UK Computer Cheats

As a final comment on computing in UK schools Ofqual has cancelled mid-year all non-examination coding assessments from all 1-9 GCSEs due to wide-spread cheating by teachers and students in the, now legacy, ‘easier’ exams taken this summer.

Yes cheating was and is widespread in GCSE coursework generally; teachers have become corrupt as a result of, amongst other things, having their pay linked to their GCSE grades through their annual performance ratings. Computing teachers simply barely exist at all and press-ganged ICT teachers make as much use of the online forums containing the answers as the kids do ( as Ofqual found out from the IP addresses).

Unfortunately for computing it is almost impossible to assess coding skills through written exam papers, hence all except the IGCSE have programming coursework … or rather did have coursework. All coders I know, code with one screen web-linked  open on StackOverflow, another on the docs and one on an IDE(integrated development environment) to format and debug as you go. None, as far as I know, do it all with pencil and paper like I did with punch cards in the past.

I moved my computing classes in 2016 to the IGCSE (International GCSE) run by Cambridge board. No course-work and deadly dull but we saw a lot of this coming. The sheer difficulty of the new ‘hard’ 1-9 syllabuses put us off, god knows what the ICT teachers thought. The assessments I saw were obscure and difficult. It is blindingly obvious that this level of challenge will produce almost universal cheating.

Put yourself in this position:

you have been teaching ICT successfully for years leveraging your MS Excel skills ( the envy of your colleagues indeed) and still keen enough to attend a three days of Python training to upskill into the coding world;

you work in an bully-boy Academy/Independent school with a ‘no one fails here’ *ethos teaching Y11;

your increase to the higher tiers of pay depends on your performance ( ie the grades);

the GCSE suddenly gets a lot harder.

Enough said.

The UK gov has said in its budget this Autumn that it will recruit 8000 new computing teachers … good luck with that. I’ll say it for the third and mercifully final time, (I retire this year) … computing in schools is finished. Ofqual delivered the coup de grace this week.

UK School Computing is terminal (official)

It’s official UK school computing is dying before it could even toddle.

The Royal Society reports this week:

• Across the UK,  11% of students in England took GCSE computer science
• 20% were female and the figure fell to 10% at A-level

Anyone who reads my blogs will know that I have been warning for some time that Computer Science is going to fail to establish itself as a subject in schools. There are three problems encapsulated in the bullet points above but for the time being I’ll let those points just hang there to be fully absorbed in all their bleakness.

At the school I teach we offer Computer Science at GCSE and A level and introduce it in Y6. There are two of us in the department both of whom can code to professional/hobbyist level in two languages.   Girls make up our very best students from Y6 but fail to opt to do it for GCSE (see above); forty years separates me from my colleague;  I will retire this year and my colleague from Eastern Europe will leave after Brexit.

We struggle to work out exactly what the exam boards want for their wildly varying syllabuses and our subject is the most expensive in the school due to the small number taking the subject compared with Geography or History for example.

I write the anecdote above because it explains everything. There are vanishingly few UK teachers between 30 and 60 years old; there is little to no substantial training for existing teachers to fill that gap; the subject appeals to those with the geek mindest which means a small uptake and a shortage of girls and finally this means it’s expensive - schools are short of money by the way.

That’s it folks, stop the hand wringing, none of  the above will be solved anytime soon.Even if you inject loads of cash we’ll just buy toys with it and the training courses will simply prove to the trainees that this is not for them.

And if you (misguidedly) make it ‘girl friendly’ you’ll patronise both women and the subject with pink-eco-friendly-code ... even ‘relational’ databases are so yesterday.

The computer-trained Euros are going home and the ZX80 generation are dying off. Just get over it and think afresh.

There is a solution, and computing should lead the way. UK is a third world country wrt teaching computing so we need third world tech solutions. All schools have broadband and whiteboard. The exam boards themselves should directly employ teachers  to deliver lessons to any signed up school in the 4pm to 5pm slot: done. Google classroom will provide the glue but what about ‘marking’? I hear you say. Don’t be daft, do you want to get rid of the teachers over again? .