School uniformity and failed exams
La Presse notes that summer day camps are pretty casual and the city doesn’t enforce any standards, this following from the near-drowning of a small boy on a day camp outing to Île Notre-Dame beach.
But then today there are stories about so many kids failing their provincial exams, which are definitely centrally controlled. Rigid, uniform organization doesn’t always work out so well in these matters either.
CBC radio had various students today saying they were stunned to find they had flunked exams on subjects in which they’d been doing well. Many kids are now having to do summer courses and retake their exams.
A change of curriculum is being blamed. But I challenge the government to show us the exam papers, both the French and the English ones, so we can compare them and see how accurately the English ones were translated from French.
Back when I did my provincial high school exams, there were several that were so poorly translated that all the results were “put on a bell curve” – bureaucratese for adjusting them upwards because parts of the exams were incomprehensible gibberish, and some multiple choice questions had no correct answer while others had more than one, and they didn’t want to admit it, but they knew it how bad it would look to flunk hundreds of kids the same year in the same subjects.
More than once since my high school years there has been news of provincial exams being bungled in this way. I wonder if these kids having to toil through their summer to retake exams have not been shafted because of linguistic blunders from the education ministry.
But now it’s easier to flunk a bunch of anglo students rather than admit your department can’t produce an exam paper that actually makes any sense. Show us the exam papers, Mme Courchesne.
Ephraim 19:01 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
The ministry or GRICS, who did the translating? Exams only? It takes years to get English language TAPS for a course.
jeather 19:33 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
Our school used to go around with copies of the French exams for on the fly translations as needed.
Kate 20:57 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
Excellent idea, jeather, but probably highly unofficial.
Ephraim, I don’t know what TAPS is. But even if a translating firm does the work, the education ministry is ultimately responsible for vetting their stuff.
Marc 21:35 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
Sadly it’s nothing new. In the early 90s entire classes had failed the sec. 4 and 5 math exams. I was among them. And everything was bell-curved, too.
jeather 22:06 on 2012/07/20 Permalink
Completely unofficial. Probably not actually allowed. Very helpful for the students. I remember it being an issue for one question in Sec IV history. We didn’t have to use the government math exams at that time, it was optional still for the math classes I was in, but I think it became mandatory the year or so later.
(The government math exams were way, way easier than the teacher-provided ones. The history one, not so much because it was such a different format than we had been used to.)
Bill Binns 09:47 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
With so many perfectly bilingual people here, I am always surprised at how truly horrible written translations are. The notices I get from my building management are barely understandable. They always begin with “Without prejudice” and always end with “Thank you for being provident”.
Kate 10:52 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
Very few people are “perfectly” bilingual. The problem you describe comes about when you get your texts translated into English by a francophone. Even someone who speaks English pretty well and can write functional English can still be far away from making a text sound natural in English.
I hasten to add that the exact same thing is true the other way, with the addition that French grammar is more ornate. So an anglo – even someone who works in French and gets around town quite happily with the French they speak – is likely to make multiple errors writing in French, messing up adjectival agreements and verb forms and forgetting whether à, dans or en should be used at various spots, as well as many more subtle mistakes. (So, I have to add, do many francophones, going by notes I’ve seen from people I’ve worked with.)
Nonetheless, in most cases, it’s best to get texts translated into a language by a native speaker of that language.
But – and here we come to your real answer – a lot of businesses don’t hire anglos, and government-funded ones the worst. They will stick to the principle that a francophone with paper qualifications saying they know English is “just as good as” a native English speaker. Which we know they can’t be, but a few errors in an English text sort of doesn’t matter, whereas an anglo making mistakes in French is insulting everybody. In any case, nobody is hiring anglos, let alone expecting them to translate into French.
And then hundreds of kids in an anglo school board flunk certain tests all at once. Let’s see those exam papers and find out if bad translation is the problem.
Ian 11:51 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
It’s not just the ministry of Education – I’m currently taking driving lessons in English and the presentation materials direct from the ministry of Transportation are full of basic grammar and spelling mistakes I wouldn’t expect from a high school student.
Jack 13:32 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
@ Kate I sat on both French and English tables for the Ministry (MELS) exams in History (412) and the new History & Citizenship course , the last time two years ago. The English translator actually sat at the table as the exams were vetted in French and was asked repeatedly if the nuance would be different in English, this was started about 15 years ago to avoid some of the documented translation problems for English speaking students.The ministry actually started a committee called the History-Geography Task force to address that specific issue.My dealing with MELS have been very positive in this regard.
Why more kids are flunking is a really easy question to answer? The Reform was based on students acquiring skill sets ( competencies ) that although hard to evaluate, would move us a way from a medieval teacher centered style of knowledge acquisition. Which is basically, I will teach you what is in my head, memorize it, spit it back out and forget it all in about 15 minutes after the test is written.When the initial tests were written the major push back was from……the private schools. These schools produce the elite of “so-so- solidaire” Quebec society, for gods sake even the three student union leaders are products of the private school system. They know that the social reproduction that they are paid to continue is based on an academic model that they have been producing for centuries.Any spin from that will be met with heavy opposition, hence the politicians came up with “The Progression of Learning” which for all intents and purposes was to get content writ large back into the evaluation.I saw the June exam in Sec.IV H & C, ………the private schools won, again.
Ephraim 14:27 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
TAPS – Table de Planifications et Specifications, I think. Basically it is the course outline given to teachers that tell them what they have to teach (not how), what is part of the curriculum and what is tested and how. For example, it might specify that a student needs to know how to multiply numbers with two digits. For the exam they will be given 10 different mathematical problems with two digit numbers to multiply and they need to get 8 of the 10 correctly. GRICS is a firm hired by the ministry to fulfill certain mandates including BIM, the database of standard exams (Banque d’instruments de mesure).
We do happen to have one of the largest education systems per capita in the world! It’s one of the Quebec’s pork barrels. It could be pared by half and still no one would notice.
Kate 18:42 on 2012/07/21 Permalink
Jack, thanks for explaining that. So at this stage it’s more likely to be true that the exams are out of step with what and how the kids are learning, rather than it being the translation bugs we’ve seen in the past? Very interesting – and harder to fix, if it’s a question of philosophical difference.
Ephraim, also thanks for explaining that.