GCSE French course work - AIBU

[lookingbusy]

DS is doing a French assignment for his GCSE that counts towards the final grade. The task is to write a 250 word letter to his penpal describing his holiday, then memorise it and reproduce it in the exam. He has been given a list of the grammar points etc. it needs to contain to get an A*. He can get any amount of help from us and is also allowed to show it to his teacher for corrections. He is also allowed to take his dictionary (which has verb conjugation tables in the middle) into the exam. How is this possibly a test? He has asked us for a lot of help preparing it (we both speak French) and to be honest there doesn't seem any point not helping him. AIBU to think this is very easy, a bit unfair on those who don't have a parent who speaks French and those who are really good at French?

YANBU. Sounds more like a memory test than a French test.

Sounds different to the French O Level I did.

We had to do translation into and out of French, all unseen, so you had to know vocab and be able to conjugate your verbs. He hasn't had to actually learn anything at all, and is complaining that learning 250 words is an incredible challenge. I despair.

I remember I failed my Maths O level first time round and as I was the last year of O levels, I had to retake it as a GCSE. I'd learned all the formulas, but when i got into the exam all the formulas were there to see in the test! Also our school used to print the results of the exams and i remember the number of girls getting all As went up hugely the year it changed to GCSEs

So now they're going to change it back to no course work, just exams at the end of Y11 and grade it 1-8. Back to o levels then.

Hibiscus I must be the same age, I retook my maths after getting a U at O level (that's officially Useless) but managed to get a GCSE no problem.

Meh. This is a fairly standard controlled assessment. The actual GCSE exam has not changed substantially since O level days (French is NOT one of the GCSEs that was proven to have got easier over time), so your child will still have to do all the stuff you did.

It does sound like a memory test, yes. It also sounds like the child has put a lot of work into it. So the goals of the CA appear to have been achieved.

The current CA structure, whereby children are assessed throughout the course (and still at the end) in a variety of different ways, suiting a variety of different learning styles ensures that children work throughout the course, rather than just in the last few months of Year 11.

Personally, I also quite like this form of CA. We have it in my subject too. It rewards students who are prepared to put a lot of preparation in.

DS2 is sitting his GCSEs ATM he wasn't allowed to bring any of his controlled assessment work home, neither was DS1 2 years ago.

Glup, when will he have to translate a previously unseen text into French or a French one into English? I hope he will have to prove his knowledge at some point.

Putting a lot of work in is very important, but so is actually knowing the stuff. I speak 4 languages and I know very well that you do not actually 'know' a word until you have spontaneously recalled it. He has not put a lot of work in, he has bugged us to practically dictate a paragraph then learned it. I bet if I asked him to conjugate any of the verbs in it he would not be able to. It's like saying, I can do fractions, but only with sevens and eights. It's not applied language learning.

It's nothing like the O level I sat, Glup. DS1 sat his GCSEs a couple of years back and wouldn't have any truck with parental interference. He got a A rather than an A* because he wanted to apply his learning rather than reproduce it verbatim, so he made honest mistakes. Which all sounds very commendable, and I know he put some effort in, but in fact his grasp of French was pretty shaky. I'm 100% sure he wouldn't have even passed O level, never mind get an A grade.

I think it will still be a tough task. You have to understand a fair bit of French to get through this properly. Sure you can memorise it all but I think it would be obvious if he made a mistake and that he didn't understand conjugation fully.

A dictionary is a bit of a red herring as it will require a dubious pause if you have to look up a table to get what you need to correctly structure a sentence.

this is correct. It's how the GCSE in languages is at the moment. It is little other than a test of memory although those with better linguistic ability always seem do better than those who struggle with languages.

I struggle to see how it's unfair if the teacher is willing to correct everyone's work prior to having to learning and reproducing? He should also have covered all the necessary vocab and grammar in class so should be somewhere in his books and/or on worksheets. It really isn't necessary for parents to be able to help directly.

