Scrapping GCSEs

Now there I agre with you boschy. There is insufficient avneues for less academic pupils to take. Many are still forced into doing GCSEs. And to make sure they don't fail en masse we have made it much easier to pass.

but no one's trying to make them easier are they?

they're trying to create even earlier differentiation between academic/non-academic, without offering any solutions/possible routes to those who are not academic at the 'right' stage of their school career.

But boschy you can't make exams easier just so some DC don't feel bad. It serves no one.

I have twins. O understand how one doesn't want a child to feel more inferior than the other.

But the current GCSEs are just not sufficiently challenging. This is why some schools now insist that in order to sit an A level one must have at least an A or A* in it. Bs and Cs are dismissed. Which is outrageous.

Chatting to a couple of year 11s recently about their Spanish orals and they called it 'a joke'. They were told the questions in advance .

"GCSES ARE too easy. How anyone cannot get at least a C is unbelievable."

bijou that's fantastic that it's really easy peasy for your 10 year old. Lucky you and lucky DC.

I have a below average 15 yo DD who has just sat maths GCSE in Y10; I wish you luck telling her that it was that easy. or do you think that some DC are just stupid?

I have a DD who will be in the first cohort for the new exams.
I also work in education.
I was one of the first years to take GCSEs.

For the sake of the students taking them I am terrified about the new proposals.

I remember when taking my GCSEs the teachers were unprepared, this had a direct and detrimental effect on results.

The government is trying to push these proposals through so quickly it will be very difficult to
i) set up a new examination board (or merge some)
ii) write the syllabus anew
iii) ensure the new syllabus is a viable working model
iv) then roll this out to ensure all examination boards, teachers, exam markers and other professionals know the new syllabus thoroughly not just having read the booklets (of which there are invariably many)

I would say it takes 3 years for a course to run to find the 'snags' in it and make the tweaks needed.
So my daughter and thousands like her will be an educational guinea pig.

Also, the GCSEs were changed last year anyway!
There has been a phased reduction in 'modules'.
In the new syllabus' I've seen the courses are already more challenging and the testing more robust.

I, along with many education professionals I know agree that the GCSEs which were running until recently needed improvement in terms of challenge and reward for more able students.

But the reintroduction of a O level style exam will be a nightmare.

I do heartily agree that there should be a SINGLE exam board - nay, exam - for the core subjects. It's no surprise that there has been "a race to the bottom" with exam boards wooing schools with how better results can be achieved with their particular GCSE.

And it ever thus. I remember in the 1980s my school boasting that they chose the hardest board for each subject . They said that universities knew . Yeah, right.

And what did you have to get a C at O level?

Seeker, take GCSE maths for example, to gain a C its just basic maths skills, even my 10 year old got most of the questions right on a practice paper.

Yes, my dp did NatSci at Cambridge with a fair amount of maths and finds dd's maths questions challenging quite often. They do things he didn't do until A level, actually.

I think English GSCE and A levels are pretty crap though, I must admit, and I do agree with the report yesterday that said emotional response was prized too highly over critical reading. This is why I get students endlessly banging on about what the reader might think in the reader's own mind and how the text makes the reader feel, but can't do close reading for toffee.

Differences between IGCSE and GCSE AQA Chemistry is astounding - IGCSE is far more complex

I sat O'levels in the 80's
My DD is currently sitting IGCSE's - I fail to see how they are dummed down. They are just as robust - in fact more so.

"GCSES ARE too easy. How anyone cannot get at least a C is unbelievable."

People say this all the time. I actually don't know if true or not. What makes you think that?

My dp has a physics PhD and he was pretty impressed by the level of maths and physics dd has been doing. History and English- my subjects- looked OK to me, although I don't think the English involved enough different texts. I can't actually remember whether I did more at O level, because I sometimes misremember a level stuff as O level.

GCSES ARE too easy. How anyone cannot get at least a C is unbelievable.
The brightest children and the children that struggle are always left out. Schools should be open during the summer for children that fail end of year tests to keep standards up as much as possible. Attitudes also need to change, so many children think its not cool to do well at school, this attitude needs to change. Parents should also be taught the best way to help their children at home.

Whilst I agree that change needs to happen, I am completely opposed to the return of the 'O' level which will just create a two tier system and penalise disadvantaged children.

There will also be a mess when it is introduced. Dh was in the first intake to take GCSEs he failed Maths, got a 'U' grade, he needed Maths A level so studied for it via distance learning and achieved an A grade. At university he was awarded a prize for achieving the highest mark in his Maths module. He has an A at A level, has now studied Maths as a module in his masters degree and yet he failed Maths GCSE. I was in the second intake and people who were expected to do well were failing random subjects. It was years before the teachers/examiners got to grips with it. Why should our children have to go through the same?

Make sure the grade boundaries are sensible, scrap all the module resits and the GCSE will be more rigorous. No need to introduce a whole new qualification.

At a risk of being accused of banging my particular drum again- in selective areas( and there will be more of them under this government, mark my words) guess which schools will be doing the lower tier exams........

But I do agree there are too many resits, especially at A level, and this gives students at university some very unrealistic ideas. They do seem to take it for granted they can have another bash if they don't do very well the first time, and are quite upset that they can't.

I think it's too swingeing and undoubtedly not been properly thought through...

I do think there is a case for a single exam board - it's daft that you can pick good subjects and get good grades and then find that some admissions tutors will think the exam board used wasn't good enough, and not fair since children have no say in it.

