Your comma was too far below a line that wasn't there. Exam surrealism at the DfE

The marking of Key stage 2 SATs GPS is revealing something pretty nasty at the heart of high stakes testing.

Here are some examples:

The children were asked to 're-arrange' some words to turn a statement into a question:

'They are listening to music.'

for which

'Are they listening to music?' is the correct answer.

(note: this is a test of what all children immersed in English can do when speaking. It's only when they get into exam situations that things like this become a problem for them. The word 'rearrange' is likely to give some children more problems than the task itself! )

In giving this correct answer, some children made what are deemed 'errors' or 'mistakes'. So one child inadvertently put a capital 't' for 'they'. This then makes that child's answer 'wrong'. No mark. Zero. The child showed that he/she had the knowledge to answer the question but zero marks nevertheless.
[UPDATE: IT'S JUST BEEN POINTED OUT TO ME THAT THIS CHILD WAS DOING THE 'RIGHT' THING: HE/SHE REARRANGED THE WORDS AS GIVEN, THAT INCLUDES USING 'THEY' WITH A CAPITAL 'T'. IF THESE WERE CUT-UPS AND INVOLVED MOVING CUT-OUT WORDS AROUND ON THE TABLE, THE SAME 'ERROR' WOULD BE MADE. THIS UPDATE SHOWS THE ZERO MARK TO BE EVEN CRAZIER.]

So, yes, of course, the children and teachers have all been told that everything has to be 'right' for the answer to be 'right' but more holistically, we can see that this is tosh. The child has done the task correctly, but made a different kind of 'error'. (A computer would have corrected this, by the way, even as it is correcting my writing of this blog!)

Ultimately, this doesn't penalise the child, it penalises the school. If there is a cumulative effect of such mark-downs, the school can and will be turned into an academy. If it's an academy, it will be turned into another academy.

If people reading this think this is an exceptional case, there are others:

No mark for a 'p' not descending below the line; 

a semi-colon not being 'on the line' (but there was no line); 

a full stop missing; 

a comma too far below the line (there was no line).

Welcome to education England, 2016.

(By that, I mean that we all know that this marking will have a knock-on effect on how teachers teach - not their fault, and how much time children will have to spend on making sure that their commas don't go too far below the line of a line that isn't there. This way a test that is supposedly on 'grammar', 'spelling' and 'punctuation' actually becomes a test in motor control. )