Policy, Latent Error and Systemic Examination Failures

Policy, Latent Error and Systemic Examination Failures - Politicians and civil servants are very much involved in examination developments in many countries. Policy development and implementation is notoriously difficult to unpick in terms of decision-making, roles and responsibilities. Nonetheless, three systemic examination failures are used to illustrate the problems caused by the policy context – in Scotland 2000, New Zealand 2004 and England 2008. Taking these cases and the literature together, it is argued that features of the policy environment conspire to generate latent errors: 1) evolving policy and competing perspectives; 2) lack of role clarity and diffusion of responsibility and 3) timeframe slippage. Human error theory indicates that to try to reduce errors we must understand their fundamental causes and that these usually run deeper than the first stories that are told. Understanding the full reasons for particular systemic examination errors is difficult because politics is slippery, and many perspectives have to be sifted.

Keywords: Assessment, system, management, politics, policy

• On different paradigms of educational assessment: Implications for the relationships with learning and teaching Jo-Anne Baird, in Vernon Wall Lecture /2017 pp.4
  DOI: 10.53841/bpsvern.2017.1.37.4
• ‘Maybe I'm not as good as I think I am.’ How qualification users interpret their examination results Suzanne Chamberlain, in Educational Research /2012 pp.39
  DOI: 10.1080/00131881.2012.658198
• The meaning of curriculum-related examination standards in Scotland and England: a home–international comparison Jo-Anne Baird, Lena Gray, in Oxford Review of Education /2016 pp.266
  DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2016.1184866

Jo-Anne Baird, Adrian Coxell, Policy, Latent Error and Systemic Examination Failures in "CADMO" 2/2009, pp 105-122, DOI: 10.3280/CAD2009-002011