Are you prepared for exam results to fall?

EdithWeston - I definitley agree we should have normalised 'bell curve marking' back again. The top 20% get A, the next 25% get B the next 25% get C and so on as we did in my day.

I also think we should have one national exam in each subject.

Thanks for explaining NobleGiraffe.

It still seems to me that most subjects are not becoming more difficult and becoming linear at the same time. So with the exception of Geography and Maths, year 9s are not all having all the changes thrown at them. The changes are being staggered.

DS is doing a pilot maths GCSE anyway, so I don't even know that they are going to change the pilot.

I think that is a fair comment about Gove, that is after all, what his experience of eduction and what he personally found successful.

I, as a teacher, am mainly concerned about the transition. This is because I feel as though I have been reacting to this change and that ever since I started teaching twenty years ago.

About very 2-4 years so education minister or other comes up with some initiative that they will 'fix' education with.

However, I do have concerns about those less academic kids, as the curriculum shrinks, both in the range of different types of course available and the option choices they can make.

Thanks for such a straight, simple and professional answer, noble.

Which also seems to imply that Gove is trying to steer state education towards what fee-paying parents buy for their kids.

Is this bad, or is the worry about the transition? Because we managed the transition "downwards". If it's "wind-back" time, could we not work to get a system that is even better not just than this, but also the original one?

If we don't "wind-back", is the cost to us that the rest of the world has O levels and iGCSEs, while UK state education is a poor product?

So as to avoid the early adjustment period, why not move to the iGCSE, which is not changing? Or even O levels, which are still available in the full range of subjects and very well thought of?

"All the bloody tinkering does no good to anyone (except the textbook manufacturers)" aka the exam boards themselves; it's an overly intertwined system at the moment.

The best think to do now is move, lock stock and barrel, to the iGCSE. It's not an experimental system. It's not been fiddled with. It's not blighted by grade inflation. There are text books and the syllabus is well established and "proved" by use around the globe.

But teachers have never only taught part of the maths syllabus and it is all examined, and a new tougher maths GCSE has already been introduced, leaving me (and many others) wondering what the hell is going on. It is very demotivating to constantly think we have a handle on the situation only to have the rug pulled from under us again.

hear, hear. That's exactly what is happening. As a science teacher, I have never only taught parts of the syallbus and would be amazed if any teacher in any subject could get away with risking that!

I really should proof read more often

I also wanted to add that when i did my O levels, they may or may not have been tougher but....my teachers certainly understood how the exams worked and had past papers going back 15 or 20 years. They would coach me in what the style of the questions would be and also how regularly certain topics came up. With question spotting like that, you could be fairly certain of what you were facing.

So trying to help students do their very best by becoming exam-savvy is really not that new.

The best thing that Gove or anyone else could do would be to just leave the current system alone for a few years to give teachers and students a chance to get to grips with it. All the bloody tinkering does no good to anyone (except the textbook manufacturers).

A big fat amen to that!!! I teach science and we have had 2 mjor changes to the course in the last year. made all the harder becuase our school runs a 3 year KS4.

One planned for and we knew was coming but we are adjusting to, which is the new style of questios that require greater analysis of data (which my top set described as just common sense really ). We are yet to see the impact of these changes requested by universities and science societies.

The other not planned for, which is the announcement that science will suddenly go linear. This means the mix and match modular system 9and the thinking behind it providing flexibilty as a child develops) has gone out of the window on a single announcement. Who knows what those exams will be like or how many there will be!

Its not just about making me not teach to the exam, its about me being able to advise parents which course or tier of entry their child is most suited for. Becuase I no longer know!!

And now we have grade deflation

enough already!!

(ps very impressed at the number of parents who are willing to sacrifice their children for this experiemnt! I wouldn't)

Oh, and the private sector who went IGCSE years ago....

I teach science in an independent school. We opted out of the science GCSE fiasco a couple of years ago, and now teach IGCSE. Looks like we made a sensible decision.

The best thing that Gove or anyone else could do would be to just leave the current system alone for a few years to give teachers and students a chance to get to grips with it. All the bloody tinkering does no good to anyone (except the textbook manufacturers).

