iGCSEs

Piggy - that's nuts.

Marching frogs - one takes girls in for 6th form but 99% of the boys stay on. Joiners tend to be from all girls Indys -it isn't cheap. IMO 6th form isn't good value for money so if someone has good GCSEs from a state school why would they shell out £50k to move for 2 years?
And yes I am aware that lots of state school pupils get A*s at A level. But my point is that in a selective school everyone is going to sit A levels and go on to uni, so as GCSEs quickly become meaningless it makes sense to sit the exam that prepares you best for the important exams. Local grammar schools also sat IGCSE maths until they had to change and again I don't think that was because they wanted an easier option but because practically all of them go on to do A level maths. Selective schools, state or Indy, can make decisions best suited to their cohort.

Anyway, I don't think anyone sensible is going to believe that this year Brighton College should have better GCSE results than Westminster, regardless of any nonsense they come out with.

Mine will take a mix of GCSE (various boards) and igcse.
Looking through the syllabi they look pretty similar in level, but I have only looked and not studied them at length though.

cake although the speaking is now separately reported if you don't do it, they claim you won't be awarded your actual GCSE/ IGCSE ...

coursework in more recent pre reform GCSEs was basically an exam . It all had to be done at school, supervised , and in silence. Not so with IGCSE.

I am in SW london and these same selective Indys are the top performing schools at A level in the country. So obviously these schools are choosing courses which are rigorous and a good preparation for A levels,

Do they not admit external candidates into the the 6th form? Or only those who have taken iGCSEs, so as not to risk diluting their results with the inevitably lower achievements of students who took inferior public exams at 16?

State school kids do get multiple A*s at A level, too, despite the crap GCSEs they have been forced to take.

There are definitely some private schools that allow 2 single separate iGCSE sciences, as I've some pupils doing those. It doesn't seem fair to compare that with GCSE double science. Both valuable options, but very different from each other.

GCSEs have only recently started to be more important for uni admissions since they scrapped AS levels and unis don’t have any actual sixth form results to go on.

Wasn’t

Unis go on A levels, exam boards options for those are the same for private or state, afaik.

Prior to the new style 9-1 maths GCSEs , the iGCSE was a lot harder, the old Maths GCSEs seemed to have been dumbed down year on year until recently. So it was ‘fair’ then either.

There’s no reason universities shouldn’t accept it. And they will have to accept it from some students. It would be a bit odd to say it’s fine for X group of students to have iGCSE but Y group can’t.

The random allocation of what the government decides to measure schools on doesn’t really have a great deal to do with uni admissions anyway.

Can see why this issue has been so widely reported. It isn't fair. I hope they do something about it.

Yes I just looked it up, its still running for current students. The speaking and listening don't contribute to your result but you can have a separate certificate! Why would you bother doing it? And then everyone sits the first paper 50% of the mark, and there is an option for a second paper or you can opt to submit a portfolio of 3 pieces of work instead.
Before the GCSEs were reformed was there an option to do an exam instead of coursework or was coursework compulsory? because if there wasn't I can see why a school may favour the IGCSE.

university.which.co.uk/advice/gcse-choices-university/how-important-are-my-gcse-grades

Says here GCSE results can be crucial for many degree applications.

My DS has just done the new English igcses with Edexcel both with coursework.

Yes cake : one comprehension style exam with some transactional writing and three bits of coursework iirc.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-40418457

Again I don't know any of the local Indy schools that will allow you to only sit 2 science IGCSEs. The dual science award is paper 1 of all 3 sciences and that is sat as standard for anyone opting out of triple science. It is one of my many complaints about education today that someone like me who just couldn't do chemistry would have to struggle with it nowadays.

Piggy - was there no final exam at all on the Cambridge course because that just sounds silly.

I thought GCSEs do matter now and are counted. Happy to be told otherwise though.

I don't think universities are all that concerned with GCSEs really. It's A-levels that matter.

Not really fair is it.

Surely unis should just accept one qualification, the GCSE and the GCSE only. Accepting exams that skirt round and benefit in anyway is surely not on if the benefit is one only the rich who have access to private schools can access.

Just makes the unfair private school advantage even bigger.

The English IGCSE with coursework was the widely popular Cambridge IGCSE if I recall. Three bits of coursework, plus a speaking and listening component.

and yes, it's the independent schools that are sticking with the iGCSEs instead, particularly maths, but also in science, as they seem to be allowed to offer two full sciences independently (e,g. just biology and chemistry, as full GCSEs, no physics, no double science, no combined, no triple, etc).

The maths one seems somewhat easier, to my mind. (the 9-1 igcse). The questions seems to be worded more straightforwardly, and they only have to do two papers, both with calculators and with forumla sheets. They have a few additional topics (basic differentiation, for example), and some fewer ones (completing the square, etc). For the pupils that I teach, the iGCSE seems to fit better with their strengths, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be harder for others.

All of our local selective Indys sit mainly IGCSEs. There is no course work options at any of them except for Art and PE, so I don't know how these other schools managed to find courses that included it, and I suspect they may be non-selective schools looking to bump up their results.

I am in SW london and these same selective Indys are the top performing schools at A level in the country. So obviously these schools are choosing courses which are rigorous and a good preparation for A levels, particularly because GCSEs are of no importance whatsoever to top-performing students once they have progressed to post A levels.

Brigton College is a selective Boarding school. It is well aware that the top performing schools against which they should be comparing results will have followed the more vigorous options as the best preparation for A level.

DS sat 2 language IGCSEs, which he studied over years and a language GCSE that he studied over 1 academic year. The difference between the 2 exams was ridiculous. He has an A* in a language at GCSE that he doesn't actually know a word of. For GCSE the students are even told the essay title in advance so they can prepare for it (learn it off by heart). It is madness that he has the equivalent qualfication as for the other 2 when he had to work so hard for them. He is still fuming about it.

Having experienced both in English, iGCSE was easier thane the old English GCSE and also easier (albeit weirder) than the new one -and included coursework. Lots of comps enthusiastically adopted iGCSE English when they realised it was - statistically speaking- easier. Some schools messed up the teaching and did woefully. Others got ridiculously high results (usually ones where there was a teacher experienced in delivery of iGCSE in all its whimsy) So the government scrapped them as a performance measure.

In the two years we delivered it, the students who did iGCSE (anyone from set 3 and below) got better results than those doing GCSE , went on to do A Levels in English type subjects :and bombed (with ridiculously high target grades, of course). However, our uptake to A level was really high ; totally not the case in the first year post 9-1 GCSE.