The English Examining Boards: Their route from independence to government outsourcing agencies

217

Then, in a less widely publicised move, the guidelines which the Secondary Schools
Examinations Council (SSEC) had drawn up back in 1962 [cited in Figure 4.5]
setting out ''expectations for the proportion of candidates to be awarded each grade
in large entry GCE A level subjects” - ie the norms - were withdrawn.

A JMB initiative had been pressing for this change because of the extremely narrow
marks range allocated to the grade C band [See Figure 4.6] with the resulting
arbitrarily limited number of C grades awarded. Despite what seems this obvious
distortion of an expected ‘bell curve’ of results, it took until 1987 (Paterson 2003:
143) for the Secondary Examinations Council to alter the guidelines [See Figure 4.7]
Now the professionals knew that strict norm referencing no longer ruled, although at
the same time they were aware that the change would not be without difficulties. One
professional examiner summed up the high expectations the new form of assessment
had raised:

To implement criterion-referencing in large-scale examinations is
problematical, as the efforts to date show. No doubt there has been a cargo cult
mentality in evidence, believing that notions like grade-related criteria and
grade descriptions would overnight eradicate the bad practice and inequities
associated, sometimes unfairly and erroneously, with norm-referenced
examinations.

(Wood 1991: 9)

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