to be a bit sick of people on here going on about how much harder GCSE's/O levels were in their day...blah blah blah...

[purplefish]

Some of us are very proud of our DC and know how hard they have worked to get the grades they got.

Agree with clumsymum and susitwoshoes.

Incidentally, I do remember being given past papers for practise at GCSE, but because we were only the second year to do them, they gave us old O level papers and they were definitely a lot harder than the GCSEs. I remember laughing in relieved horror with my mates that our exams wouldn't be as dry, complex and rigorous as the O levels. They seemed like too much hard work!

Here, for anyone interested, is an old French O level,
extras.timesonline.co.uk/mathsquest.pdf.

GCSEs may well have been introduced to be more inclusive but what they really seem to have achieved is to fail the high achievers who score the same grade as those less able. An equal exam system is simply not achievable because not all children are equal. Some are less bright than there and changing the exam system to embalm them to have a piece of paper with an A on it is doing them and others a disservice.

of course employers all want qualifications now. probably because in order not to have gained any, you must either be really non-academic or a complete and utter slacker.

And here is the higher French written paper for 2007 from AQA:
extras.timesonline.co.uk/mathsquest.pdf

lego - I have friends who teach secondary school and friends who are university lecturers. They all agree - unanimously - that exams are not only easier than in the days they took them but they are getting progressively easier. My friends who teach at undergraduate level despair because they have to dumb down the exercises they set for new students every year or so because so many of them just don't get what they're being asked to do. Of course, at degree level you have the whole foreign student issue which is a whole other topic of discussion (if you don't know about that - foreign students are a lot more lucrative to universities than domestic ones and so the entry requirements are lessened still further because the universities need the money the foreign students bring in because they are so horribly underfunded. In a very simplistic nutshell)

This is the thing that really pisses me off about this socialist ideological social engineering bullshit (and I speak as someone born and raised in a leftwing commune who is still a liberal pinko at heart)...loads of the Labour policy makers so keen to level the playing field by lowering the bar in this way enjoyed an excellent, free grammar school education, good free universities etc and now they want to pull the ladder up after themselves.

My dad was a working class shopkeepers son who got a place at grammar school and then Cambridge. He came from a family of penniless immigrants - can you imagine how hard it would be for a second generation asylum seeker to follow a similar path these days?

I agree that elitism fails the less able, but surely they could have come up with something better than this, which fails the able and the less able alike?

How hard would it be to get a decent grade in this excuse for a qualification? It is Travel and Tourism GCSE.

www.freeexampapers.com/download.php?l=GCSE/Travel%20and%20Tourism/AQA/2005%20Jun/AQA-3591F2-W-QP-JUN05.pdf&t1=2wflo53&t2=3160j693

I wonder about this, especially at this time of year.

I took my GCSEs in 1992. For me, they weren't hard and I could have done more than the 10 I did (which was what most people in my comprehensive school took). My English exams were 100% coursework which I think now was ridiculous - we had a folio of 10 pieces of work which gave us 2 grades.

My parents were until last year maths teachers. A level maths has got easier. Topics that were in single maths are now in Further maths and you can get a further maths a level without studying mechanics in depth. This didn't used to be the case.

I do not believe that there has been a vast improvement in the intelligence of people sitting exams. I do believe the teaching is more focussed to the exams. I also think that modular exams allow for a different technique and that being able to resit modules to get a better grade must affect results (as obviously it is meant to).

Not sure I have any point to make here . But this improvement can't go on for ever - it isn't possible surely.

you're right wildstrawberryplace, lots of these socialist luminaries send their own children to private schools, and make sure their children get internships at Credit Suisse First Boston, and then preach to everyone else the evils of grammar schools and private schools. They have removed the ladder from the poor, while riding on the gravy train themselves. Sometimes you have to wonder who they really work for, because it's not the people.

GCSE's are totally different to the O-Level. Not easier, harder, better or worse - just different.

It's an interesting debate, but what really annoys me is when you get a thread where parents are celebrating their childrens achievements and then the same people always come along (who haven't got kids sitting GCSE/A-Levels so they don't actually have a real grasp of what they are talking about ) pissing on peoples parades. Most unnecessary.

Ah but claig - they know what's right for the rest of us (speaking as a diehard labour supporter). I loathe Blairism - it took everything that was bad from both conservatism and labour and made it into an unholy mush of Bad.

I don't dispute that those who got 10 A*s deserved it. Well done for the hard work that your dcs have put in.

However as a teacher, I have seen what I believe to be core topics taken out of the syllabus and exam boundaries lowered over the last few years.

The pass mark for a GCSE grade C in maths on the upper tier paper is something like 20% and this was back in 2005.

If you look at many of the top schools, they are moving to IGCSE and IB. It's obvious that this trend will continue, because GCSE and A level have been undermined. Soon we will have a two-tier system, where the elite will do IGCSE and IB and the rest of the people will be stuck with a dumbed doen deliberately destroyed GCSE and A level system. Our formerly excellent A level system has been undermined. Who knows for what reason this was carried out?

GCSE's are totally different to the O-Level. Not easier, harder, better or worse - just different.

how do you justify that.How do you justify saying that GCSEs are not easier when all the educationalists on here are pretty much unanimous and unequivocal in saying they are.

