Marking against merit (1 Viewer)

thenothing

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This only goes for English based subjects, such as the obvious (English Standard, Advanced, and Extensions), Histories, Studies of Religion, etc.

Now that the HSC is over, and results are out, I, like many people have been doing a lot of reflection. Does anyone feel that sometimes they were marked not for their merit in assessments, but rather for who they were? ie, a teacher gets an impression that some students are smarter than others, and marks them accordingly.

I can see in some of my subjects my rank has affected my mark in a big way, for example, 37 for assessment in Extension 1 English, and 45 in the HSC. Same thing happened in History Extension. Same level of studying if that's what you're thinking ;)
 

adgala

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i'm sure most schools tell their students to write their student numbers instead of their names to make sure this sort of bias didn't occur, at least that what my school did.
 

Optophobia

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Yes it always occurs, it's not something that you can stop on the internal assessment, but on the external one, they have numbers instead of names.

Teachers will always have their pets and their grudges. It differs between teachers. Some teachers may assume you're stupid, some may assume you're unpopular or prejudiced. But it goes both ways.

In short... We live in a capitalist society. It will always happen, even at university with tutors.
 

forevaunited

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I definately know what your talking about. Its not like ive been adversely affected by this, or that i can conclusively say that this is what teachers do but i have my suspicions. Its not really much of an issue, as far as i can see, with essays because a lot of teachers claim that they do not look at the name on the paper before they mark it, but definately for oral reports and hand in assessments i believe this happens.

It kinda gets to the stage where, if a person has done extremely well in a subject for a long time receiving close to full marks, the teachers begin to think "why shouldn't he get full marks" rather than assessing whether they have earnt that mark.

hmmm didn't explain that very well but in response to the thread yeah i do believe that it does exist sometimes, but, that being said i would hate to be a marker in one of these subjective subjects . . . its tough work
 

karoooh

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adgala said:
i'm sure most schools tell their students to write their student numbers instead of their names to make sure this sort of bias didn't occur, at least that what my school did.
QFT

The only time a teacher would know which assessment belonged to which, was when we did our speech assessments.
 

sandz_2

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forevaunited said:
I definately know what your talking about. Its not like ive been adversely affected by this, or that i can conclusively say that this is what teachers do but i have my suspicions. Its not really much of an issue, as far as i can see, with essays because a lot of teachers claim that they do not look at the name on the paper before they mark it, but definately for oral reports and hand in assessments i believe this happens.

It kinda gets to the stage where, if a person has done extremely well in a subject for a long time receiving close to full marks, the teachers begin to think "why shouldn't he get full marks" rather than assessing whether they have earnt that mark.

hmmm didn't explain that very well but in response to the thread yeah i do believe that it does exist sometimes, but, that being said i would hate to be a marker in one of these subjective subjects . . . its tough work
wow this is so true! it happened to a few students to us this year as we kinda realised.. they would hand in assignments and consistently the student would get such a high mark.. although we did play along to see if it was actually working as 2 different girls [one that got top marks and the other had a poor reputation] handed in the EXACT essay, the girl with the higher marks essay was typed got 19/20 if i remember and the other girl hand wrote the essay and got 14/20.. just goes to show not every essay is read!
 

thenothing

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adgala said:
i'm sure most schools tell their students to write their student numbers instead of their names to make sure this sort of bias didn't occur, at least that what my school did.
We did that for the trials :)
 

sideshowtim

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this happens at my school and usually with the teachers pets. one kid, who was a teachers pet, did a presentation for ancient history and the guidelines stated that it had to be nothing over 10 minutes, he went on for about 20 minutes at the end of the lesson i heard the teacher say to him "don't worry about it, you won't get marked down". i doubt the same was done for the kids who don't do as well in ancient who did a 7 minute presentation.
 

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