Zero Marks Question

Michael Gove's stint as education minister of the Tory coalition government was interesting in its over-arching reform fever. He systematically culled giant portions of the secondary and primary curricula in order to focus on particular, more academic subjects - languages, arts and humanities, natural sciences and mathematics - to what some describe as to the detriment of the ignored practical subjects and sports. One of the more glaring reforms is of the grading system, which will shortly be replaced from an A*-U format to the newer 0-9 system, interestingly introducing an entirely new grade category. Where this new category will fall is most curious: will it be a new maximum grade of 9, requiring even greater knowledge of subject and application of skills? Will it be in the middle, where the average will squeeze both the maximum and minimum grades in their respective directions? Will it even be evenly distributed throughout all of the grades? Surely not!

I feel perhaps that the most interesting possibility is that the new grade classification be Zero (0), introduced on the bottom of the grade ladder. That would mean that a grade of 1-9 would correspond roughly to the A*-U grading system, but with a grade 1 being equivalent to a former grade U.

(The grade U is commonly referred to as 'Ungradable' in that the score was so low (below 20% for example) that it barely represents comprehension of the tested material, or that something has occurred to make grading of the paper unfeasible).

What are we left with? To put it simply, we have an empty grade category at the bottom. Something that scores so low that it does not bear thinking about. How could it be used? The pertinent question is this: how will the paradigm shift from an alphabetic to numerate grading system affect the interpretation of the already used numerate marking system? As the two consist of numbers, it naturally follows that a nine mark answer that achieves nine marks will be graded as a 9. A series of three three mark questions, answered for three marks, will achieve an overall grade 9 for achieving nine marks total. It just makes sense. Papers graded out of 90 marks will be formed of 10 questions or sets, formed of all the possible permutations of question parts as to add up to 9 marks exactly. A subject can be broken down into many chunks of teaching that fit well into the roughly nine months schooling period of the year, helping teachers better organise the order of information and practical work they put in.

So what happens in the hypothetical scenario that a zero mark question is asked? We know what happens when zero marks is achieved in the rated system of nine marks - a grade 0 has to be given as 0/9 was proffered up in the answer. If you envision a test as something asking for an answer, getting zero marks is the equivalent of returning a "I do not know the answer to the question." That, in certain subjects like mathematics, can be a fairly common occurrence due to the nature of black-and-white numbers. An answer of 2+2=5 seems to merit a zero marks answer, but let's look at that one again. If a person gave the educated guess of 2+2=5, we know that, although they clearly have extraordinarily poor number sense by even primary standards, the answer of 5 is a positive addition to the objective 2. The candidate giving this wrong answer has obviously learned more than the candidate who answered 2+2 = 0, even though this candidate may have just gotten + and - mixed up but knew that, proportionally, 2-2=0. Further still, both show at least some greater knowledge than someone who didn't answer but left the question blank. Essentially, we are asking: how will the grading system make distinctions and dispensations in the vaguer territories of knowledge measurement or skills acquisition? It throws the grading system into the same league as another vague numerate measurement: standardised aptitude test scores and intelligence quotients.

The point I want to raise is in my own subject of religious studies or theology, as well as many of the humanities like history and geography. In fact, I believe it raises a point for all of the literate subjects that were graded in the former system. What if we want to ask zero marks questions? There are some fundamental testing materials in the humanities and fringe literate subjects, for example recitation of an event in Mark's Gospel or the name of a location of a key character's birth. In history, it could be the year of an election or a catastrophe, a question worth exactly one mark. Answering a series of nine interlinked questions like that could qualify as a grade 9 set of questions. Answering a nine mark question on Hitler's rise to power by mentioning nine key events, or three three mark-weighted key events would equally equate to a grade 9 essay. We can clearly define in nines what defines grade 9 knowledge of a subject, by highlighting how each subject matter studied is a mark on the road to a 9.

But what if I want to ask a question that was worth zero marks? What if I wanted the wrong answer? What if my major aim was to catch out the faux knowledgeable, the concrete studied minds of the geeks and the try-hards? What if I want to ask "Allah is the god of Christianity" Do you agree with this statement? Give reasons for your answer.(0)" What completely useless answers I would get, as their young minds scrambled to decode this stupid and inane question. And yet, within their attempts to reason their way out of this question, they will inevitably give great answers to read or will leave the space blank. Who gets the zero marks for that answer then? Is it the person who wrote "I don't understand the question because Allah isn't the god of Christianity" going to get more marks than the person who wrote "Yes Allah is the God of Christianity"? How about this: a person answers "In some ways yes, Allah is the same God YHWH as Christianity, or rather Judaeo-Christianity, of which Islam and Judaism are a part in a family of religions descended from the amalgamation of Syrio-Palestinian, Mesopotamian and Canaanite pantheons"? Sure, give the smart-ass zero marks for his answer, but he still achieves a grade 0 for the ungradable question!

The only seemingly viable way to make a zero mark question seem a fair achievement is if a grade 0 answer produces an answer in total opposition, that is the totally opposite answer to the question asked. Perhaps someone who answers "I do not agree that Allah is not a different God of not Christianity, maybe" is achieving the only reasonable opposite answer to what the question is asking, which is inexorably nothing. It is, at least, the production of something that is nothing in answer to a needed nothing. That, surely, denotes a grade 0 knowledge of nothing, which in a subject like theology or philosophy or many more, is indeed something. The perceptive linguistic understanding that "this is not a question" is, in literature or language subjects, a key cognitive skill. It is somewhat like the story of the philosophy student who, sitting his final 8 page essay paper, read the deliberate question "Why?" and wrote the answer "Why not?" achieving full marks on the paper. In the instance of numerate standardised grading systems, it seems that this sort of answer would achieve a grade 0, for giving a zero marks answer. QED Mr. Gove.