SATisfied?

There has been a lot of hullabaloo in the UK about a Maths question that appeared on this year's Year 6 (Grade 4) SATs paper for Mathematics. There was a big article about it in the TES.


It's not that hard. It took me about a minute to solve. The trick, of course, is to understand that the two squares should not be the same size. Maybe that is why the examiners put the word "different" in bold type. (Do teachers ever tell their students to read the question, I wonder? Maybe they do.)

The students should also know that there is not much point in panicking, crying and wasting a lot of time on a question that only carries one mark if they really have no idea what the answer is. This is just common sense and good exam technique.

All of the exam papers that were ever written have had some questions that were harder than the others, so there were some that could have been done quickly and easily, while there were some that were more challenging and time-consuming. Yes, how nice it would be if all exams were always 100% fair! But is life always fair? I thought that schools were supposed to prepare their students for the future. Are all GCSEs, A levels, university exams or driving tests always completely fair for every single person who takes them? Are job interviews completely fair? I don't think so.

Of course, I am not saying that the SATs examiners (or any other examiners) should deliberately write exam papers that are unfair or not based on what the students have been learning, but it is more or less inevitable that some questions will be harder than others and that some might take a bit longer. Some students will "see" the answer straight away, while others will struggle. Maybe some exam candidates might even get the wrong answers for a few of the questions. Yes, that might actually happen.

When I was teaching in China, all of my Year 5 (Grade 3) students had all of their Mathematics lessons in English, although their first language was Mandarin. I don't remember any of my Chinese students panicking or crying or saying that their SATs exams in Year 6 (Grade 4) were unfair. So how about lots of students in the UK doing their Maths exams in Mandarin?

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