What follows is simply a set of reflections on an issue that I've been thinking about for a while regarding a potential danger (or problem) for the new HSC Modern History exam [1].
An initial set of questions
I think if I were on an exam committee I'd be trying to constantly ask myself and others on the team a core set of questions. These include:
Are the questions we have set justified by the syllabus (including outcomes, skills/concepts and content points)?
Could these questions be attempted (to varying degrees) by all students who have studied HSC Modern History? (i.e. are they set up fairly allowing for lower-order access points and the ability to demonstrate higher-order thinking skills and greater mastery?)
Are the questions in each section of the examination equitable? (i.e. are all of the 'Peace and Conflict' study questions across the various options similar in terms of their complexity?)
Do the questions reflect variety? By this I mean: are they repeating old questions that have been used regularly or do they target a range of different points and themes within the topics? [2]
Do the questions require students to demonstrate different skills across the entire paper?
Are the questions good historical questions? By this I mean, do they require students to grapple with important historical issues or problems?
The national study 'danger'
I would argue that, among other concerns, the new HSC Modern History syllabus has an embedded danger and that is that three of the four topics have what I would call a national study 'flavour'.
In the new Core Study: Power and Authority in the Modern World, 1919 - 1946, the majority of the content dot-points are focussed on the Nazi regime in Germany up to 1939. It is like a mini-national study (and has obviously been drawn from the old national study option on Nazi Germany).
The National Study section of the syllabus has also been retained so there is no need to explain how this fits the 'flavour' I am pointing out.
Then, the final topic for the course, 'Change in the Modern World' includes four options that could almost fit comfortably into the National Study section of the syllabus (but are obviously focussed on post-war events rather than the pre-war period). They are:
Pro-democracy movement in Burma, 1945 - 2010
The Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square, 1966 - 1989
Civil Rights in the USA, 1945 - 1968
Apartheid in South Africa, 1960 - 1994
All of these focus on an area of change and continuity within a specific national setting. In my view, that essentially makes them studies of a nation (i.e. national studies).
The potential problem in an exam
This raises a potential problem within an examination if students have studied a particular set of options and the questions are not carefully structured.
For the sake of the discussion here, say a class of HSC Modern History students have completed the following topics (which, as I have argued elsewhere, would make a logical sequence of study):
Core Study: Power and Authority in the Modern World, 1919 - 1946
National Study: Russia and the Soviet Union, 1917 - 1941
Peace and Conflict Study: Conflict in Indochina, 1954 - 1979
Change in the Modern World: Civil rights in the USA, 1945 - 1968
For the sake of discussion, let's say an exam has the following types of questions:
Core Study: main question (10 – 15 marks) about the rule of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany (Eg. Using sources A, B and C, and other evidence explain the impact of Hitler and the Nazi Party on Germany up to 1939).
National Study (USSR): question option about the rule of Stalin and the Communist Party in the Soviet Union (eg. Evaluate the impact of Stalin's rule on the USSR up to 1941).
Peace and Conflict Study (Indochina): question option about the rule of Pol Pot in Democratic Kampuchea (essentially a national study-style question - eg. 'Assess the impact of the Pol Pot regime on Cambodia up to 1979')
Change in the Modern World (Civil Rights): main question about the impact of the civil rights movement up to 1968 (essentially a national study-style question – e.g. 'To what extent was the civil rights movement in the USA successful in achieving its aims up to 1968?').
If the exam was set up like this and not looked at carefully as a whole, then students could potentially be responding to very similar types of questions in each section of the exam. In this particular example, three sections are essentially dictatorship questions (Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot) and the final question similar to many questions that could be asked within a National Study.
Past examples?
In the 2016 Modern History exam, students were able to respond to the following questions for the National Study and Peace and Conflict Study:
(15b) To what extent did Stalinism transform society, culture and the economy? (p. 9)
(21b) Evaluate the impact of Pol Pot's aims and methods on Cambodian society to 1979 (p. 12)
Because I studied both of these options with my two classes that year, many of my students came out of the exam and said something like: 'half of the exam was just two dictatorship questions.'
I think that is a (slight) failure on the part of an exam committee. Although there is no essential problem with the Pol Pot question (i.e. it makes sense to comprehend and it is justified by the syllabus dot-points), why was a National Study-style question asked in the context of a Peace and Conflict study? There are plenty of other ways to draw on the Pol Pot material in this topic without resorting to a National Study-style question (these include: rise to power, role of nationalism/communism, impact of the Second Indochina War on civilians, etc.) [3]
The point is, I think that the problem I have outlined above with the new syllabus is a greater danger now than it was in the previous syllabus and I think exam committees of the past (at least in the case of 2016) were caught out a little. Let me be clear, I don't think this was a major oversight or something that needs serious complaint and I am not pointing an angry finger at any particular exam committee (it is undoubtedly a tough job!). I am merely interested in exploring the particular dynamics of exams and asking some questions about what we can possibly expect in the context of a new syllabus.
Ensuring the exam has variety
The question at the heart of this discussion might be:
How does an exam committee ensure that a paper has reasonable variety even though many topics could lead to similar styles of question?
In the past, this could be more easily avoided because they ensured that the style of questions were different in the Personality Study. By ensuring that the individuals available for study in this topic were not the 'great men' of history but other individuals who had to be explored in a more complex manner, syllabus writers almost ensured that exam committees had to ask a different style of question from other parts of the exam [4]. Examiners can no longer rely on this to ensure that the exam has some variety.
On their own, I think questions about dictatorships are important and they are obviously reasonable questions to ask within the context of the topics I have specifically identified here (the Core Study, USSR and Indochina) but I would not like to see HSC Modern History become a study of dictatorships. There is far more to Modern History than that.
Let me briefly return to one of the initial questions I suggested would guide my thinking if I were on an exam committee: do the questions require students to demonstrate different skills across the entire paper? I would argue that too many questions revolving around dictatorships would require me to answer 'no' here and that is my concern.
The only solution I see is to recognise this potential problem and look out for possible sequences of questions like this in the draft paper and eliminate them if they accidentally arise. If, for example, the exam committee want to include a question similar to 2016's Pol Pot question (21b) then I would argue that they should probably ask something different in the USSR section (for example: Account for Stalin's rise to power in the USSR by the late 1920s). This would go some way to preventing a scenario in which students who studied both topics could write two responses of a very similar style in any one exam [5].
Endnotes
[1] This is not to be taken as general support for exams as assessment tools. The reality is, however, in NSW this is still the major assessment for HSC Modern History.
[2] I wouldn't promote asking poor questions in search of 'variety' but I think the topics are diverse enough to allow for good historical questions that don't need to be repeated regularly.
[3] By 'style of question' here I am not merely referring to question stems. I am referring to the thrust of a question and the type of content it requires students to engage with. The example of the USSR and Indochina questions from 2016, in my view, were very similar in 'style' because they required students to engage with the impact of a dictatorial ruler.
[4] Here I mean that questions asked of these personalities required students to do something obviously different to a national study or peace and conflict study essay.
[5] I realise that the content knowledge required to answer these questions would quite different but the problem is that analysing history through a national frame is only one 'style' of history.
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