Eleven Plus Appeals

I tried to find a link to `Scaling of Teachers’ Marks and Estimates’ by McIntosh, Walker and McKay. Amazon, of course, had one. In fact Amazon had four second hand copies, this morning, marked at the princely sum of 1p each!

The article, written in 1962, described how teacher’s marks were used to establish an order of merit within a school. When would you use this information? Suppose your child just misses out on passing the eleven plus. You go to your teacher at school and ask for help. Your teacher maintains that your child should have passed and can-not think why your child did not pass.

You know that others in school did pass – so why did your poor child fail?

Your child’s teacher is not sure.

You then ask for the scaling of the marks in the class. You explain that you want your child’s marks moderated by the teacher so that his or her marks can be compared with the ranking achieved by other children in the actual eleven plus examination.

Suppose that your teacher ranks your child higher than others who did pass – then you may have gathered some useful intelligence.

There is a slight problem with this method – you need the mean or the average of the others in the school who did pass. Will the school offer this information or will you need to go cap in hand to the parents of the successful parents? Do they actually know their child’s scores?

Now it is clear that asking the school and other parents for help may pose problems. You could even be experimenting because the appeal board may not recognise your findings. Surely, however, the feelings of your child’s class teacher should be considered?

A little more research may be needed before the eleven plus boards use scaling by class teachers as a useful tool in determining the success or otherwise of children in the `Need to Appeal’ zone.