I don't know whether a single exam is always the best way to measure everything, although taking exams isn't a bad skill to have. However with maths, dd has been doing exams throughout year 10 and notching up her grades as she goes, and I think it's been very good - they'll be done with it early and are starting on further maths, which I don't suppose you could do if everything was focussed on one exam next June.

It isn't quite true that parents and teachers can help in advance - IME a controlled assesment is just that (dd has one today, I'll ask her this afternoon). And her French teacher was telling me how hard it is when you want to help but know you can't.

I also think continual assesment at some level - ie doing things that matter and are going to actually count - throughout years 10 and 11 is a good thing in terms of maintaining focus and commitment, whereas if it's all working up to June of year 11, you presumably risk losing more of them along the way.

I do feel for dd2 who'll do hers in summer 2016 though. I guess even if this shower have gone by then (which I doubt) things will be fucked up beyond repair for a while.

speaking as someone who did one year and a half of some o levels, then got dropped to cses i can categorically say it's a shite idea for people who fall in the middle! the cse coursework was completely different to o levels!

In the world out there, O levels have never gone away, and there are iGCSEs too. Nothing to stop schools lobbying for access to "proper O levels" and recently iGCSEs access was extended to state schools. Perhaps school departments should opt for these, stable, products to manage the uncertainty of a new experiment? Their "quality" is viewed positively.

I wish for a world where technical and practical talent could be sought and nurtured/ disciplined into a worthwhile future for those who don't fit as well in an academic place. Meanwhile, the possible challenges in academic assessment that are proposed are relatively easy to address, IMHO.

I have a dd who will be in the first year of the new qualifications and I think it is a complete nightmare. Firstly, the Tories will almost certainly be out of office by 2016, so the new, probably Labour , govt, will enter to be faced with some half-started and totally undesired changes. If they then try to return to GCSs it will be a complete shambles. Plus the dates state that those doing exams in 2016, like my dd, will sit new Maths, English and Science O levels, but no mention of other subjects, whic apparently 'won't be ready'. But GCSEs won't be recognised. So what exactly will they be sitting in other subjects??

Plus one exam board sounds very nice in subjects where there is an agreed universal body of knowledge, like maths, say. But what about subjects like English or History? Will all pupils across the UK have to read th same 3 books or study the same 2 periods of history or whatever? Doesn't sound very desirable.

And all this is happening at the same time that A Levels are being revised! Poor secondary school teachers, they won't know whether they're coming or going.

tectime - I've taught lots of Chinese and other Far Eastern people doing Masters here and the average standard is far lower than UK students at the equivalent level - don't beleieve everything you read about needing to compete with the threat from the far east. In most of those countries, their derees are only about equivalent to our Levels in standard.

I don't see what's so fantastic about O Levels - I was the last year to do them and on the whole, I think GCSEs are better - particularly insofar as they are one qualification only, so candidates aren't labelled as inferior by being made to sit a lower qualification, as used to happen with O Levels and CSEs. Plus in some subjects, like history, which went from being rather easy rote learning to skills-based, I think the GCSEs were actually much harder and more stretching. Certainly my dd's lessons generally seem to teach at a higher level than my (top of the league tables) grammar did back when I was at school.

Those who focus on dumbing down now seem to have an unduly rosy-eyed view of education in the past. The truth was it was pants and a shockingly high proportion of school leavers left with NO QUALIFICATIONS AT ALL. Which is probably what Gove and the Tories want - to ensure that our proles stop being so uppity and aspiring to ideas above their station, like university. They should eat their gruel and work for free and be grateful for it.

Change of name so anything harder is understood - good

Expecting 75% of children to sit them. - I think not. Im my time (O level era) about 20% sat them. About 60% did CSE and 20% left school sitting nothing.

Having CSE being functional skills based and O levels academic will kill the opportunitues of the late starter or those with a poor primary base education because the decision on which to study for will have to be made much earlier.

He needs to sort Primary education first. - Otherwise the transition requirements will be too great.

He needs to allow one year sixth form to cover O levels for those who do CSEs under the new system - to allow for late starters to recover to O level standard.

The speed of change - considering the next two years is already an unknown for current year 9 children - will cause errors to be made. It needs time as, with time, it is possible the current GCSE structure could be maintained and stabilised in grades and the current iGCSE or international O level be tweaked to be used as an 'extended paper'. It would save a huge cost doing that.

I copmpletely support it, and have DC who wll begin GCSEs in 2014 ie the first year this comes into force.

I know their year will be a tough one, but I still think it's worth it. W
Why?
Because I want their O levels to mean somehting. I want them to be an indication of intelligence and commitment.

These days we all know that a GCSE can be got in a numbe rof ways.
Exam board cherry picking.
Modules.
Resits of modules.
Assessment ie you write an essat, your parents check it, your teacher marks it, then you learn it offby heart and regurgitate it.
Orals where you know in advance what the questions will be.

It's a farce!

Children are capable of so much more than this.

I actually feel elated by the new changes. We will now be able to hold our own with our Far Eastern (more hungrier) competitors.

My tuppence:
People easily forget the drawbacks of old-style O-levels/IGCSEs.
As a foreigner I've always thought the old system (so much pressure on the end & mega-cramming, I have seen it in action at Uni 17 yrs ago & recently with friends' DC who only do IGCSEs) was and is a loony system to measure attainment & ensure knowledge retention.
I cannot see why old-style is automatically guaranteed to be more rigorous.
DC (includes current y5 & y7) will do alright with either system, I suppose, so can't be bothered to care that much any more.
I'm not afraid of change-over, I think the draft proposal should not have been leaked, though, let them think the details thru next time before the proposal gets publicly debated.