Scrapping GCSEs

Beingfluffy I agree with your comments on the Far East education system. I have taught A level Chemistry to students from these countries and they are used to memorising large amounts of work and can repeat this (including on an exam) without really understanding it. They often have better mathematical skills than GCSE students but are much poorer at questions that require analysis and interpretation of data. These type of analytical questions are the type of skill that Scientists require in the real world.
The other thing that nobody has mentioned yet is that the number of O levels usually taken was much more limited than GCSEs. At my school you were limited to taking 8 subjects at 16 (there were options to take up to 2 additional subjects in the sixth form). This meant that pupils were encouraged to specialise very early and many students stopped studying Science (apart from Biology) at 14. If you were studying 3 Sciences then you could not fit in a subject such as History, Music or a second MFL. At GCSE pupils can study a larger number of subjects up to the age of 16 and this seems to provide a more balanced education.

"And bollocks to you liberals out there".

(Bangs head against the wall).

I totally agree that the current maths GCSE doesn't stretch the most able. As the higher tier paper has to cater for students down to C grade, there isn't enough space on the paper to put enough tough questions on.

What we need is a three tier system in maths. A paper for the weakest (let's call it Foundation), a paper for the middle students (let's call it Intermediate) and a paper for the strongest students which concentrates on the toughest topics (let's call it Higher).

Oh wait, we had that until, what, five years ago? And maths teachers have been bemoaning its loss and calling for its return since, complaining that maths was now not challenging enough for the most able? They wanted Foundation students to be able to get a C and instead of just adding that for exceptional performance at the bottom end, they buggered up the top end.

FFS. There are things that could be done to improve the system without completely throwing it away.

Tectime, I certainly hope you don't come to regret your words. I sat O' levels during the so called Golden Age and I can tell you they were basically a memory test. If you did no work during the course and crammed the night before you could get good grades - I am proof! It is good for lazy people who have the ability to memorise and write woffle in a convincing way for two hours but not necessarily for the average hard working studious person.

We must be lucky, I have come across one or two teachers in the state sector I disliked due to personality but I have never encountered an incompetent teacher in my own state school days or in my daughter's state schools. I did come across incompetence in the private sector; but paying peanuts attracts monkeys I suppose.

My DD has just done her GCSEs, they test in much more breadth and depth than O' levels ever did. She has also done 11, more than the 8, I sat which was standard in those days. We are both grammar school girls!

In respect of your earlier posts about the superiority of the Far East's education system - I previously worked at a well reputed Uni in central London. I found many students from that region to be utterly incapable of analysis and forming their own opinions, all they could do was memorise and regurgitate. We tried to help them but it was often too late to develop those skills. While saying that, most of them passed because the Uni wanted the overseas rate fees! Which is another scandal quite frankly.

My sister has taught and is currently an academic author (in English) working in a Far East country. Her experience is that the day to day teaching is often poor and secondary age kids (apparently the majority) have to go to night classes to cram for their exams.

What I don't understand is that if this really would be a 'return to O-levels' and the new exams would be of the same level of difficulty as the old O-levels, then how, under the new system, would 75% of children be expected to cope with these O-levels when in the olden days only 20% of children could?

Is this a tacit admission that children these days really are cleverer than in the 50s?

I have already mentioned that the return of the "O" is fantastic news for England. Good riddance to the GCSE. I certainly do hope that the Government provides teachers with better resources and also elevates the status and payof teachers. Education is after all an investment. There are as many dross teachers as there are competent ones. A lot of the teachers I have met have been highly comptent; about 30% need to be weeded out of the profession.

I am delighted that my Primary school children will sit O'Levels, as did I. And bollocks to you liberals out there!!!!!

From next year, GCSEs will not be modular. There's no need to return to an O level to make that happen. It has happened.

pointy/giraffe

I did 'O' level in 1981 and it was definitely harder than the questions in the Guardian. The ones shown were from the start of the paper and questions got harder as you progressed. As far as I'm aware the main difference in maths is that 'O' level included Calculus (but with our Board it was one of the 'optional' topics) and GCSE doesn't (although IGCSE does!)

