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Mauritius: errors and anomalies in the cpe mathematics paper
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L'Express (Port Louis)
8 November 2007
Posted to the web 8 November 2007
Port Louis
CPE candidates of Emmanuel Anquetil Government school after the second day of the exams on 23rd October 2007.
I have recently seen a number of articles in the press in which reference has been made to some anomalies in the CPE paper. I understand that our teachers' union has made representations to the MES regarding (among other things) question 54 of the CPE Maths paper. This question has been described as being "particularly difficult". The various parties are clearly missing the whole point.
It is not that the problem is particularly difficult. It is simply that the question has been WRONGLY SET. Full stop. The fact is that the pie chart diagram is wrongly labelled. It is blatantly wrong. The various sectors of the pie chart have been wrongly labelled in terms of 'rupees' whereas in fact they should have been labelled as 'number of people spending this sum', or that sum, and so on.
Of course once you have figured out, consciously or unconsciously, that the examiner's labelling is wrong, then the solution becomes very simple. Almost trivial. So the difficulty does not lie in the solution but in having to guess what the examiner had in mind and was unable to put down properly on paper. A look at past question papers reveals that where pie chart sectors are concerned, qualities such as students' preferences for various colours or fruits, etc then it did not pose any serious problems. But when quantities such as rupees are mentioned, then confusion with other quantities such as number of people, is all too easy to occur, and the examiner then cannot afford to be loose or careless in his wording or labelling.
Losing marks twice in a competitive exam
Obviously, once you know the solution, you are quite unable to see the mistake or to appreciate the difficulty that the child would have faced in an exam situation. Furthermore, the existence of a perfectly feasible mathematical solution does not in any way diminish the fact that the question is wrongly set.
True, some students would have hit upon the correct idea but future statistics will no doubt reveal that a large majority of students will have got stuck on this problem. This is not the fault of the teachers. They have not failed in their duty towards the students.
In this case, it is the examiners who have failed in their work. The director of the MES and the chief examiner should in such circumstances do the correct and decent thing. The question should be scrapped as one should not expect 11-year olds to make (or be able to make) allowances for the examiner's own shortcomings. The 8 marks allocated to the question should be redistributed over the remaining 4 questions of the same section B. After realising that such a serious mistake had escaped the vetting process, I decided to scrutinise the rest of the CPE papers as well. Fortunately for the students, there does not appear, as far as I can see, any other errors as such - although there may well be one or two anomalies.
For instance, in the French paper, Question 6 carries 10 marks for five items(2 marks per item). But item 1 and item 5 are testing exactly the same body of knowledge. Thus if a student does not know this item, he will lose marks twice over for essentially the same mistake.
This is an anomaly, which has again escaped the vetting process. Losing 4 marks instead of 2 is a very serious matter in a competitive exam. It can make the difference between a pass or a fail, or an A or A+ with the consequent admission to a national college or not.
I hope that the relevant authorities deal with the above issues urgently as I understand that the marking process begins very shortly. Moreover, the MES may consider issuing a communiqué to that effect.
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A teacher
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