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An early indication of this appeal in England emerged with moves toward a single
examination at 16-plus: “Л major feature of the proposed single system of examining
at 16+ is the requirement for national criteria” (Orr 1983: 7). The phrase introduced
in 1980 by Mark Carlisle as Secretary of State for Education was the notion of ‘grade-
related criteria’. Once again, as with the two previous instances of major examination
reform in 1918 and 1944, the task of drafting the national criteria (which would
ultimately be agreed and applied by the Secondary Examinations Council) was
given...to the GCE and CSE boards jointly. A letter from the DES to all Boards
(dated 28 February 1980) inviting them to undertake this task included the following
suggestion in relation to grades:
‘Consideration should also be given to the possibility of incorporating (in the
national criteria) some elements of criterion-referencing of grades, or some
grades in the 7 point scale.
This might... go some way to free the award of grades from statistical norms, if
quality or performance changes over time. (Quoted in Orr 1983: 7)
Ignoring the irony which hindsight might detect in the “z/” in the final sentence, it is
the case that the seed sown in that 1980 letter grew to produce a fundamental
confusion that contributed in no small way to the crisis of 2002. This occurred despite
the clear awareness of assessment experts like Desmond Nuttall, in 1983 a researcher
at the Schools Council, that “Zn practice, grading of public examinations relies on
both norm-referenced and criteria-based considerations” (Orr 1983: 13). Despite this
expert insight, others had strong motives for endorsing the apparent desirability of a
criterion-referenced system. Orr and Nuttall attributed the growing interest in criterion
referencing to:
...the desire, mainly among politicians, to achieve greater comparability (a)
between examining boards (b) between alternative syllabuses ...in the same
subject (c) between years and (d) between subjects. The pressure to maintain
comparability in all these aspects arises principally from a desire to maximize
fairness in the competition between individuals with different qualifications.