To only now now realise that iGCSEs are harder than GCSEs...

I'm an invigilator, there are still IGCSES and normal GCSEs going on, just depends on the subjects.

I teach and examine both. IGCSE 9 in my subject is the equivalent of a GCSE 7.

This may well not be the case in other subjects. I have students who do GCSE in school and take IGCSE as private candidates and mostly, their grades bear this equation out.

There is also a lot of variation between the exam boards however despite them being theoretically the same standard.

All I know is my Dd still has numerous exams to go (French today eng lang and geog tomorrow more next week) her best friend at a private school doing igcses in similar subjects has finished!

Both mine did iGCSEs for sciences. They both continued with different sciences at A level. Both said that they had to go over content that they had done previously because those that had done GCSEs hadn't covered the material previously.

And?

in 2024 my dc did WJEC GCSE for all the sciences and got all A*. It adds nothing to this post.

I don’t know if iGCSE maths or GCSE maths is harder, but I do know that doing WJEC level 2 additional maths was useful for those going on to do A level maths and further maths.

In 2017 DS did AQA iGCSE for all the sciences and got all A*

Since the switch to 9-1, GCSEs have been harder. I don’t know anyone from either sector who thinks otherwise, including those who have taught and/or tutored both. FWIW I don’t blame private schools, who have the flexibility, for choosing the course likely to bring the better results. Any private school teachers I’ve spoken to about it have been candid about this!

I can say confidently that Geography iGCSE is much easier than the GCSE from the same exam board (Edexcel/Pearson) - both are ‘traditional’ content and assessment style roughly the same but iGCSE has about two-thirds of the content (possibly less!). I’ve taught both in recent years. The CIE International A Level in Geography is also very different - some harder bits of knowledge included in a few places but less content in total and no coursework which altogether makes it significantly easier, in my experience.

It’s true that it can be hard to compare as each exam board does things differently and, in principle, they are supposed to then end up with similar proportions of each grade. I’d prefer it if there was one exam board and no iGCSEs, personally. If you need something different for international schools, and private schools in the UK want to use them, that’s valid but it should be called something else. You shouldn’t be able to apply for the next stage (college, Sixth Form, university, etc.) with e.g. a 9 in an iGCSE Geography where you would have had a 6 in a ‘normal’ GCSE with the same amount of knowledge.

The school my ds started off at used to use IGCSE as they felt it prepared the students for A levels better. When the new GCSE's came in they almost entirely switched to the new ones.

English GCSEs are harder.

Around here a number of very competitive independent schools openly tell us parents that they pick the "easier" exam boards, and if that's iGCSE then they will do that. They definitely forum shop to maximise results, and will not use the same exam board for every subject.

It's openly an industry in getting the maximum number of top grades for their statistics and nothing about being prepared for the next level. It's always been that way even when I was at Uni. It was obvious which children had been spoon fed at school because they were totally unprepared for the course at university. The state school children that had managed to get the entry grades for the course were almost all much better prepared for independent study.

Maths teacher here, and I disagree that iGCSE's are always harder. There are topics in GCSE syllabus which aren't on iGCSE and vice versa, and boards may format questions differently. Schools teach according to the style and material required for their particular exam and board, so someone looking at an iGCSE paper might think it's harder when in fact they're just used to a different type of question.

Our school did a mix of both. History was typically GCSE and French was typically iGCSE, for example. Geography, Art, Computer Science etc they could choose depending on the schedule. Whether one was ‘easier’ than the other is hard to judge considering the exam changes from year to year. It’s curved anyway, so if one exam students do better in because it’s ‘easier’ the same proportion should get the relevant grades anyway.

@MissyB1 ,

That sounds like a really inexperienced tutor.

As someone who taught IGCSES for years, I always looked at questions from GCSEs and a variety of boards to give my pupils a look at different styles etc.

And my last school Maths department were one of the last to teach GCSEs and they were thinking of moving to the IGCSE paper to make it easier.

Ds is currently sitting igcse edexcel maths. His tutor (who works in a state school, and had never seen an igcse paper before he started tutoring ds) says its a much harder maths paper than the standard GCSE. He says some of the questions are close to A level standard.

Can you specify what subjects you feel are harder? Because it’s fairly well known that they aren’t.