How to Graduate Better Writers

Every year, students who earn high marks on provincial exams go on to fail first-year university courses.

The year I graduated from Esquimalt High School, for example, seven or eight students in my class scored 100% on their final Math 92 exams. Our teacher was famous for such results. One of my friends, who had achieved one of the perfect papers and who took Math 120 at UVic in the same section I did, failed that course.

The reason for this reversal of fortune, I now understand, is that we didn't actually know very much math at all; what we knew really well was how to write the math exam.

This phenomenon demonstrates one of the fundamental laws of unintended educational consequences: it doesn't matter what a course is supposed to be about because the exam inevitably determines the agenda. That law is more usually expressed in educational circles as, "What's tested, counts."

Exam sets agenda

Over the last 20 years since provincial exams were reinstituted, I've prepared hundreds of students to write the English 12 provincial exam. English is more difficult than mathematics to reduce to a finite set of problems, but the law of unintended consequences applies. All too often, the exam sets the agenda.

Every exam period (like the one that starts Monday, February 6), the ministry publishes a disclaimer like the following one (this one taken from the English 10 exam specifications): "It is expected that there will be a difference between school marks and provincial examination marks for individual students. Some students perform better on classroom tests and others on provincial examinations. School assessment measures performance on all curricular outcomes; whereas provincial examinations may only evaluate performance on a sample of these outcomes."

The ministry is being disingenuous. Its bureaucrats must know that disclaimer is largely fiction.

There is a lot of pressure, actual or implied, on teachers of examinable English courses to teach to the exam. Students and their parents understand that access to further education may be limited by a poor result. Clever students need high marks for scholarships. English teachers are chronically overworked and it's a useful shortcut for them to teach to the exam. The ministry may downplay the difference between exam and class results, but every principal in the province knows whose students "examine" well, and whose don't. The Fraser Institute even ranks schools, largely based on exam statistics, and their findings are widely disseminated - and believed.

Light on skills

Teachers aren't stupid; they understand the connection between exam results and their reputations. So most of them make sure their students perform, and for increasing numbers of them, if that means teaching only what the exam requires, that's a price they pay.

Stephen Hume, columnist, author, and now UVic lecturer, recently put his finger right on the issue. He was interviewed in the UVic student paper, The Martlet, saying that there's a gap between what high schools say they are teaching, and what's actually being taught. Students arrive at university without the skills or knowledge they need to fulfill the course requirements, and one of these gaps is writing. Hume says, "The provincial exam is no bridge. Students should be writing for at least four years, not just the four months preceding the provincial."

One need only look at the English 12 exam specifications to see why there's a problem. In addition to the multiple-choice questions (27 percent of the exam) the exam requires one short paragraph of 125-150 words and two "essays" of 300 words each.

For far too many high school students, that's the extent of the writing part of their English program. That's what they're prepared for. No wonder Hume senses a disconnect between the high school experiences of some of his students and university-level expectations! In most first year English courses, students must write essays of several thousand words, using research. What's worse, many of his students will have done well on their exams, and will be under the consequent impression that they're quite good at English. They'll feel completely unprepared for the length and quality of paper Hume and his fellow instructors are likely to assume as standard.

Well, we'd better brace ourselves. The situation is about to worsen.

It used to be that many secondary English teachers didn't feel particularly constrained by the exam unless they were dealing with Grade 12s. However, last year, a provincial English exam was introduced into Grade 10. I predict the rot will advance rapidly, even into middle school. Talk about unintended consequences!

It may appear as if I'm arguing against having a provincial exam in English, but I'm not. I thought the English 12 exam was good and fair when it was reintroduced in 1986, and, although it's more limited today, it's still fine for what it measures. It just doesn't measure very much.

What to do

So I have three suggestions, all of which would be relatively simple to implement.

First, bring back the scholarship exam in English 12, which is an additional, optional exam. The present exam doesn't reward the high flyers; it only rewards students who can write error-free, 300 word, three-paragraph essays. The scholarship exam used to consist of one essay, written over an hour. That encouraged teachers to have their students practice longer, more creative essays. So they did.

Second, next year, every graduating student will need to produce a graduating portfolio. If one of the required portfolio elements for academic high school graduation were an essay of at least 1000 words, students would demand to be taught how to write a longer essay and it would be done.

Lastly, most universities and colleges already require an English placement exam (LPI: Language Proficiency Index) to be written by incoming students. It would be a relatively small matter to increase the length of the required essay and to make the exam a threshold exam, so that students who could not write a reasonable essay of at least 500 words were denied admission until they could. That would definitely change some high school teaching for the better.

In the interest of student writing, it's time to reclaim control of the agenda.

Justus Havelaar is a writer and newly-retired English teacher who lives in Campbell River.