It’s not entirely clear why anyone is surprised today by poor results on a test that was implemented in response to the concern that English proficiency of Fiji’s teachers was weak. Indeed, as the Permanent Secretary is quoted as saying a few lines below the headline of English test shock, “It proves what we have suspected all along”.
What is slightly more of a surprise is that the Ministry didn’t think this through. It set a pre-determined pass mark, with a pre-determined consequence (fail and you can’t come in), without having a back-up plan in place to help fill the positions that would inevitably be left vacant, and even serving teachers may now need to pass the test in order to keep their jobs. Well, there is a back-up plan that you can try again this Saturday, but you will then need to think about a different career if you fail for the second time. If teachers do markedly better on the re-test, one week later and with no interim support, it will suggest that they either failed the first test due to lack of familiarity with the testing format (rendering the test invalid), or passed the re-test due to circumstances that altered the odds somehow - such as an exact repeat of the same test items, or an easier version of the test. It would have been more sensible to use a band score system (such as IELTS in which you can score between Band 1 and Band 9 in each skill, but you cannot fail, leaving institutions such as universities and immigration authorities free to determine which bands make the cut). With this type of system, the Ministry of Education could have ascertained the extent of the issue before making rash decisions, excluded those scoring the really low bands, and then put together a strategy for ensuring that they wouldn’t have to keep accepting those with lower-than-desirable bands in the medium to long term. As it is, they’ve slightly shot themselves in the foot, because they’ve announced to the nation (and the region at large, who still seem to look up to Fiji as the beacon of educational progress, if many comments on social media are to be believed) that approximately 50% of new teaching posts will not be filled unless enough candidates pass the second time. What are they going to do if they don’t? Leave the classrooms understaffed or go back on their word and let the teachers in anyway? Meanwhile, none of us really know what ‘failure’ means on this particular test, so the general public is not necessarily any the wiser now than we were when the media was merely reporting that standards were falling. We know nothing about the predictive validity of the test - i.e. whether an ability to do well on the test items translates into an ability to teach English well. This does not necessarily refute the general impressions reported about the recent test. It’s just that these media reports remain just that - general impressions that reinforce what we were fairly sure we knew already.
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March 2019
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