To wonder about CSEs v O Levels

[Bakance]

My partner has a brother much older than him - my DP is youngest in large, working class, Irish Catholic family. No one in their family has passed ever gone on to higher education - none educated beyond GCSE level.
Partner's eldest brother did 6 CSE exams big absolutely no O-levels at all - would he have been considered below average academic ability ?

@Bakance When GCSEs were introduced, grades 2-5 CSE were equivalent of D-G in GCSE grades. Only grade 1 CSE was a Grade C GCSE. So below grade 1 was a lower grade GCSE equivalent. In numbers it would now be grades 4-1. Grade 1 CSE could be considered a 5 in GCSE grading.

There’s plenty of info on how GCSE replaced the two exams. However anyone with CSEs generally would not do A levels. However there are other routes to HE.

My grammar didn’t do CSE. Nor my husband’s grammar. I’m not aware of any that did around here. This did lead to under achievement at the grammars too!

I went to a private girls' school. Snobbery and status meant we were all entered for 9 O'Levels. Compulsory subjects were all three sciences, two English, French, RE, and History. My chosen options were Cookery and Art. It was far too much. I gained 2 C's and 7 D's. Education was a dark art, I took my Maths using a f**king Slide Rule. This was 1980

Academic ability if measured by exams, then yes, it's probably a bit lower than average. Now nearly anyone will be pushed towards the uni route if they have a slim chance of passing the minimum number of GCSEs. This isn't right, as lots of jobs don't need that type of education or it doesn't suit people. Plus tons of debt.
As long as they've managed alright in life and worked then that's all that matters. If they want to study further, then it's never too late.

My sister, 3 years younger was the first year of GCSEs. I took a School’s Council 16+ in history which was them testing out the planned GCSEs. I received both an O-level grade B and a CSE grade 1 which was based on both coursework and 2 exams.

I took mainly O-levels, although I had to fight to be allowed to take O-level music rather than CSE (the school had never had a music O-level failure!). I took CSE French, I was in a stream that mainly took O-level French, but my grammar was poor, whilst my speaking was above average, so they were confident I would achieve grade 1 CSE but not confident about a C at O-level.

I also remember being told just before sitting our exams that the national average was 5 grade 4 CSE’s

If he got decent CSEs, not below average no, but in those days unlikely to go to Uni, not considerEd "academic".

At my, not especially good secondary, we had 8 sets and only the top one did Olevels. Some people in set 2 did both, with the CSE being insurance for if they didn't make it though the Olevel.

A CSE grade 1 was supposed to be equivalent to an Olevel C, but no-one really believed it.

I did Olevel and CSE in maths and did the entire CSE paper twice in the time allowed.

So would that be equivalent to a grade 1/2 in today's exams roughly?
I did my GCSE,s in 1990and got mainly C,s and D,s I was fairly average academically, I probably could have tried harder and pushed the grades up to mainly C,s

I would say your partners brother was above average academically. I say this because his results were above average (slightly). But the situation in which he was sitting these exams was clearly from a seriously disadvantaged starting point.

IIRC a CSE1 is not equivalent to an O level C.

The blurb on the back of the certificate states something along the lines of if you got a CSE1 then you might reasonably have been expected to get a pass (Grade A,B or C) if you had undertaken the O level. It does not say that a CSE1=Grade C.

This makes sense, because if you say got 100% mark at CSE1, then there is no information to actually discriminate what grade O level you would have got.

Oh and to answer the Ops question the answer is it depends. 6 CSE grade 1s would have been well above average (but unlikely as anyone getting that many would have been horribly mis streamed. Anyone getting a CSE1 should really have sat an O level).