Ok, if we accept that exams are getting easier (which I don't) then the next question is why? I don't believe the government had manipulated the exam boards in order to engineer this. So, the exam boards have just been setting easier and easier questions and excepting lower standards in course work?

O'levels and A'levels - they wern't harder- the marking was different and it meant they were harder to pass, as there were only so many % at A, B and then C

So if your year acorss the whole country was very clever etc you may fail but not now you pass as you should.

What it does mean that where as uni would pick the cream of the top as they got the top % with o'levels

now they don't get to pick the cream of the top and can't decide who to pick as instead of knowing if soemone got 99% in maths or 88% in maths they get a grde and that is why the uni's are compaling as they don't always get the right people and say standards are slipping - it isn't standards that are slipping it is marking that has changed

a level boundaries are nuts.

my DS got 72 out of 100 on maths, but because he didnt do well in the mechanics he got an E.

i think A levels are very hard compared to my day. degrees are easier than A levels.

I don't know about GCSEs but my daughter (14 and home educated) took a couple of IGCSEs this year and I can say that they seemed very similar in standard to the O levels I took. She had 3 exams for each, ranging from an hour to nearly 2 hours long, and they were very tight for time - she had to write like the clappers to get it all in.

One of the subjects she did was Geography, something I also did at school. I can say categorically that it was every bit as hard as the Geography O level was - very similar in some ways (river formations, erosion, weather) and quite different in others (immigration, urban sprawl, high tech industry). She knew it at least as well as I knew mine at 16 - probably better because I was a lazy toerag who mugged it all up the night before (having spent 2 years of Gepgraphy lessons on the piano!)

She got a B. The same grade as I got all those years ago.

Certainly I think pupils are better prepared than we were. I basically messed around for 2 years, spend a couple of weeks cramming my brain full of stuff, and came out with a very respectable set of O levels. I see the pressure todays kids are under and it's tremendous compared to the O level days.

Maybe GCSEs are easier/ marked easier, but I think it is sad that every year kids are made to feel their efforts are nothing compared to ours all those years ago.

If you want to do a valid comparison between O-Levels and GCSEs, you can't just shove a bunch of 35-to-40-year-olds a current GCSE paper and then snigger and say "I told you so" if they struggle with it.

Such a experiment would only be valid if you gave then exactly the same teaching as the teenagers - it isn't valid to expect someone to take a exam without any recent teaching in the subject.

One way to do it would be to have two groups made up of fifteen adults and fifteen teenagers, both of whom get the same teaching without knowing which exam they are going to get. Then at the end, both do both. One lot do this year's GCSE then the old O-Level paper, and the other lot do the O-Level paper first then this year's GCSE. They would not be allowed to communicate with each other between papers.

A couple of points to note that have not already been mentioned:

Pass rates are not the same as success rates. Although the pass rate may be 97%, the figure for people who stick the course and take the exam is much lower. Students who are not likely to pass their exams are encouraged to leave / not allowed on to the A2 course. This filtering process simply didn't happen when I did my 'A' levels in the early 90s.

Furthermore, teachers are placed under even more scrutiny in their teaching and pass rates than when I started teaching in the late 90s. Back then, if I had a bad year, I didn't have to justify myself in the same way that I do these days. Nowadays I have to account for every person who quits / fails on my course.

Also, we're increasingly seeing students coming through to us (at 'A' level) who are pre selected for the courses they are going to do. For example, many students who are not predicted to get a C at GCSE in English Literature, now do Media studies instead, geography students doing travel and tourism and this year I'm seeing loads of students doing these 'equivalent to GCSE' courses instead. Simply, if the schools do not think the students will not get a C, they don't bother allowing them to do that subject.

There are lots of different factors like these which affect the results that students get, and perhaps artifically boost the pass grade that were not employed when I did my GCSEs / A levels in the early 1990s.

I went to a lecture at my former university to mark my tutor's retirement. The lecture covered a history of maths over the past 40 years (thrilling I know). What totally surprised me is that since "my time" (last year to take O levels), my 3 year degree course has extended to a 4 year one, because the students coming up now simply don't have the same level of maths (despite needing both maths and further maths A levels in order to get onto the course).

On the upside, this particular lecturer has been involved in looking at the KS1/2 national curriculum for maths and he does feel that the changes in the last decade should go towards reversing this.

I'd broadly agree with LadyBiscuit.

However, to address the OP, I don't think people intend to play-down the achievements of teenagers taking the exams now, they can't help the papers they are set and yes, we should be proud of them for doing well on the papers they are set. But, government targets to have more people educated to a certain level mean that in order to achieve this then a degree of dumbing down is required.

Further, education is not entirely altruistic. It is not only about educating the most able (though that would be nice in an ideal world), but there are financial issues to consider too. This will only get worse under the tories coalition government.

I know there is also concern from some professional organisations regarding the dumbing down of education. This was simply ignored by the previous government.

A lot of defensive parents on here, blindly refsuing to accept that little Tarquin and Agatha aren't quite as clever as they had been led to believe.

Let's face it - the results don't matter...we all get the life we deserve, regardless.

The exams are different but still difficult.

The problem is everyone gets a reasonable grade, even those who are muppets. And there is no way to spot the smart kids from those who are just taught the exam papers.

Whatever happened to 'failing your exams'?

No - your kids are not amazingly bright for getting all A's. Sorry.