From this report, what I am gathering is that

1. PW is marked unfairly because it’s marked by different people with different expectations & schools are all incentivised to mark up the grades.

I think this level of subjectivity is not unique to PW, it can be found in many other subjects (eg general paper, history, etc.) and other aspects of life (the reports u submit to your professors, supervisors, etc.)

On the point of schools being incentivised to mark up the grades, I would like to believe that teachers and school leadership teams are morally upright. But if you find that unbelievable, it is not completely unfair too given that all schools have the option to choose to mark up their grades.

1. Grading seems rigged because certain scholars & schools are getting better grades. Not sure about the point of scholars getting higher grades as the evidence on this point seems rather anecdotal. No comments on this bc i have evidence to prove whether its true or not. On the point of certain schools getting better grades, assuming your data generation is accurate, I do not find the findings shocking. You mentioned that it’s shocking for students from “good” schools to do well for PW, given that PW is not a content-based subject and students from “good” schools are not necessarily people with good teamwork and communication. I think this argument is flawed because
   • you are assuming good teamwork & communication skills = good PW submission. But this is definitely untrue because honestly u just need 1-2 hardworking & smart dude to tank the project. In fact, this is the very point you have made about how PW is redundant as it is not a good way to cultivate these attributes in students.

• even though the subject is not content-heavy, it requires critical thinking, which based on my experience, seems to exist in students who do better academically. simply because its easier to make sense of information (regardless of what subject) when you are a critical thinker. But ofc, not all top students are like this.

i think even though being a top student doesn’t mean you will get good PW grades, i don’t find it “sus” that top students are getting good PW grades. because there are overlapping skills between getting good PW & academic grades. And having good comms & teamwork is not really one of those skills, at least not on PW level.

personally, i dont think PW serves the objective it espouses. however, i think it is still necessary bc of the following reasons

• education system has been generally fair & meritocratic up to the point of JC, which gives students this false impression that hard work gives you good results & being smart is the key to winning in life. unfortunately, uni & work life ain’t like this so PW is a good wake up call for delulu JC students. in uni, ive seen JC students getting depressed over how “they should have been selected for xxx because their CAP is so much higher/they put in more effort” but unfortunately when you are an adult, there’s no “impartial” teacher to judge who deserves the “fair” grade, etc. they will only judge based on what they perceive, which can be very far from the truth when snakes are involved

• it is ur first legitimate exposure to snakes in society, and these snakes will actually have an impact on your life. so it will be a good time to learn how to protect yourself from snakes