I went to a 9-form entry comprehensive (270+ students), and was the last year to do o-levels. I remember the top-performing student got 7As, 1B, 1C that year. I imagine that now in a large comp, the top 4-5 performing students would be achieving 10-11 A* equivalents (ie grade 9). I do wonder how gcses and o-levels compare; and whether students are now taught / trained to do exams better, and have more resources (we just had our exercise books that we had written in for two years to revise from). Or whether they are just more intelligent, or if the exams are slightly easier? Actually I don’t think the exams are easier, from what I have seen at gcse now it seems to be less learning content by rote and regurgitating it in an exam, but manipulating the information / analysing etc, which are different skills to just being able to parrot the content! And physics A level is completely bonkers now - really weird and complicated questions that you have to try and unpick (eg a surgeon in a ship trying to amputate someone’s limb and the ship is rolling and you have to calculate various things in order to work out whether a or b would happen (2023 paper)). And the grade boundary for an A in physics in 2023 was approx 50 per cent. Which is crazy, as it means that a lot of people taking the a-level would struggle to achieve above 35-40 per cent!

I'm interested in why you're asking the question OP, specifically about the brother?

It would depend on his age and probably the school. I went to an 80s comprehensive. Many people did a mixture but if he only did 6 CSEs probably below average.

Goodness, I'm a similar vintage to you and I've never heard of the 16+ exam! Wonder what happened to it?

Ours were all O-levels (with A to E grades, not the previous 1 to 9 system).

Another reason why it's difficult to compare is that the marking has changed. O-levels, and possibly CSEs, were marked so that a fixed percentage got each grade, say the top 5% an A, the next 10% a B and so on. But today's GCSEs are marked against a fixed standard. So someone with an A at O-level would be in the top few percent, which you couldn't necessarily say for someone with an A at GCSE - the proportion of candidates getting an A has been steadily rising.

Up to about 15 per cent by the mid 80s when I went.

I did O levels in 1983. I went to a Sheffield comp with about 220 in each year. I’d say anyone below the second set did at least some CSEs, set 5 and below would have only done CSEs. DH did CSE German but was top set for sciences. Some of my mates were double entered- parents had to pay the second exam fee.

We were told that CSE grade 1 was equivalent to O level grade C.

Impossible to say if he was below average. As he didn't sit the exams.

Academic achievement has nothing to do with intelligence.

5 academic O levels including English and Maths was considered a great result. You could train to be a teacher or solicitor with these passes. I went to a convent school and my friends at the grammar school used to sneer at me until I got better O levels than they did. French was much like A level and a lot of the Maths is now just A level. Having taught GCSE I agree that most of them are very watered down from O level. Those who went to a school that only did CSE were hugely disadvantaged. From friends' experiences it was really difficult to achieve the top grade that gave them an O level equivalent.

I took O levels in the days of 1-9 grading. We were allowed very little in the way of ‘options’, the only choice was between Chemistry and Art 😬
The Art teacher told me I would be choosing Chemistry 😏 so I sat English Language, English Lit, Maths, Additional Maths, French , History, Geography, Biology, Physics and Chemistry. No light relief at all.

Whereas I would have considered the maths, additional maths and Chemistry as light relief

I did 6 O levels in the early 1980’s. DH got 10 O levels aged 14 and then took his 4 A levels aged 16, he went to Cambridge and also did his PhD there as well. This was very much a bog standard comp. I was in set 2 for everything out of six sets and then there was the remedial set as it was known so seven sets all together.

I did O levels at a comprehensive in the early ‘80s. I did ten subjects - about maybe 20 pupils took ten - and got all As. Quite a few - maybe five or so- would get all As, but not lots. The maximum number of timetabled subjects was nine. The extra tenth one, Additional Maths, we did at lunchtime.

I was in the first year to do GCSEs so we did a lot of O level practice papers as well as the specimen GCSE ones the exam boards sent out.

They were different - but not necessarily easier. I think it depended on the subject and how you prefer to be assessed - I was better at exams than coursework.

I did 8 GCSEs and think I did better at Maths and Chemistry than I would have done at O level, but think I would have done better at English lit and Music if I'd done O level. The rest I think I'd have got the same grades.

They gradually changed them and they were easier (I did another one at my local college about 10 years later) and then of course Gove came along and made them harder again.

Yes this.

Why does it matter?

Richard Branson has 1 O level.

GCSEs replaced O levels and CSEs