- #1
MrDocat
- 26
- 0
My country is implementing an unified TAS-like exam. All of our best universities use it as the sole criterion for admission of new students. It happens yearly and had more than 6 million participants this year. It is by far the most important exam of a student's life.
Half of the exam is graded automatically by computers (IRT). The problem lies on the other half, the essay, which is graded by a human. We found out they can't grade that many exams using the same standards, because very good students / professors are scoring less than semi-illiterate people. **Someone wrote the anthem of a soccer team as his essay and got 500/1000, while my professor who wrote a perfect essay got 420**. Here's the scan of the anthem essay for proof: http://i.imgur.com/UJUcqLB.jpg . There are more proofs and countless cases like that.
So the result is half of the score is essentially random! And as that exam is the only criterium for admission in all colleges (no interview, no history, nothing - they just use that grade), our places are being filled randomly!
Please notice the scale of the problem. There are already 40000+ students in a Facebook group debating the issue. We went to the streets, made videos, went to the justice and got media coverage, that's still a small portion of the 6000000+ who participated and the government simply ignores us. Most of that million don't know what's going on and think they failed / got miraculous results because they deserved!
It's a very sad moment for our education. A teenager can't chose his career anymore. I've personally seen several friends who studied for years dreaming of engineering crying for the first time. I've also seen people who spent the high school partying and getting straight F's, now being presented with places on Medicine and Engineering schools!
We're out of ideas and hope. **Please, help us!** What can we do?
Half of the exam is graded automatically by computers (IRT). The problem lies on the other half, the essay, which is graded by a human. We found out they can't grade that many exams using the same standards, because very good students / professors are scoring less than semi-illiterate people. **Someone wrote the anthem of a soccer team as his essay and got 500/1000, while my professor who wrote a perfect essay got 420**. Here's the scan of the anthem essay for proof: http://i.imgur.com/UJUcqLB.jpg . There are more proofs and countless cases like that.
So the result is half of the score is essentially random! And as that exam is the only criterium for admission in all colleges (no interview, no history, nothing - they just use that grade), our places are being filled randomly!
Please notice the scale of the problem. There are already 40000+ students in a Facebook group debating the issue. We went to the streets, made videos, went to the justice and got media coverage, that's still a small portion of the 6000000+ who participated and the government simply ignores us. Most of that million don't know what's going on and think they failed / got miraculous results because they deserved!
It's a very sad moment for our education. A teenager can't chose his career anymore. I've personally seen several friends who studied for years dreaming of engineering crying for the first time. I've also seen people who spent the high school partying and getting straight F's, now being presented with places on Medicine and Engineering schools!
We're out of ideas and hope. **Please, help us!** What can we do?
