Systems of Knowledge exam tests what students don't know

I'm writing in a personal capacity as assistant lecturer at the Junior College, as part of a team responsible for teaching Systems of Knowledge. I'm so utterly incensed by the SOK paper that our students took at Intermediate level on April 30. It has left me infinitely disappointed on their behalf and totally disenchanted and demotivated.

I've been asking myself why and what we're trying to teach 16-18-year-old students when they're then given questions more suitable for finals students in International Relations (having to decide, for instance, whether it is justifiable and possible to impose democracy by force, with Iraq as the example), more suitable for post-grads in History of Art who are better equipped to answer questions about art, literature, ethics and morality, for philosophy undergrads who would have a field day discussing the ethics and moral connotations of matters dealing with privacy, data protection and technology design and operation...I could go on.

Members of the SOK board and the paper setters, whoever they might be, have proved themselves year after year to be far removed, in their exalted cocooned world, from Sixth Formers and the level at Intermediate. Do they no longer mould humane paper setters? My contemporaries at University in the 1960s were so lucky to have been formed and influenced by the late Professor Beck, a fine gentleman whose memory is still so fondly cherished by all of us who were privileged to be his students. His maxim was that an exam is there to find out what a student knows not what a student doesn't know. Paper setters in all subjects at all levels please note. This year's SOK paper setters couldn't have made a better job at finding out what students didn't know (as they've often done in the past).

The irony of course is that the same proportion of students will pass as they do every year, and after that lecturers will receive an anodyne examiners' report which always serves to criticise the students and their perceived shortcomings, and by implication their lecturers', and is little more than an exercise in self-justification.