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.

ladymuck I wonder though does it really need 4 years or is it a good way of possibly making the students stay longer and pay more - the cynic in me ownders if it is a bit of both

I teach Higher north of the border in a subject where we had to write 4 essays in 2 hours and 20 minutes when I sat it 20 years ago (!!)whereas now it's one essay and 2 answers in 'extended note form'.

The second half of the exam incorporated two essays and a 40 mark source question then but now there are only 4 source based questions.

To be honest, we are the only subject left up here that teaches the effective skills of academic argument (and no, I'm not an English teacher)and it's getting more and more diluted as the years go by...

Again it has turned into a thread knocking the childrens achievements.

For all of those mentioning tutors and 'paying for education' etc etc, what about us 'normal' people who don't pay for tutors and don't send their children to private schools?

I also know lots of children who didn't get As-Cs throughout, and some who I really thought would!

IMO it depends on the teaching and the determination of the child. Teaching standars are better. Children have more access to computers and the like now.

My son is certainly more articulate than I was at 16! He is also a sponge...soaks up info and keeps it there. He has been like that since he was very tiny! He was reading pretty fluently at 3, has excelled at SATS every time, was told at 7 that if he kept going at the rate he was, he could have taken a Maths GCSE at 11 (not that I would have let him), passed 11+ with flying colours. He is just naturally bright. And he has that annoying ability to learn things, keep them and sail through exams without worry! If anything, the coursework based stuff is less suited to him!

Perhaps it isn't knocking the children's achievement but stating the truth. No one is saying that children haven't worked hard.

some of the children scoring A*s across the board would have got As indoor the older exams. An awful lot would not.

academic argument, bev - you must be history?

Don't forget that a lot of these 'over-inflated grades' are achieved by kids who aren't playing on a level playing field - private tutors, private schools with very few kids in, parents who do their coursework for them, a background where high-achievement is the norm.

I would argue that grades achieved by comprehensive kids probably give a more realistic picture. I teach English in a comp. We only had a couple of kids who got As across the board with a couple of As. Very few got A in English. Why? Because it's hard. Yes, they can re-draft coursework (once), and yes, it generally rises by a grade when they polish it - but coursework is marked harder than the exam to take into account extra help.

Incidentally, coursework is changing now - especially with AQA. Students can prepare for it by reading a text. They will not know the question. Coursework will be 3 or 4 hours of writing done in school time. No more parental help for little FLorence or bloody Tarquin. Hopefully a slightly more level playing field for normal kids.

There are a number of issues at play here I think.

1. Coursework tends to favour girls, who are more mature and consistently diligent. O levels favoured boys, who, at the top end, showed more courage and flair on the day.

1. Coursework helps the hayfever sufferers out there.

1. O levels were graded normatively. So, only the top 20% of kids got As etc. The theory behind that was that it was more likely that a particular paper was harder or easier than that the entire population of 16 year olds were significantly more or less intelligent than previous years.

1. Teachers have always taught to exams, and taught exam skills.

1. The current system does seem easier than when I took O levels (I speak as a other of DTs who did really badly in GCSE this year ). However, it favours the hard-working kids over the innately intelligent. In general, I think that people who work hard do better in life than people who are brilliant but lazy. On the other hand, I think it does might make it harder for the children who are dealing with other social issues outside of school, because there is less chance of last minute cramming and catching up. So, my schoolfriend who was a child carer for her mother who spent a fair amount of time in a psych hospital during her GCSE course, would probably have done less well under the current system, but was able to revise hard when it came to the crunch and show what she was capable of.

Does not negate the hard work of the kids who sat the exams, but it is an important debate about the kind of education system we want to have.

As ever, The Onion gets to the heart of the issue !

(Endure the 15-second commercial, sorry I couldn't find a way of bypassing it...)

I went to one of the top grammar schools in my area and took 9 O levels in 1981 < wince >, as did everyone. Taking nine was seen as "a lot to cope with."

