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Theatrical
Diary
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Assessing DramaOne of the worst parts of teaching Drama , for me at any rate, is assessing work. How do you assess a piece of Drama, not as a critic would, but actually giving it numerical marks out of a specific total? What makes one piece work 35 out of 45 and another 40? Worse still, what makes on piece worth 40 and another 41? Earlier this week I attended an examination board standardising meeting for the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) Expressive Arts course. In it, we teachers were to assess various pieces of work and then be told what the board considered the mark to be. This is the standard according to which we are to mark our own students' work. I hate these meetings because I almost always disagree! The first piece we looked at involved Music and Drama and the two candidates we were to assess did not impress me. The singing (a capella, which isn't that easy) was about a semi-tone flat all the way but the instrumental playing was fine, albeit not terribly demanding. It was the Drama which I really didn't rate. Diction was poor, the range of pace and intonation was extremely limited, and the whole piece lacked impact. The idea was interesting and they attempted some unusual approaches, which didn't really come off. I tried to be as generous as I could in my marking of the piece, but I was still five marks (out of a total of 45) below the board, which gave one of the candidates 40. The people from the board then told us why. What they had done was take a list of "skills" and ticked them off: "She did A." "She did B." "There were signs of C," and so on. But, I protested, she didn't do any of them very well and anyway, they were not things which would be taken into account by anyone assessing the qualty of the acting, and the piece as a whole was boring. We then looked at some other work which was less contentious: it was mainly visual arts work, although there was one other piece of Drama which was, to be honest, not terribly good, and finally we came to a dance piece. A group of four boys had creaed a dance piece based around Kung Fu. It was fast, excitign and imaginative. Admittedly the boy we were asked to assess didn't have complete control and there was some unsteadiness in one or two of the moves, although I doubt that an audience would have noticed it. The board had given him 43 marks. At that point, the other staff started to protest: this was so much better than the first, so how could he be given just three marks more? So the board representatives started their listing again. But what about the "Wow!" factor? one teacher wanted to know. We never got an answer. So one candidate who made every last one of us sit up and take notice, and admire his performance, ended up with the same grade as someone whose performance was difficult to follow because of poor diction - a performance which was, in any case, more than just a tad boring. Had I been wearing my artistic director hat in an audition situation, candidate one would have been told politely, "Thank you very much" (probably halfway through her piece), whereas the last would have been, at the very least, called back. My worry is - and it's a worry I've had ever since I started teaching Drama many, many moons ago - that educationists and theatre people think in totally different way. For the educationist, hitting the right buttons is what is important: has the candidate included (a), (b) and so on through to (z) in his/her performance? For me, there are only two questions: was I convinced? and, was I moved? In a desperate - and futile! - attempt to achieve some kind of objectivity, educationists seem to have totally forgotten what the performing arts are all about - performance! If you jump through the right hoops, then you'll get the marks, even though your performance might be (as I, in my anger, described the first candidate's work) crap. I was quite happy with the mark awarded to the last candidate - he wasn't perfect, so I would certainly have wanted to deduct a couple of marks - but I felt the mark awarded to the first devalued his achievement. Assessing Drama isn't easy, but this isn't the way to do it. And that concerns me, for students all over the country are taking this exam, and this is the standard by which they will be assessed in the summer of 2002.
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