[etni] Results of Modular Bagrut Exam

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At the risk of repeating what others have said, I would like to make some 
comments about this year's Modular Bagrut exam and the less than satisfactory 
results received by  many 11th grade English Speakers :
1.  Those taking the Bagrut exam in the 11th grade are presumably the most 
proficient English language learners in this country; that is precisely why 
they have been given the "privilege" of taking the exam early (a dubious 
privilege, 
as it turns out).     If so many of these pupils received grades 10, 20 points 
lower than 12th graders, who we can assume as a group are inferior to them in 
language ability, then there are three possible conclusions:

1)  our English Speakers are not as good as we thought they were, despite the 
       grades of 90+  that their teachers gave them.   That is, we don't know 
our pupils and in the 
        test the bitter truth came out "at last."       
2)   their teachers are lousy and/or didn't do their job properly (we are 
talking about some
  of the most capable and experienced teachers in the country here).    
3)  the test was not valid.     According to the Chozer Mankal only pupils 
whose teachers  deem them capable of  achieving a 90  should be doing the 
Bagrut in 11th grade.  Does the fact that  so many pupils got grades lower than 
90 show that for two years  they managed  to pull the wool over the teacher's 
eyes?   I doubt it.   These   pupils by  every yardstick  SHOULD have been 
getting 90s - certainly not 60s and 70s, which is what many teachers have 
reported  - and if they didn't the test did not test what  it was supposed  to  
test:  English language proficiency.    


 I remember writing here several months ago that I didn't understand why the 
11th grade English Speaker teachers were so anxious about the new Bagrut 
because they were English Speakers, after all, and how different would the exam 
be from recent Bagruts anyway,  which were already looking pretty different 
from Bagruts of two, three years ago?   I was wrong.   This test was 
substantively different and not enough time or materials (one mock exam wasn't 
enough) were given to prepare pupils for it.   The teachers I know did a 
stupendous job with the resources at their disposal but one year wasn't enough 
to internalize, even to UNDERSTAND, what the new Bagrut was all about.  There 
was an unfair expectation that since they're English Speakers, they'll manage, 
they'll do fine.    All of this, together with the fact that this was a new 
type of test, unchartered territory, as it were,   put the 11th graders at an 
unfair disadvantage.   They should have been compensated for this; they should 
definitely have received a "factor."    

2.  There should be several more questions on various levels,  as Sharon Tzur 
pointed out,  with fewer points for                 each.    Increase the 
duration of each module from 1 1/4 hours to 1 3/4 hours, like in Math, which is 
also                     modular.  In order that we don't have to be at school 
until 2:00 AM, make the English Bagrut in the morning,                 like  in 
Math!    

3. While the Inspectorate has put a great deal of time and energy in preparing 
teachers for the NBA, the 
     courses that have been given have dealt exclusively with project work and 
not at all on how to
      prepare pupils for the actual Bagrut:     helping us to teach our pupils 
how to approach questions that 
      require a very high level of conceptualization and really make them think 
 (if this can be done is                              another question...)    
The new Bagrut exam itself was just kind of ignored and expected to take care 
of                         itself.     I suppose the assumption was that the 
research pupils did  for their projects, plus all the extensive reading the 
pupils did (?),  would have a backwash effect and the pupils would just kind of 
 naturally become  better readers.    This obviously hasn't happened, at least 
not yet, and if it hasn't happened with the best students of English I doubt 
it's happened with the rest.     I strongly recommend  reducing the emphasis on 
project work in future NBA courses and spend at least some time on  training 
teachers in the actual Bagrut, which has a lot more bearing on the pupil's 
final grade than the project  does.    

4.   As a marker, I felt more strongly this year than ever before that when 
grading an unseen I am taking off too        many points for aspects of 
language other than  reading comprehension itself.     By the time you've taken 
off 3 points for grammar, 1 point for spelling, 1 point for extraneous 
information , the pupil has lost 
 half the points at least and you KNOW s/he understood the text!   I really 
like many of these questions                   which challenge the pupils and 
make them think.   But  sometimes I wonder if there should
not be more multiple choice questions on the unseens, like on the TOEFL or the 
psychometric exam.
Test vocabulary, spelling, grammar, in the writing activities and make sure 
that the reading comprehension, 
oops, sorry, access-to-information-from-written-texts section, really does test 
reading comprehension.
                  

 I only hope that the English Speakers who took Moed Bet do better this time.   
The questions were as
 hard as Moed Aleph - some even more so! - but seemed fairer, less ambiguous.   
  Let's hope for                                 the best!     I also hope some 
of what we've written the last  few weeks will be taken into consideration for 
the sake not only of next year's 11th grade English  Speakers but our poor 
"regular" 12th graders.   If they have to take an exam like this year's,       
oy... I don't want to think about it................                      

                Regards,  Maxine Tsvaigrach           


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