In our year of 120 girls, I think two girls got 9 A grades. Much fuss was made. I have not seen the results for the school this year but would be surprised if less than 50% of Year 11 had got 10 or 11 A*s

I have worked as reader/scribe for Maths GCSEs and I assure you my bright ten year old could get a C grade. I have only reader/scribed for Foundation Stage so I have no idea what he would get at the Higher stage. I could get 100% on the Foundation Stage paper right, yet I remember revising for my Maths O Levels, yes actual swotting, and fretting that I had not worked hard enough. (And I was one of the first years where we could use calculators - parents were outraged!)

Sample question on Foundation Maths paper: Write down 7,456 in words.

It makes me sad for people like my sister who failed their O Level Maths at school 35 years ago, and went back to night school in their own time to try to pass it on another attempt. She was very pleased with her D.

But on the other hand I am glad that all children today get a qualification for what they achieve.

Lastly, I feel sorry for the A* students who are just as able, and as hardworking, as the A Grade students in the past, but who have no real way of proving themselves.

@Unquiet Dad . I have 2 of those poor benighted children in my home.

I don't want to get into this argument (yet again), but I've just found an O level English Language paper here which I really don't see as more difficult than a modern GCSE paper. Very different, certainly, as it asks completely different skills of the candidate.

A good example of why it's almost impossible to compare O levels with GCSEs.

SlackSally

Interesting paper. When I did EngLang O-level at a comp, we weren't taught the subject at all, we were just presumed to pick up everything via osmosis from the EngLit lessons.

Did anyone else have similar experience ?
Can't imagine that with current tickbox curriculum anything so non-goal-oriented could possibly occur.

Exams are getting easier, at least in some subjects (obviously can't speak for all, as didn't take all subjects!).

I took my A Levels in 1996. For the 2 years running up to them, I practised on A Level papers my teachers gave me from the 1970s and 80s. They were hard.

When I came to take my actual A Levels, in several papers, I left after half an hour (the earliest I was allowed to leave; in one paper I finished after 20 minutes), having already completed the papers (translation), because I found them so easy (in contrast with the papers I had been practising on). I am definitely no genius, but I found the exams a walk-over, so...

Astro79

But won't Ma and Pa just switch us to a board where they can "offer their advocacy".

Yours
Florence + Tarquin

I'm with the OP on this one.

My kids worked a lot harder than I ever did at equivalent levels and fully deserve their grades/degrees.

When I was doing the equivalent of A-levels/IB in another country in the late 1960s, my maths teacher rushed through the syllabus in the first year. In the second year he divided the class into the "strong" and the "weak". The strong were educated into higher level maths concepts and encouraged to study maths at university; the weak practised on old exam papers and discouraged from doing maths at university despite the fact that a significant number of them got As and that some of the strong ones did not.

Panthesileia when I was doing my Maths O Level in 1981 we were given "old O Level paper questions" to do as homework. They were from the actual exam books.

They were so hard. I remember being in tears over one of them, I couldn't understand it at all. And I was good at Maths! When I got back to school the next day I asked my friends and they were all stuck too.

For the first time ever we went to the staff room at lunch time, asked for our Maths teacher and wailed "We can't do it!!" She tried to explain. We still didn't understand. She said "Oh never mind, leave it."

I was seriously panicking about how hard the O Level was going to be and thinking I would fail if I couldn't handle O level questions. When I took it, it was a doddle and I got an A.

I suspect the questions we were given to practise on were from the 70s, 60s or - knowing my school - the 50s.

And yeah I would have been furious then had anyone said that exams were getting easier.

Ben Goldacre did a blog on this a couple of weeks ago. Some of the comments are very interesting too. www.badscience.net/2010/08/exams-are-getting-easier/

@Jules great article. Thank you.

Cumfy - do parents really do that?

I really don't belong on MN at all. My world's a bit too different. :(