Wednesday 2 June 2021

They seek it here, they seek it there...

The examination boards purport to offer a service, in setting and marking exams and awarding grades, however, in reality, all they are doing is rent-seeking, monetising their grade-awarding powers. This has been highlighted by the decision of the government that children "should not sit exams" in academic year 20/21 and that the grades should be awarded on coursework. However, the only way the exam boards can assess children on their coursework is to look at the results of, er, exams, except these are tests set by the educational establishments themselves, not the exam board. Despite the fact that the exam boards now have to do almost no work prior to awarding grades in GCSEs and A levels, their charges remain the same.

4 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Are they big Tory donors?

Bayard said...

It certainly wouldn't surprise me if they were.

Bayard said...

I suppose all certifications are "land", in this respect. A good example is the Soil Association. Started as a charity to oppose intensive and support organic farming, it now has a subsidiary, Soil Association Certification Ltd, described in Wikipedia as "a not-for-profit subsidiary of the Soil Association charity, independently providing organic certification services and advisory support on all aspects of organic certification. SACL is one of the organic certification bodies in the UK,[24] approved by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs." All these "organic certification bodies" do is extract a yearly fee from farmers for the ability to call their produce "organic".

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, yes, most government licences, permits, approvals etc are "land".