OxBowBusiness

Buy the book then buy the t-shirt?

Buy the book then buy the t-shirt?

Some Business Studies teachers seem to think I have a hatred of Ian Marcouse

Well, I don’t.

Ian Marcouse  was AQA Chief Examiner from 1994-2004. That’s the exam board where – as newspaper articles tell us – there was ‘cause for concern’ about the standards and, more recently, I have shown you can pass easily after a day of tuition.

Naturally Marcouse would reject my claims about falling standards – at least I assume so. After all if as subject is easy then why buy all the textbooks him has written and other products he produces?

But, I stray from the point.

This blog entry is about ETHICS. Not Marcouse’s ethics or even those of the EBEA (Marcouse is Chair of the EBEA) so I’ll leave aside how the EBEA journal printed my review of a book which systematically showed how the book was rubbish – and then the journal printed an apology to the publisher and banned me from reviewing!

No, as I said, I’ll leave that aside.

I’ll also not mention the post to the EBEA discussion group by Geoff Riley of tutor2u where he called me a liar – even though I was not a member of the group (having previously been banned for calling someone else a liar).

No, I’ll leave that aside. (Riley was shown to be wrong but of course no apology came and neither did any form of censure.)

This is about ethics of exam boards.

In particular about their email support service

Now, you might say that it was commendable that Edexcel (like Oxbow) offer something for free – but they don’t.

And that’s the problem.

This is what you get:

1. Highly topical business case material


2. GCSE classroom activities and worksheets


3. Monthly updates from Senior Examiners and Moderators


4. Fully up-to-date Scheme of Work with references to useful materials to support your teaching (from September 2005)


5. Monthly message board, listing training events and student conferences


6. Reviews of new text books and classroom materials

Source: www.edexcel.org.uk

All very good – others such as tutor2u provide a similar service – more expensive and without the reviews, but it may be better.

That seems to be fine. Tutor2u are independent – there is no feeling that you ‘have’ to buy this product as it’s directly for your exam.

But there is a perception that this is the case for Edexcel.

Edexcel, for example, refuse to answer any queries about the GCSE syllabus unless you can give a centre number – which if you’re freelance, then obviously you cannot. So clearly they’re not the most helpful of organisations.

Certainly Edexhell were not too impressed.

And now they’re selling via Marcouse, an email support service.

There used to be a joke that AQA worked for Marcouse, not the other way round. I remember a few years ago AQA were telephoned and asked about conferences in general. They plugged various conferences but warned people off conferences ’run by Oxford School of Learning, especially by Mr Sivewright.’

I know they said that because they said it to me – having forgotten to ask the name of the caller!

I guess I still support the Cone-Campaign stance over all this – exam boards should examine only  - and they should all merge as one.

We want to educate, NOT steer pupils through hoops closely defined by first the syllabus, then the Chief Examiner’s book and then pay more for the email support service.

How long before we buy Edexcel pens as the ‘essential aid to writing smoothly in exams’?

Buy the exam – not the t-shirt!

posted by Duncan Williamson @ 4:00 PM