I don't know about O-levels so can't comment but they have clearly only selected questions that they could type easily which restricts them from the start! You can actually click on the links in the article and see the GCSE papers yourself to see how selective they've been. But as a quick guide, the hardest question they've selected from the higher tier paper is Q19 of 27 on a paper where the hardest questions are at the back.

giraffe I actually find that really reassuring - apparently the Mail did something very similar. Would you say that the same thing applied with the old O levels, i.e. that the easy questions came at the beginning and things then got progressively tougher? As I've said before, DD1 had a look at the 1985 O-level sample questions and worked out the answers just like that, but obviously they came from the beginning of the paper. I would hope that there would have been more challenging material in the O-level paper (and I believe you when you tell me this certainly applies to the higher GCSE paper).

I am at how misleading that Guardian article with sample questions from GCSE papers is. Whoever wrote it appears to have just opened the exam paper at the first page and copied out the first few questions. The questions listed for the higher paper don't get any more difficult than an easy B grade. Obviously anyone with a decent maths background but no real experience of maths GCSE is going to look at those questions and say 'how easy, GCSEs are rubbish'. The questions get harder as you go through the paper, with the A and A* questions nearer the back, but apparently the Guardian writer didn't get that far.

tortu I agree with you - assessment needs to cover all the learning involved in a particular subject, not just cramming. In a subject like English we should be assessing writing (in many forms, from factual essays to business letters to fiction), the analysis and appreciation of literature and poetry, comprehension of complex texts, spelling, grammar, punctuation and of course the spoken language as well. The much maligned skill of 'persuasive writing' which someone on a parallel thread was railing against is actually one of the cornerstones of, say. writing a really good covering letter for a job application. Just ever so slightly useful in real life, in fact.

Everything Gove does is done with 1950s blinkers on. Even if a few of his ideas have merit, and they probably do, the whole is just another scattergun approach with little research and solid thought about it. The speed with which he wants to bring all this in alone is enough to make me despair.

Well said tortu.

He is the only man on this planet who, every time I see, the word wanker escapes from my mouth.

pointy the history the exam
boards offer has a heavy 20th century bias. From World War 1 to the Arms Race. Within these specs, you pick the units which appeal to you most. We, however, do Medicine Through Time and the American West. I bloody love it.

To be fair to the exam boards, you have to be qualified in history to mark exam papers and I am currently commencing my own marking marathon for the exam board.

For pupil to engage with and understand history they have to see the big picture through constant themes such as power, the monarchy and movement and |settlement of empire. If Gove has his way and I have to teach a string of dates and events, pupils will disengage from history pretty rapidly.

And breathe.

I am already angry at this idiot who is leading (messing up) our exam system. Yes there is a need for some changes, but THERE WAS A REASON WE DROPPED O-LEVELS IN THE FIRST PLACE, YOU IDIOT!

The man is a complete gimp. Really.

I'm not going to try to argue with the random, anecdotal evidence and assumptions on this thread (sigh), but I really can't believe that our Education Minister is deliberately ignoring all of the research carried out in the past five decades or so.

Basically though, exams favour the way in which a minority study and learn. They favour bullshitting boys who do nothing for two years and cram at the last minute. In my own subject (English), the exams are actually the easiest component of the course. They do not favour the careful study of girls and don't actually teach children how to write well.

Oooo he annoys me. He really does think that we should just dump 90% of the population.

crazymum when I did my A-levels in the Netherlands, assessment of Dutch literature was in two stages: an oral exam with my own teacher assisted by a colleague, and an essay under exam conditions. This essay was set individually and based on the reading list I'd chosen, which had to include five works of fiction either by one author or on a particular theme (the latter would earn you more marks) plus secondary literature study.

The essay was then marked by my own teacher and sent away to another school where it was marked by a teacher who had never met me, and the mark averaged.

This is clearly labour and resource-intensive but the way the system was set up meant there was thorough benchmarking all the way through.

In MFL exams the literature exams were marked internally and were oral (i.e. a French literature exam would be about the reading list and would be conducted completely in French). We were also required to write a 400 word essay in the language we were studying, which was marked on content, spelling, grammar and punctuation. By the time the central MFL exam rolled round (which would be multiple choice text comprehension) we were all quite looking forward to it because it was a walk in the park compared to what had gone before.

