Is the modern method of marking GCSE English Language stifling creativity and causing ‘Writers’ Block?’

Our Senior Moderator, an English Language GCSE examiner of over 30 years asks….

Could the electronic assessment of GCSE English Language Writing be responsible for the continued ‘plethora’ of robotic responses?

Having the luxury of not being in an exam setting, I have been thinking about and planning this piece since the marking of Language Paper 2 ended earlier this summer. Now let me make one thing clear – before I started, at no point in this process did I feel the need to jot down DAFOREST techniques or make lists of the punctuation or vocabulary I might include, in order to dazzle you with my ‘gargantuan’ writing skills.

After an intense summer of marking, disturbingly, these DAFOREST check lists are often the only evidence of planning seen on GCSE scripts. Sadly, it seems we have forgotten that writing is an organic process which as in nature is often diminished by artificial additives. But I don’t entirely blame our teachers. No, I have come to the conclusion that perhaps we have created a Catch-22 situation where the marking process unintentionally gives rise to teachers ‘teaching to score points’ rather that encourage inspired and holistic writing. Please read on to understand why.

Last year, I was dismayed and irritated in equal amounts by the dozens of responses filled with often ridiculous surveys and statistics, spurious anecdotes and a barrage of rhetorical questions. I wrote a blog indicating that teachers seeking a magic formula for GCSE success were sacrificing clarity of thought and expression in favour a checklist of techniques. Now after marking upwards of 500 often equally formulaic writing responses electronically, I am beginning to wonder whether the way these exams are assessed and annotated online is giving a misleading impression of what quality non-fiction writing really looks like.

In the olden days of GCSE marking, the actual scripts were delivered to your door in bulky plastic bags. For weeks you would have a leaning tower of papers as you worked your way through them. There was a system of standardisation and marking was completed with a red pen by hundreds of ‘Mr Fishers ‘waiting for their Tibbet moment’. Whilst markers were warned to keep comments professional and reflective of the mark scheme, they were much less restricted. Access to scripts by schools, post results was also much more limited and costly.

Now scripts are marked electronically question by question rather than candidate by candidate and when it comes to the longer writing questions the main board demands that annotation of AO5 and AO6 is apparent throughout the response and in summative comments at the end, in order to justify the mark given. The annotations are provided in quite lengthy comment banks which are dragged and dropped into the script. A good idea it may seem at first but in reality, choosing from a drop-down menu by demand makes the marking almost as robotic as the scripts are in content themselves. It not only makes the writing more laborious to mark but also means the examiner will often sub-consciously or not, be on the look-out for apt places to ‘drop’ their comments. The comments are a forced attempt to acknowledge points worthy of award in order to justify a mark given, but inevitably, these comments are then feasted upon by the hungry eyes of teachers who adopt a need to immerse their teaching with more DAFOREST techniques, often to the detriment of the very writing they seek to improve.

Subsequently, if a school requests a script from a disappointed candidate, to review the mark, and sees the comment as a sign of approval rather than necessity, they might continue to encourage their students to shoe-horn an unwieldy list of ‘wordy words’ into their writing, with little regard for the sense they are making….and indeed they do! Countless scripts are submitted with an identical checklist of 10 ‘top words’ which need to be included, so often resulting in nothing more than a meaningless word-salad. Similarly, the requirement to identify a ‘range of sentence forms’ might have led to the often-borderline hysterical use of exclamation marks and rhetorical questions in responses which are more reminiscent of Lady Macbeth on the night of Duncan’s murder than lucid, journalistic, transactional writing. The comment ‘sophisticated range of punctuation’ could also be culpable for the XXL size semi-colons (enforced in as bold as possible pen) which this year have been shamelessly drawing attention to themselves on some scripts. No doubt this is exam-showmanship at its worst.  Somewhere out there, teachers are advising students to press their pen down hard to make sure the examiner doesn’t miss the inclusion of the aforementioned semi-colon.

There is no doubt that lackadaisical is an example of a ‘more sophisticated vocabulary’ and however much an examiner is wincing inside at its often awkward usage (and seeing it ticked off the planning list), they might choose to drop one of their quotas of comments beside it rather than being told off by their Team Leader for insufficient annotation.

Tragically the very essence of naturally inspired writing is being snuffed out by a need to applaud wooden technique with equally wooden acknowledgement.  Overall, it does nothing for the improvement of written English for our future generations and will inevitably leak into the pages of novels and journalism in years to come. Tragic when the whole process of teaching English is to inspire penned creativity rather than stifle learning into a tick box regime of reactive techniques. 

I cannot think for a minute that Tolstoy, Dickens or even modern-day journalists such as John Crace or Polly Toynbee, arm themselves with a bank of intended vocabulary and punctuation at the ready before putting pen to paper.

Writing is a natural process that needs to be encouraged to bloom rather than stifled into a strait jacket of GCSE acceptability.

Not all exam boards have such extensive comment banks which must be applied throughout the answer. I mark GCSE English Literature for another smaller board who prefer the use of the ‘meaningful tick’. This means applying a tick icon for any credible point in the response with a summative comment at the end. This approach not only makes the answer easier to read and appreciate in its entirety rather than the sum of its parts, it also seems to allow the examiner more freedom of what to reward rather than having to search for the evidence to fit a comment.

Behind the insistence on this extensive and prescriptive annotation is the need to be able to justify the mark given if the school or the candidate decides to challenge it. Whilst transparency is to be applauded, the number of GCSE grades altered following a challenge last year was minimal. A tiny fraction dictating the way scripts are annotated and potentially influencing the way English Language is taught in thousands of schools. So not so much the tail wagging the dog as the fleas on the tail wagging the dog.

In the interests of promoting the effective teaching of writing at GCSE I think this is an itch we probably need to scratch.