Confidence assessment marking

It's a shame we're speaking past each other. My opponent has been very articulate and has upheld a high standard of conduct, though of course that's no protection against being dead wrong. In this round I'll summarise my position. When you're able to set the mark value of the questions yourself, then you can make the easy questions worth three times as much as the hard questions. Since the easy questions are now worth the most marks, guess what people aren't going to study? That's the wrong message to be sending the young people of today - we should be telling students to put in the hard yards, not that the easy part counts the most. When you're pushing all marks down because, unless a student puts a confidence of '3' for every single question and gets nothing wrong, their score will include deductions for wrong answers, lack of confidence, or (most likely) both, you're going to have lower scores for top students. When poor students have head starts of up to 66%, you're going to get higher scores for poor students. Couple that with a minimum mark and a single fail grade, and what you end up with is more concentrated marks. That's really bad, for all the reasons my opponent so well articulated in round 1. No wonder he dropped all responses to this point last round, other than to reassert that "percentage based grades" somehow make the single fail grade OK. No, they make it worse, as I explained last round. When you're complicating a non-broken system that will introduce more marking errors, students and teachers will get angry. It's not a "minor inconvenience" like my opponent would have you believe - people's lives and futures are at stake here! The system we have now isn't perfect, but that's no excuse to make the system worse. My opponent states improvements will be made in the system, but as I said, in England it's 4 years later and there are still no "improvements" - only steps in the wrong direction. He adds that the QCA in England denied that technology was the "main issue", but what do you expect them to say? "Oh, we just wasted millions of taxpayer dollars in return for a system that didn't work and which has resulted in many more mistakes being made"? Hardly. When you're basing your whole case on a single survey, you know you're a desperate debater. The UCL survey was only conducted on students after 5 years - more than the time it takes to complete a degree. Therefore, while I agree tests don't make most students leave the university, the only new students to join are those happy with the format. This happens in New Zealand with our three forms of high school assessment - parents pick their kid's high school based on whether they want an NCEA, Cambridge or IB exam. My opponent is deeply naive if he thinks people don't think about exams when they go to uni; indeed, that's almost all that people think about! Time and time again, my opponent has asserted students prefer the system based on the survey, not logic. The fact is that when you're in an exam for a top paper at a top university, it's stressful enough as it is. When you double the number of responses they have to give, and force them to gamble on every single question, they will be more stressed out! When you're advocating not penalising risks, you shouldn't advocate a system that has penalties attached to risks. In round 1 my opponent gave the example of a doctor unsure of his diagnosis. The greater harm is if he's wrong, as my opponent admits. With my opponent's examination system, he is more likely to be wrong, AND more likely to take risks. More likely to take risks because you have to have an average confidence higher than 2 to even get 66% in your medical exams, and more likely to be wrong because there is less need to study the difficult aspects of medicine with my opponent's model. When you make a point about statistical reliability only on the basis of some comments by professors, and I point out that the professors have a vested interest in misrepresenting how well the system works, my point is absolutely relevant. I also showed a prima face case why the professors are wrong - reliability comes from knowing more about what people know, not how well they perform at the same type of unfair, biased test a year later. It's utterly illogical and contrary to common sense to call a test that I have proven to make the smart dumber and the dumb smarter, using fewer questions, a more reliable assessment. Despite my opponent's constant assertions, it isn't. Confidence assessment does not assess "understanding" as my opponent constantly asserts, but rather "confidence," which is at best of questionable importance in the real world, yet has the largest impact on the final test score. Then he instructs voters to look at the evidence, not my assertions. Right back at you! I haven't made a single assertion under this heading that I have not somewhere justified. And no, some professors who gain massive financial benefits from lying about the power of confidence assessment do not count as "justification. "When you give guessers a head start, you encourage guessers. When rote learners can triple the marks they get on questions they know, you encourage rote learning. When students critically think about their answer, they are less confident about it (that's just the nature of critique), and thus get much lower marks under your scheme - asking the professors who I've proven are heavily biased by their monetary incentives is not good evidence. Some of the best scientists and doctors were skeptical of the answers they came up with at first, but years later they turned back and agreed that they had, in fact, stumbled on the correct solution. Is it right to cut the reward of unconfident people by a third? Is it right to encourage guessers? Is it right to encourage rote learners, while discouraging critical thought? Pro seems to think so. When you agree the status quo is already working to ensure answers are not rushed, and that your system actually makes rush answers less unappealing because they're worth much less than under the status quo, you fail to show that your system has any benefit whatsoever. I agree with my opponent's logic that scoring a -6 will deeply affect students, but when a 6-point improvement is just a '1'-rating away, I don't buy that the system will motivate students to study any more than the status quo. Rather it will motivate them to reduce their confidence and score much higher. The status quo is exactly the same, just without the skewed mark range to create that perverse incentive. When you do all that, your model has failed. When your model has failed, you lose the debate. You also lose sources if I've discredited all of your sources and you've discredited none of mine. Vote based on what my opponent and I said, not what you hoped we'd say. Vote based on argument, not blind assertion - including the blind assertions in my opponent's sources. Vote to keep our qualifications systems fair and unbiased. I've been involved in my fair share of student activism over the years, and this is one thing no student or teacher should support. The system didn't add up in round one. It still doesn't.