Appendix 1.
Because school evaluation happens by relational means, it is never possible for every student to get the maximum scores. The complete number of the very successful ones determines, how big an effort is required from the rest of the students. As a simple and clever consequence of this, the students find it most practical to perform at the level close to the medium standard. Hence the typically low ambitiousness of the studentsī does not result from a lack of competition, but instead from its considerably high level.
If the overall learning results prove to be too low, the teachers can improve them by composing easier exams. An other possibility is to place topics, that will be asked in the test, to the lessons given immediately before the test. If the learning results prove to be too good, acts of the opposite kind will be realized.
As a result of this basically tautological nature of evaluation, the scores given by separate educational institutions or even teachers are not, should not be and could not even theoretically be comparable. Only this can serve as an assurance against inequality, which otherwise could result from the differences in the teachersī (or the student groupsī) level of skills.
An interesting implication of this is, that the school marks loose their identity as proper measures of competence. This applies as well to the teachers as to the students. Also in the matriculation exam (at least in Finland) the scale for separate score categories is determined only after the exams. This way of action is based on an assumption, that the level of competence among the separate age cohorts of the teachers and the students stays constant year after year.
A slightly more tragic reason for the habit is, that using absolutically tuned learning criteria (which would require repeating the same questions year after year) would make the unwanted pedagogical effects (one example below) of this sort of an exam unbearably evident. Hence paradoxically, taking the scores seriously leads to a situation, where it becomes very difficult to take them seriously. In fact, such a closer look at the system reveals, that it is difficult to find good logical or pedagogical arguments for quantitative evaluation at all.
For the most, we now have good reasons to suspect the validity of, and also the need for, quantitative evaluation as a tool for social discrimination (appendix 6) either. A consensus of the criteria can never, not even theoretically, be reached. Instead of this they are, and will always be, in a state of constant transformation. Their nature depends completely on the preferences of individual teachers as much as the favoured branches of pedagogy.
The tautological nature of measuring the results becomes most obvious if we imagine a theoretical situation, where all the students get maximum scores. For the teacher this would mean a great success (as long as there is even one weaker student the teacher can improve his or hers work).
In reality, though, the presented score distribution would, for the most, be interpreted only as a sign of the teacherīs professional incompetence. This would happen, because an elemental characteristic of a good exam (hence a good teacher as well) is its segregativeness. This explains why a completely successful teacher would, in fact, not be successful at all.
Maximum scores could easily be reached simply by owning all affordable time to practising ideal answers for the future exam. The unwanted side effects of a learning strategy like this are immediately apparent. This, though, is exactly what an exam (= segregation) concentrated school system requires from its students. Hence, the only thing which the students truly study in a constructivist manner in the school, proves to be the teachers. The teachersī constructivism is similarly restricted towards the jury of the matriculation exam.
This phenomenon makes obvious the common statement, that constructivist pedagogy cannot be successfully realised in the everyday life of the school. It is not surprising, that inside the school this state of things is interpreted as a sign of faults in constructivism. For an outsider the explanation lies in the philosophical and pedagogical nondurability of the schoolīs most traditional and prominent evaluation tools.