I can repeat what I said last year about Davidson:
Gina Davidson fails to disclose her close affinity with the Scottish Labour Branch but has left it in her Linkedn cv:
‘More recently I have worked in policy and PR for the Scottish Labour Party’s parliamentary group within the Scottish Parliament, which included speech writing for the party leaders.’
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/gina-davidson-7889b810
The point about Swinney’s comments are that he is principled enough to stand up for the maintenance of standards when, sometimes, a well-meaning teacher who has worked daily with a pupil, tries to get an award for them, which the more objective assessment already held by the SQA, suggests is unsustainable.
If you were the parent of the pupil in question, you’d want the best for your child but what if you were the parent of another child denied access to the course they have worked so hard to get into, because of grade inflation and the award of passes or higher grades to other pupils, based on some kind of subjective assessment?
And, if this kind of thing becomes common and is then leaked to the Scotsman or opposition politicians, such as Labour’s Ian Grey, what will they have to say then about standards ‘slipping’ under the SNP?
Brian Wilson, Brian Monteith, John McLennan, Helen McArdle and Gina Davidson – ‘Our job at the Scotsman is to fight this threat to democracy by giving you the unvarnished facts in news reports that you can trust.’
Good one!
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
“I grade this paper an -F “.
“The pupil was inattentive, improper and misdirected preparation for exam, did not show her workings, is unaware of historic detail, gives a slanted and biased view of the subject matter, and her summation was sloppy and slapdash”.
” I would add that she had slipped from the standards set last year, but that would not be true”.
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Phew! Though at first ‘this paper’ was my report! A guilty conscience?
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Alternative headline: “JS confirms that individual teachers will have only say over pupils’ exam grades”
But, but, but … ‘postcode lottery’; ‘grade inflation’; ‘devalues the qualification’; ‘open to abuse’, ‘teachers’ pets to win out’, ‘makes mockery of any appeals system’ ….. ‘is SQA even worth tax payers’ money now it’s abandoning traditional moderation role’ etc. etc. etc.!
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Mr Swinney is simply stating what has been the SQA’s and its predecessors’ procedures for decades. There has always been and has to be a moderation procedure to ensure that the criteria have been met, by teachers. I undertook moderation duties on a number of occasions, and, sadly, some teachers were simply not assessing according to the criteria or were applying the criteria inconsistently. Rather than fail the pupil automatically, moderators would review the work submitted, Mark it according to the criteria and adjust the grade. Sadly, this resulted in some students being given a fail.
What was galling in some cases was that the pupil had done her or his best based on erroneous material presented by the teacher. Most teachers are rigorous in their approach and their schools have good cross checking procedures before work is submitted for moderation.
This is a mendacious non story by an ignorant vindictive party hack.
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Once more a memorably-worded summation.
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I see ‘will’ in the headline and ‘could’ in the main body of the article which suggests flexibility and as for the inferior reporting, same as per usual.
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