Louise Roberts: HSC spelling decision a worry for educational standards

At times it seems like the number one goal of the education bureaucracy is to make our children stupid, writes Louise Roberts.

Shood it bee a suprise that this genaration of HSC studints will leef skool confadent that being abel to spell correctly is not inportant for career suxxess?

After all, the sentence above, littered as it is with errors, would be perfectly acceptable if I were a graduating HSC candidate and somehow otherwise demonstrated a sound understanding of the set text I was writing about.

Revelations that students are not being penalised for spelling errors in HSC English exams not only strikes fear in me as a parent but also forecasts a worrying trend in our disintegrating educational standards.

And that’s before we factor in our woeful global ratings in science, maths and languages. You know, the STEM and similar rankings issued annually that have our kids circling the drain.

Let me be clear that I am not sticking the boot into teachers.

Revelations students are not being penalised for spelling errors forecasts a worrying trend in our disintegrating educational standards.

God knows they are trying to fertilise and expand the minds of our children with two hands behind their backs - helicopter parents tugging on one and woke educators twisting the other.

Rather my ire is directed at the teachers’ unions and bureaucrats who, despite parents, employers, and the community calling out for better-educated students, have deigned that spelling doesn’t matter.

It’s only the latest appalling example of the state of our kids’ education: Basic civics going unlearned, HSC responses being marked down by politically correct markers, and so on.

How on earth have we got to a fuzzy comfort zone with Year 12 exams that correct spelling is not a critical marking factor?

Even the message with NAPLAN is that spelling does matter so why the inexorable slide towards mediocrity by the end of high school?

So a half-baked calculation for HSC maths or a few erroneous decimal points will eventually also matter not in the marking process?

As parents we surely have to wonder where the state government is on all of this: Under Bob Carr’s Labor government, NSW held the line against educational faddism.

Under ten years of Coalition government, they’ve let the low-standards trendies run the show. With predictably disastrous results. Of course.

2020 was an insanely disruptive year for education.

I raised the spelling issue in the English exam with my son as he was doing his homework. “Spelling, wrong, in the HSC English exam, Mum?”, came his perplexed bullet point response.

He is in year 11 so it is a looming issue for us.

Australian Tutoring Association co-founder Mohan Dhall tells this paper today that competent spelling was essential.

“I would have thought across all subject areas, particularly English, that it should be considered by the marker and have its own criteria,” Dhall says.

Indeed, spelling assistance and predictive text, like an early version of grammar AI, is endemic and plenty are reliant on it.

The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) told students ahead of last year’s exams that spelling was not expressly marked.

“Although not explicitly marked, handwriting, spelling, punctuation and so on can influence a marker,” a note to students said.

A recent HSC graduate confirmed this to me today but, being the astute individual she is, worked extra hard on her spelling.

“There’s no easy road once I am at work, so what’s the point of slacking off in an English exam,” she says .

2020 was an insanely disruptive year for education. Why set our standards so low already?