Assessment

In the assessment process of most of the Boards, there is a strong emphasis on calculation and plotting charts and graphs. This appeared to be a repetition of skills that should have been adequately tested at GCSE level. There are minimal demands on candidates to interpret or comment on the results of their calculations, and evidence from examiners’ reports that these skills are not being developed. (The OCEAC AS-level Statistics was the exception in that it had a compulsory comprehension question concerning a given set of data. NEAB statistics papers and examiners’ reports were not available for consideration.) In general, the weighting of marks for different parts of answers, however, makes it clear that the examiners themselves are sending the wrong signals to teachers and students. The AEB and OCEAC boards tended to employ more imaginative and plausible contexts, but with so little emphasis on application and interpretation it makes little difference to the candidates whether the context is real or not. Lack of choice of questions in the shorter examinations associated with modular courses should at least encourage candidates to revise the whole syllabus. The Boards are slow to respond to new technologies. They do not ban the use of calculators, which turns the questions that they set into trivial exercises. Rather than using the opportunity to examine other more relevant aspects of statistics, however, they insist on candidates showing the steps in their working (i.e. ‘method’ marks go for hand calculation).