The power of ten (out of ten)
Like many sporting stadiums, the Melbourne Cricket Ground has two large television screens so that those a long way from the real action can see it enlarged (without reaching for their binoculars) and replayed (in case they missed it the first or second times). If the game being played is Australian rules football, and the goals are coming thick and fast, then the big screen works overtime. Sponsored by Mitre 10, a chain of do-it-yourself stores, the goal replays feature not only the passage of the ball between the posts, but also the play immediately beforehand and, to the accompaniment of a catchy jingle, an assessment: ten out of ten (10/10) every time.

On a bad day, there might be 25,000 people at the game and on a good day, anything from 50,000 to 90,000, but whatever the size or make-up of the crowd, no-one is in any doubt as to the meaning of ten out of ten. It's a perfect score, a perfect performance, a perfect outcome. You can imagine the appeal it has for the sponsor. Apart from the obvious 'product association', the terminology is universally understood, and it's a darn sight more punchy than satisfactory completion or has achieved mastery.

Imagine either of those phrases being flashed across the screen after Che Cockatoo Collins or Peter Matera has grabbed the ball on the boundary line, dodged around a couple of lumbering defenders and kicked a goal from an almost impossible angle. They might well have achieved mastery but ten out of ten seems a more powerful way of saying so; and certainly one more suited to the medium.

Ten out of ten doesn't stir much debate in the Members pavilion or the Great Southern Stand. There's not a whiff of controversy. It's the only assessment available. It's awarded for every goal. To give football followers something to argue about, Mitre 10 would have to agree to assessments based on how goals are scored: one out of ten for a goal awarded in error; two out of ten for a goal scored from an undeserved free kick; three out of ten for a goal scored from a legitimate free kick; four out of ten for a goal kicked out of the pack with eyes shut, and so on. And that would never happen. Apart from the technical demands this would make on the big screen's instant replay apparatus, the Mitre 10 advertising man would be dead against associating the company's garden stakes, lengths of timber and paint brushes with anything less than perfection.

Mr Christoforou, I remember, was very much in favour of ten out of ten. I can't say I blamed him. I taught his son Nick in the early 1970s and, accompanied by an interpreter, took Nick's reports home because his father was a shift worker and couldn't come to the school. The report form was a single foolscap sheet with a space for each subject. This allowed for a written comment from each teacher and some statement of achievement.

In an era when subject faculties (rather than schools) had assessment policies, our school was no exception. Maths and science gave percentage marks; art, graphics and some trade subjects used A+, A, A-, B+ and so on; physical education and home economics used another set of letters: E (excellent), VG (very good), G (good), S (satisfactory) and NS (not satisfactory); and English and social studies provided a comment only. What was Mr Christoforou to make of this?

I found myself, through the interpreter, not only trying to explain the meaning of Nick's 86 per cent for mathematics and 74 per cent for science, but also to answer the question: how did the A- for graphics compare with the E for physical education? Making sense of the teachers' comments was easy by comparison.

As it happened, Nick's maths teacher was a keen follower of the horses and found it almost impossible not to slip into racing parlance in his comments. Sometimes the head of the maths faculty made him rewrite the more obscure of thesePlays up at the barrier. Will need firmer handling next startbut since the percentage mark was regarded as the 'real' statement of progress, most of his track-inspired observations were allowed to remain. On this occasion he had written: Nick led the field until the home straight when he fell at the last hurdle. Will come good. The interpreter rolled her eyes and turned her palms upwards. 'He was at the top of the class until the last test, when he didn't do so well', I explained. 'His teacher thinks there's nothing to worry about and he'll do well again.' Translated into Greek, this satisfied Mr Christoforou. After all, 86 per cent seemed like a pretty good result.

'In Greece,' Mr Christoforou explained, 'students are marked out of ten. In every subject. So, if your boy gets a seven out of ten for history and an eight out of ten for mathematics, you know he's doing better in maths than in history. And if his cousin in Thessaloniki gets nine out of ten for mathematics, you know she's doing better than he is. This way parents know how their kids are going. I think it's a better system.' I couldn't argue with him. Not on the basis of the mish-mash of assessment and reporting practices I'd just presented to him.

Not many years before I taught Nick Christoforou, I was the subject of a bit of ten-out-of-ten assessment myselfat the University of Melbourne. The quickest way to reach the house I was living in was to walk through the grounds of one of the men's colleges and, depending on my timetable, I sometimes did this during the day or in the late afternoon. As long as there was daylight, there were always clusters of young meneventually bound for chambers or daddy's business or the stock exchangelounging against parked cars or lolling around on seats. Using the ten-out-of-ten system, they amused themselves by assessing the physical attributes of the female students as they passed. Perhaps because they were obsessed with curves of a different kind, they paid no attention to what the experts said about normal distribution. They were never known to award a score higher than seven.

In the United States, and possibly elsewhere, they conduct these kinds of public assessments on national television and with judicious use of the decimal system pretend they're engaged in scientific evaluation. I don't suppose you caught the Miss USA pageant on telly in 1993? I `ll admit it's a few years ago, but I've never forgotten it. Where else could you see the wearing of a swimsuit judged to two decimal places?

The nine judges, in sequined gowns and dinner suits, weren't giving anything away. They weren't about to tell us why Miss California scored 9.23 in her bathers and only 8.97 in her evening dress; or what it was that gave Miss Virginia a 0.01 advantage over Miss Kansas. What could account for 0.01? Perhaps a couple of errant hairs missed by the electrolysis machine?

The 'expert' commentators weren't much help. At appropriate breaks in the judging, a couple of Former Misses with been-there-done-that airs of superiority gave regular reports on the contestants' progress using performance indicators which left us none the wiser. Miss Texas was 'looking sensational', Miss South Carolina was 'in stunning form', and Miss New York, isn't she wonderful, was 'in there with a big chance'. What did they base this on? What did it mean? We weren't told. I felt as confused as Mr Christoforou when he received Nick's report. I needed an interpreter.

I'm sure when Ofsted inspectors go into classrooms in the United Kingdom and make their reports on the teachers they observe, they're wearing neither dinner suits nor sequins, and decimal points don't enter into it. Neither, I'm sure, do the teaching equivalents of 'in stunning form' and 'looking sensational'. The Ofsted inspectors are on serious assessment business.

Chris Woodhead, the chief inspector of schools, has estimated that there are 15,000 incompetent teachers in the system who need to shape up or ship out. (The National Association of Head Teachers made its own resounding and unanimous assessment of the chief inspector in a vote of no-confidence at their 1997 conference.) One way of identifying incompetent teachers, Mr Woodhead says, is to change the framework within which they are graded from a seven-point to a three-point category or scale. He argues that, to date, inspectors employed by his office have generally not made use of the seven rankings or grades available to them, assigning very few teachers to the lowest categories. Having only three grades or rankings would force more assessments to be recorded at the lowest level.

Are these signs that assessment of teachers' performance might be about to become more crude and, as a result, more arbitrary, more dependent on 'gut feeling'? I hope not. I can understand the chief inspector not wanting ten out of ten every time, but neither is this is Lesson of the Day or Miss Chalk-and-Talk 1997.

Education Links | Free Lesson Plans | Who are we? | What's New | Products & Services | Access Asia | Discovering Democracy | Enterprise | OZJAC | Science | SCIS | Technology | VET in Schools