IBP Po And IBS - WillIt Work Or Not?IBP Po, the English Examination Programme, is currently conducting a new series of tests that will test students on descriptive and analytic skills. These skills are the core competencies for all exams, and not to be underestimated. Unfortunately, the Department of Education has decided to simply ignore these characteristics in their new tests, ignoring the overwhelming majority of academic opinion, instead focusing upon quantitative subjects and trying to create a 'gender balance' by choosing more female subjects to assess.

According to IBP Po spokesperson Jeanette Higgs, 'descriptive skills are an important part of the test and they have been very successfully and well supported by the Ministry of Education. However, you don't always need to have a relevant word or phrase in your title to get through it.' This is a false assumption based upon the assumption that students with 'descriptive' skills will normally only achieve a passing grade, when what is actually going on is that students with any sort of analytical or critical thinking skills are likely to do worse than non-descriptive test takers.

It is also quite ironic that, if students are required to demonstrate those skills during the IIBA exam, but not during IBP Po, a statement such as this can be made. Does IBP Po really thinks that IBP Po teachers will stop teaching their students' descriptive skills, such as how to use multiple choice questions correctly, and instead, want them to spend every moment of every day just copying and pasting answers from handouts? Of course not.

One of the things that IBP Po has mentioned is, 'Descriptive essay topics are often too broad and/or too theoretical, leaving students without any idea of what the goal of the essay is.' Yet, these types of questions are exactly what the IUB paper topics are meant to gauge. The purpose of the IIBA is to create broad generalizations, rather than narrow detailed ones.

Another reason why IBP Po has come under fire is because they 'use adjectives inappropriately,' particularly in case studies, and 'narrow topics down to minute details that don't necessarily fit with the topic at hand.' It seems like, at least according to Higgs, that the people who have created these tests have missed the point entirely, and have instead tried to force IBP Po subjects to conform to certain ideas and requirements, without really offering anything new. Which is unfortunate, because most students really prefer to take tests that have real life scenarios and real world applications.

There are also reports that the IIBA will keep the 'contextual' section of descriptive paper topics, even though the majority of teachers who administer the tests want it removed. According to an email sent out by IBP Po earlier this month, 'An example of contextual reading is a local market report, where students read about a local market's needs and how each type of market (food, health, drinks, retail, accommodation, leisure, etc.) is contributing to the local economy.

The IUBB/IBPSPo collaboration will give us the opportunity to continue the programme we started before, which was to teach our students by using an integrated approach.' IBS is indeed trying to help, but their attempts seem to be futile. There are many ways to teach 'descriptive' writing, such as embedding questions into the text and using a focus group for this purpose, but there are no standardized tests in place to allow teachers to reach a consensus.

While it is nice to see that the Ministry of Education has been listening to its teachers, the fact remains that the IIBA/IBPSPo collaboration will not be able to offer the meaningful content that teachers are asking for. If anything, their English teaching assessment will become even more frustrating for teachers, as they are expected to teach readers to do 'wonderful things', instead of teaching them how to actually read.