And no, there's no direction translation work either way at GCSE (or A level for that matter). Thing of the past. I think this is a good thing - huge portions of your marks can be lost because you don't know a key word and it's impossible to know everything/remember everything.

Thing is, in real life, he will always have access to a dictionary (or google translate or similar), so the exam conditions are reproducing a realistic situation.

No, I don't think they are. Real-life situations arise whether you have access to a dictionary or not. Even if you have, you can't possibly converse naturally if you have to look up every fourth word. And Google translate, noooo.

Techno it's a written test, not oral. He will sit down, under exam conditions and write down the 250 words he has memorised. If he forgets an ending of a verb or how a word is spelt, he can look it up in the dictionary. It's really not very demanding at all.

Mumandboys, I suppose if a parent is good at French they might do what I've done, and help compose a concise paragraph with interesting vocab and neat phrases that display a knowledge of French he most certainly does not have. The teacher will probably have limited time to correct mistakes in the text they are shown.

I do agree, though, that education must shift towards good use of modern resources.

I agree prose translation could go horribly wrong, but I would have thought the way to go would have been to allow the use of dictionaries or internet. Not to tell them what the question would be and allow them to prepare the answer. It's just no test of their actual knowledge.

Ds has probably covered the conditional tense in class, but I don't believe he knows it thoroughly and he doesn't need to, because he can learn the one or two conditionals that are in his paragraph and regurgitate them.

YANBU although to be fair they are told it has to be their own work and the teachers are only allowed to correct once.
.At DS's school quite a few students cheated anyway - took their draft in and switched it for the one to be submitted.

Doesn't sound very different from when I did GCSE quite a few years ago. I got an A and cannot (and could never) independently hold a conversation that I hadn't memorised. If the other person deviated from the script, I'd be screwed! How could I get an A and not know how to string one sentence together by myself?

YANBU.

My daughter has just completed her gcse in french. There are 2 ca and the second one is a question and answer one which does make them think harder. With regards to this one memorising a passage in a foreign language is a lot harder than you give it credit probably because you are good at languages. You can help all you want but without a lot of ability himself your son would struggle with the recall.

You'd be surprised how they still don't get an A* though.
I am an MFL teacher and I find this so difficult t swallow; we teach them to regurgitate what they've learnt in an exam. When I was at school (not too long ago either!) we had a written exam at the end of year 11 and that was that. These CAs are making pupils lazier because they know they can always have another attempt and thus they fail to take it seriously.

However I have to say he is NOT allowed to show it to his teacher for corrections.

I got someone who is both French and a French teacher in a UK school to compose DSs incorporating everything needed for an A*.And he got a B! I think maybe she used a lot of idiom which the Marker (who probably wasn't French) didn't understand

I did Latin O Level in 1981

40% was the language paper - an exam on translating Latin

60% was the literature paper, comprising of:

• an English translation of Virgil. In English

• translating some of Julius Caesar from Latin into English. This had all been prepared and corrected in class. I had the correct English translation in my exercise book and I learned it off by heart and when I saw the latin, thought "aah it's this bit" and wrote down the English from memory. Which was the sensible thing to do.

I suspect I got close to full marks on the literature paper without having to exert any real knowledge of latin.

I got an A.

People are very impressed.

YABU in that you are criticising your child for the national GCSE structure and test.

He needs your support to get the best grade he can - this piece of paper will go forward to 6th form applications, university applications and eventually onto his CV.

You are a fluent linguist - he is not. That level of fluency cannot be taught in a few hours each week in the sterile classroom environment, it needs to be practised in real life situations.

I think your expectations are unrealistic - if you have the skills to help him and it is allowed then why wouldn't you just help him? He is not competing with our generation and our grades he is competing with others of his own age doing the same assessment.

As an MFL teacher, he should not be getting corrections, nor is he allowed a dictionary in the controlled assessment.

Essentially, the school is allowing them to cheat!

All the kids I know of show it to their teacher for corrections. Then they show it to one of their parents' friends, then they memorise it. It's a total waste of time, IMO.