I think internal assessment with benchmarking has a lot going for it in subjects where there isn't necessarily a 'right' answer. I disagreed fiercely with my examiners about Slaughterhouse 5 but was able to argue my case using my understanding of the book and so got the marks. This kind of exam really prepares someone for further education.

In Holland if you take the equivalent of A-levels, you bypass the equivalent of GCSE completely, but friends of mine who were in that stream worked in a similar structure, but with less demanding content.

ellie I don't know enough about the history syllabus in the UK and I didn't take history in the Netherlands... I do know that history in the Dutch system = 20th century history and focuses very heavily on politics and the mechanisms of the modern state.

I do know that I would find it difficult to handle a system where one exam board focused on the Reformation, WW1 and its causes and the Enclosure Act while another tested knowledge of the feudal system, the social and economic underpinnings of the emergence of early states and the Restoration. As a teacher I wouldn't know where to start or what to choose. I think that's the problem - history is such a huge subject.

Having said that, I think that as you say the key to teaching and assessing history well is not reeling off lists of dates and memorising Kings and Queens, which seems to be what Michael Gove wants. To my mind, history is meant to hold up a mirror to ourselves and teach us to think critically about the choices our ancestors made, the reasons behind those choices and the assumptions underlying the way society worked in the past. That kind of teaching is probably not tied to any particular period of history at all. However, handling history in that way would imply gasp trusting schools and teachers to do their job. Assessment would also have to be done by people with at least some understanding of the subject rather than someone doing piecework with a mark scheme on their desk.

mumzy I suspect that some GCSEs don't match up, most likely those relating to languages and literature. As I have said on a different thread, I'd want to see a wide range of suggested whole texts, going from the 21st century backwards, including poetry, plays and prose, from which schools and/or students could choose to build a reading list. I don't actually trust Gove to do this either, he seems to have a severe case of heritage literature disease.

Am unsure about having one exam board - isn't this creating a monopoly. Having a common syllabus may work for Maths, and I would welcome a move back to separate Sciences, but do not see how this would work for subjects such as English Literature or History.
Also wordfactory the current changes in GCSEs are already addressing the issues regarding modular GCSEs and restricting resits. Declaring all resits as suggested by mumzy would reduce the number of re-sits considerably.

I've spent a fair bit of time with year 11s recently and they'll often say of a course 'Oh I only need to get x or y to get an A*' becauae they've already banked good marks in their modules.

Also Wordfactory, all Olevels and Alevel resits had to be declared and your uni grade offer was usually higher if you had to resit any subjects

For all those who feel GCSEs are as hard as Olevels why do only A* and A grades matter for GCSEs whereas for Olevels even a C grade was very respectable? And no I don't believe we've been breeding geniuses over the past 20 years

fallen one of the main differences would be that in 1984 the students would have had one or two exams in their final year and that would give them their result.

They wouldn't have sat the paper in modules. Done assessments etc. And they certainly wouldn't have been able to resit little chunks of it along the way to improve their overall mark.

pointy i can see how one exam board would work for some subjects. Not sure how it would work for mine as we would all have to study the same bits of History and I think that would be a shame.

As for breadth. I would challenge anyone to cram in a couple of days for a history exam. We have chosen to stay linear despite modular exams being introduced as the level of thought required to attain the top grades often doesn't mature until Year 11. We too have no idea what will be on the exam papers and we have to cover everything that is on the exam syllabus despite Gove's assertion that we all teach to the test. I teach my pupils historical skills such as analysis and evaluation, I foster high level thinking. That is good teaching not teaching to the test. The knowledge needed to apply those skills is definitely something that cannot be crammed and it makes my blood boil when Gove suggests that's all we do. He would have us return to the old days when History was all about reciting dates. My pupils may forget dates sometimes but they can tell you why something happened or the impact it had. And that is what history is all about if it is too have any relevance to pupils.

Ventral surface.

And there's a word I've had to add to dictionary...