approach by competences, the complex action which constitutes every act of thought is reduced to a succession of procedures that become an end in themselves, ‘pool of knowledge and competences which is indispensable to master’ – therefore, that is what teachers will target.

It is the very objectives of education that have been changed beyond recognition. More precisely, we can state that an education system that gives itself for objectives the mastery of such competences, disconnected from one another, has given up on its primary ambition, which is not reducible to a sum of competences, and which used to be the development of thinking.

[The Greek philosopher] Zenon of Elea has left us some famous paradoxes: an arrow will never hit its target because in order to do so it must first cover half the distance separating it from its target and before it can do so it must cover half the distance between its starting point and the half way point, and so on in an infinite sequence. This sophism provides an excellent image of evaluation by competences: one could multiply them to infinity – why not reward, for every task, the pupil who can produce a sheet of paper and a pen, the pupil who can trace any kind of marks on the page, the one who can use words in the prescribed order – all of them necessary skills. Thus, by breaking down complex tasks into smaller and smaller units, we move away more and more from the fundamental unity of understanding. The multiplication of competences in every area of teaching is not only absurd and arbitrary, it is also harmful in the sense that it seriously compromises the main aim of education: the more we multiply and aim for the single skills employed in a complex thinking process, the more we prevent pupils to access such complex thinking.

Translated by Michele Ledda