To wonder about CSEs v O Levels

I remember my teacher saying back in the 70s that 5 olevel passes put you in the top 15% educationally.

I did O levels with the Joint Matriculation Board and the grades were also 1-9 with 1-6 being a pass and 7-9 a fail. I posted this on another thread and met with disbelief.

S levels were around until 2001.

Oh yes! I remember people doing “one year sixth”!!

S levels were still around in the 1980s. I took s level German and English.

Back in the late 50s, my parents didn't just do A Levels in Sixth Form, they did S Levels as well!!!

You could only stay on if you passed English and maths and your A level subjects

Fail maths and you were out

I do object to the term 'so old'!

Of an age would do.

I am not So Old.

They did.

And quite a lot (I believe) of some of today's A-levels were studied at O-level back in my day

And this is also why not so many went to university

GCSEs replaced O levels and CSEs

Why does it matter?

Richard Branson has 1 O level.

Yes this.

I was in the first year to do GCSEs so we did a lot of O level practice papers as well as the specimen GCSE ones the exam boards sent out.

They were different - but not necessarily easier. I think it depended on the subject and how you prefer to be assessed - I was better at exams than coursework.

I did 8 GCSEs and think I did better at Maths and Chemistry than I would have done at O level, but think I would have done better at English lit and Music if I'd done O level. The rest I think I'd have got the same grades.

They gradually changed them and they were easier (I did another one at my local college about 10 years later) and then of course Gove came along and made them harder again.

I did O levels at a comprehensive in the early ‘80s. I did ten subjects - about maybe 20 pupils took ten - and got all As. Quite a few - maybe five or so- would get all As, but not lots. The maximum number of timetabled subjects was nine. The extra tenth one, Additional Maths, we did at lunchtime.

I did 6 O levels in the early 1980’s. DH got 10 O levels aged 14 and then took his 4 A levels aged 16, he went to Cambridge and also did his PhD there as well. This was very much a bog standard comp. I was in set 2 for everything out of six sets and then there was the remedial set as it was known so seven sets all together.

Whereas I would have considered the maths, additional maths and Chemistry as light relief

I took O levels in the days of 1-9 grading. We were allowed very little in the way of ‘options’, the only choice was between Chemistry and Art 😬
The Art teacher told me I would be choosing Chemistry 😏 so I sat English Language, English Lit, Maths, Additional Maths, French , History, Geography, Biology, Physics and Chemistry. No light relief at all.

5 academic O levels including English and Maths was considered a great result. You could train to be a teacher or solicitor with these passes. I went to a convent school and my friends at the grammar school used to sneer at me until I got better O levels than they did. French was much like A level and a lot of the Maths is now just A level. Having taught GCSE I agree that most of them are very watered down from O level. Those who went to a school that only did CSE were hugely disadvantaged. From friends' experiences it was really difficult to achieve the top grade that gave them an O level equivalent.

Impossible to say if he was below average. As he didn't sit the exams.

Academic achievement has nothing to do with intelligence.

Up to about 15 per cent by the mid 80s when I went.

I did O levels in 1983. I went to a Sheffield comp with about 220 in each year. I’d say anyone below the second set did at least some CSEs, set 5 and below would have only done CSEs. DH did CSE German but was top set for sciences. Some of my mates were double entered- parents had to pay the second exam fee.

We were told that CSE grade 1 was equivalent to O level grade C.

Another reason why it's difficult to compare is that the marking has changed. O-levels, and possibly CSEs, were marked so that a fixed percentage got each grade, say the top 5% an A, the next 10% a B and so on. But today's GCSEs are marked against a fixed standard. So someone with an A at O-level would be in the top few percent, which you couldn't necessarily say for someone with an A at GCSE - the proportion of candidates getting an A has been steadily rising.

Goodness, I'm a similar vintage to you and I've never heard of the 16+ exam! Wonder what happened to it?

Ours were all O-levels (with A to E grades, not the previous 1 to 9 system).

It would depend on his age and probably the school. I went to an 80s comprehensive. Many people did a mixture but if he only did 6 CSEs probably below average.

I'm interested in why you're asking the question OP, specifically about the brother?

I went to a 9-form entry comprehensive (270+ students), and was the last year to do o-levels. I remember the top-performing student got 7As, 1B, 1C that year. I imagine that now in a large comp, the top 4-5 performing students would be achieving 10-11 A* equivalents (ie grade 9). I do wonder how gcses and o-levels compare; and whether students are now taught / trained to do exams better, and have more resources (we just had our exercise books that we had written in for two years to revise from). Or whether they are just more intelligent, or if the exams are slightly easier? Actually I don’t think the exams are easier, from what I have seen at gcse now it seems to be less learning content by rote and regurgitating it in an exam, but manipulating the information / analysing etc, which are different skills to just being able to parrot the content! And physics A level is completely bonkers now - really weird and complicated questions that you have to try and unpick (eg a surgeon in a ship trying to amputate someone’s limb and the ship is rolling and you have to calculate various things in order to work out whether a or b would happen (2023 paper)). And the grade boundary for an A in physics in 2023 was approx 50 per cent. Which is crazy, as it means that a lot of people taking the a-level would struggle to achieve above 35-40 per cent!