bad education drives out good
Gresham's Law states that "bad money drives out good". Something similar holds, though not for quite the same reasons, in our education system. Each examination board wants as many schools as possible to use it. (All hail Competition!) Each school wants its examination results to be as good as possible. (Yay for league tables!) And so ...
At a certain local secondary school, which I shall not name because I understand all the others are equally corrupt, pupils' mathematics grades are determined partly by "coursework". It's supposed to be investigative and open-ended. The school chooses what they pupils will be asked to do for their coursework. Immediately before they start work on it, they work with their teachers to produce a model submission for a different coursework exercise, one that a really good pupil might have produced on her own.
So far, so good. But the collaborative model answer is for a coursework exercise almost identical to the real one. So the pupils' contribution is this: they copy out what their teachers have led them to, and make a few superficial changes in the formulae.
This is not education. It is not assessment. It is bullshit. It is corruption. And it is a perfect example of why running a national public service as a set of competing individualized concerns is stupid.
Updated 2006-01-05: I'd said that the teacher just gives them a model solution; it isn't quite that bad.