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Cambridge Assessment exams CHAOS: Computing students' work may be BINNED

Don Jefe

The flaw(s) in continuous assessments can only be fixed by ditching continuous assessment. The 'memory skills' argument is incredibly stupid and, hilariously, perfectly highlights a substantial component in the failure of continuous assessment: Continuous assessment takes critical thinking round back and shoots it in the face.

Unless you're in a wholly unstructured disclipline, like contemporary mixed media art, every skill you use is based on your memory of the principles of the skill and how you apply those memories. Everything, if you don't have it memorized it isn't learned. That shouldn't be difficult to understand, but, you know, continuous assessment. The heavily weighted exam teaches you those principles then piles more stuff on top, forcing you to either actually learn the principles involved or spend time looking back through previous material trying to recall where you think you saw it before.

Continuous assessment doesn't give you a reason to learn principles. You are shown how to solve simple problems in isolated scenarios, not how to take various parts of foundation elements and mix them up to solve a problem. Continuous assessment is training, it is not educating. You leave school and enter the workforce ignorant of the core of your disclipline and trained in how to perform a task, not solve problems. That's great for people who are content as mindless drones, but it's absolutely terrible for advancing much of anything, including your career.

The fact of the matter is that continuous assessment training is creating legions of interchangeable drones that aren't capable of much of anything. It's unfair to the trainee, but I'm not going to pay Engineer wages for people who can't think and have no idea why things work. If you come to me with post graduate credentials and can't do corporate accounting, conn a ship, build a bridge, express creativity, plan an invasion, communicate clearly and sell yourself on ability, not your training, I'm going to pay you teenager wages because that's all your worth.

If I've got to have four people to replace one with a proper education I'm not going to be the one losing money. I'll just keep doing what I've been doing, going to South America, Asia and the Middle East to find proper engineers. And that's where continuous assessment is fucking you lot. Countries that haven't bought into the mass production of ignorant drones still turn out classically educated undergraduates who are worthwhile to hire. That's not going to change, they're exporting good education and that's what I need and that's what I'm going to have. So it's either start pushing back, don't be scared of pushing kids to learn and perform under pressure and get off your ponies, you don't know shit beyond what you were trained in, and it's sad.

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