I'm sitting on the fence here, and I have a year 9 ds.

I'd like the exams to be harder and for there to be final examinations. Modular exams - ludicrous. You might as well have a modular driving test: reversing one day, hill start the next, emergency stop following week... and as I read on here once, who on earth wants to be treated by a doctor who gained his qualification at the 32nd attempt?

But I would like the see the exams renamed. The current year 10s would take a huge en masse gap year so they could apply to university with their 15 A*s and look bloody brilliant compared with their year 9 rivals.

I am also concerned that some private schools are going to clean up - they have been doing the traditional exam twice a year thing all along and state school students have not been reared on unseen exams.

There is an awful lot of scaremongering on this thread.

I'd really like a clear explanation of what is going to happen and when.

I am assuming that for the syllabus taught from September 2012 there will be linear GCSEs.

I am assuming that the new, harder GCSEs are a separate issue that the government is going to bring in for the syllabus taught in September 2013.

I am getting the impression from this thread that part of them being harder is that longer, more essay type answers will be required. If that is the case, then it is surely bad news for boys, not girls as has been suggested here.

So I'd really like more information before making out that this is the end of the world. I don't believe for a moment that only 5% of pupils in the whole country are going to get C or above in their Science GCSE each year. Something has clearly gone wrong with that module; there is no way that percentage can be reflective of how difficult the new exams will be.

Only approximately the top 2% of pupils get 10 straight A*s now, so that's still pretty good.

I generally agree that a recalibration is no bad thing, and I think that the universities will cope fine - if they have 2,000 places to fill in a given year they're not going to suddenly say "sorry, only 500 of the applicants had our required grades this year, so we're sending three quarters of the staff on sabbatical", and they'll have enough data to understand the difference between a pre- and post-recalibration grade.

But employers aren't normally recruiting from a single year group, and they won't have as good an overview of what the changes mean so I'm much more worried about the effect on them.

And of course I wouldn't trust edexcel et al to recalibration their way out of a wet paper bag with calibration marks pre printed on it in indelible ink, so I'm suspecting that no matter how good an idea it is in theory, it'll be an almighty cockup in practice. I'm grateful that my eldest DC is a little younger than the cannon fodder.

I think the reason why I think it will be fine for my DC is that it will recalibrate and people will start to have more trust in the system.

An A will once again mean somehting special. A B will be pretty darn good.

10 A*s will mean the child is extraordinary as well it should.

I've a year 9 boy and I'm worried. There was a special parents' evening for his cohort, spelling out the school's concerns (voiced here by littentree, noblegiraffe, webwiz and others). His is a highly-motivated school, that prides itself on outstanding teaching, that goes far further than the exams, so I take their worries seriously.

Never mind the whole issue of a sudden re-calibration of the meaning/value of various grades (which I think will be an issue for a particular cohort), the exact syllabus of science and a few other subjects has not yet been finalised, to my knowledge.

Not good.

Yes, I can see where Mr. Gove is going; yes, it is crazy that you don't have to read whole books (though ds has read most of the books on the English syllabus, in their entirety already) but ... this is rather like performing a U-turn on a motorway.

And totally agree with whoever said that those doing IGCSE will be sailing past, looking at the carnage in the mirror.

Yes, I'm glad there are folks out there happy to sacrifice their own DC to this brave new world, so maybe I won't have to.

I don't think there's any doubt that 'things must change' but I'm not sure this is the way of going about it.

I agree noblegiraffe - the thought of DS being caught up in such an exam disaster is very worrying. The constant change in science GCSEs and how they are examined was already making teachers and children's lives difficult before the latest changes and one of my greatest frustrations with science gcses is the reliance on exam technique rather than scientific knowledge.

I don't have a lot of confidence in exam boards anyway after DD2 sat an A level maths paper last summer with a long impossible question on it

It's not really an experiment. It's a return to previous expectations.

Yes, there should be a "rebranding" so it's always obvious whether exams are pre- or post- revision.

But when I sat O levels, about the top 10% got As, and the next 10% Bs. Now 25% get A*/A, and the system is rapidly becoming meaningless.

Typical university offers in those days were BBC/BCC at A level. Everything will recalibrate.