Column: F for Fail - how we got into an exam mess

Your exam begins now. No talking, No Googling. You may turn your paper over.

Question 1: If the SQA downgrades exam results, what level of anger - 10 being seething, 8 being furious and 1 being “aye but whit aboot England then, eh?’ - is the correct response?

Question 2: In the event of a major downgrade of exams, what percentage of folk from really posh schools would you expect to be negatively impacted – a) none b) a few but their dads will tug on the old school ties and and make it go away or c) significantly fewer than kids at schools in deprived areas.

Question 3: How shoogly is the peg currently holding the jacket of Education Secretary, John Swinney? (You may refer to your protractor, and draw a diagram to best illustrate the angle , and speed, of the descent to the floor).

Question 4: How on earth did we get into this mess?

We like to tell ourselves that Scottish education is the envy of the world. Aye, it used to be.

The debacle over this year’s exam results underlines how badly, and sadly, we have fallen.

It’s 40 years since I left school clutching my two Highers, eight O-Grades and a comp-O for a second futile crack at maths. (A Comp-O was basically Scottish education’s way of saying “aw bless, at least he brought a sharpened pencil with him.”).

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Back then you sat your exams and, some six weeks or so later, you got a brown envelope with a cardboard backing through the post, Inside was your certificate filled with Cs and Bs. Okay, I’m aware some folk got As. We called them swots.

I’ve still got my certificates, and every time I look at them, I’m reminded of the words of my crabbit old maths teacher. “I don’t care, I’ve got MY O-grades.” was her splendid motivational speech she delivered pretty much every week through third and fourth year.

I wonder what auld Mrs Adams would have made of this mathematical muck-up.

The withering look of contempt would have left John Swinney in tears. Even Nicola Sturgeon would have wilted.

Numbers mattered to her, you see. Sums added up, lines in geometry met, and trigonometry was perfectly understandable with some application. I found out the hard way that the answer to the question “what’s the cosine of 42” was not “who cares, miss.”

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I’m still none the wiser how we ended up with such a credibility gap between teachers marking too high, and the SQA wheeling out the office’s postcode lottery Christmas board game to then plunge tens of thousands of kids into despair.

Neither party emerges with much credit, and the political fall-out has detonated in the lap of Swinney.

That he managed to retain some dignity while pirouetting 360-degrees was quite remarkable. His speech and apology were pretty decent given every finger pointing at him screamed “it’s all your fault!” And it was ...

But politicians come and go – far more often than heads of quangos too.

The real damage in this mess is the lasting impression of one rule for us, and one for the rest of them.

And that is simply unforgivable and unacceptable.

> The views expressed are those of the columnist, not the newspaper