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.