By Abdennour Lamharchi, Faculty of Education Sciences in Rabat, Morocco
In the modern educational world, the development of personal skills remains a primary goal for all those involved in education. It is not merely a process of passive knowledge acquisition, but a profound development of intellectual, technical and spiritual capacities. Throughout this educational process, the assessment system plays a central role whilst acting as a false pivot in the learner-knowledge relationship, assuming that the highest-performing individual is the one with the best mark.
Consequently, modern educational approaches emphasise the acquisition of sustainable, cross-disciplinary skills. The reality is quite different, however, as the national job market appears to remain overwhelmingly dominated by grades. It cannot be denied that assessment remains a very important element in measuring personal educational pathways. But the question facing the learner is this: What have they learnt? Have they acquired their knowledge with any depth?
From an academic perspective, this phenomenon, which I have termed ‘the dictatorship of the marking scheme’, raises a major critical question: Does the current system truly assess mastery of knowledge, or merely a learner’s ability to meet a fixed, standardised marking scheme under pressure?
In this report, I have sought to analyse this discrepancy between marks and competence, showing that when one focuses solely on marks without a deep grasp of the subject matter, success is merely temporary. What strikes me as particularly concerning is that a small difference of 0.5 points on an overall average can determine whether a learner is eligible to sit an entrance exam for a prestigious university. This system of the ‘dictatorship of the marking scheme’ assumes that a student with 15/20 is less capable than another with 16/20, whereas this difference may simply be down to luck. Another major problem is the disconnect between ‘grades and profile’. What is surprising is that the system demands excellent marks, even in modules that have no connection to the chosen specialism. Take the example of an IT genius: I find it illogical that they could be rejected by an engineering school simply because their mark in philosophy or history and geography has dragged down their overall average.
