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 ?

In 79 I took 7 and passed 5 plus some typing exams . I came 6th in my year for results and as i said above one of teachers said that 5 o'level passes put you in top 15% in the country.

I wouldn't say 5 I Levels was very good but it was generally viewed as the minimum number to get a job that required O Levels. I can remember most office junior and entry public sector roles advertising with 5 O levels as a requirement.

I did 7 O levels (failed one), 1 CSE, and RSA and Pitman typing qualifications.

Really? I'm sure in our school the ones that got cse 3 and 4 were the bottom set crowd. I was also in last year of O levels .

My ex went to a "bad" school and they didn't really offer O level just cse

I think most people at universities had at least 8 Olevels as well as 3 A levels.

I don't think 5 O levels was considered good. I got 6 but no MFL, maths or science. So pretty poor really. Not that I was prevented from doing A levels. Although that didn't go well! As a mature student I found my niche though. Avoided maths and concentrated on work related qualifications. So once I moved away from academic subjects I did really well. I also received much better teaching and leaving my oppressive grammar school made a huge difference to me as well. Many people are intelligent but it's not always obvious at school.

@wombat15 In my day, 2 A levels was accepted for some degrees. The Polys offered degrees with 2 A level entry. The Red Bricks probably didn't.

I did my GCSE,s in 1990 so we were the third year to go through ,
When I did my nurse training in 1993 the entry requirements was 5 Olevels/ GCSE,s at grade C or above including maths and English or a science ,I failed my maths several times but did have two science GCSE,s at grade C so that got me on the course
I beleive at the time for those who didn't have the entry requirements they could sit something called a DC test which was like an IQ test ( I think) to get on the course.

I went to a Grammar School and no one did CSEs (as in, it wasn't an option) so that alters the perspective, percentage-wise) a bit.

I was at a grammar school and took 9 O levels in 1984. My school allowed the bottom set (5) to take CSEs in Maths and science. I don't remember anyone getting all As. Our 6th form allowed some girls to take secretarial qualifications, but most took 3 A levels. Those doing maths took an AO level in L6. It was called an Additional O level, a bit like an AS. A few girls took 4:A levels - one actually got 4 A grades. Which was very unusual. I had several friends who went onto Oxbridge colleges and none had 3 A grades. They all had the standard offer of 2 Es!!

Oxbridge relied on their own exams and weren't interested in a levels results.

I think exams were harder then in that we had no revision help from school. There was no internet or YouTube videos. Past papers were not accessible - for most of my subjects the first time I saw an actual exam paper was when I sat down to my mocks. The school kept the papers from the previous sitting which was then given to us. Some subjects the first real paper was the actual exam.
There were no public mark schemes so we didn't know what the examiners were looking for. We weren't trained to answer questions in the way kids are now. As far as I remember, there was no standard format to the exams beyond knowing we had to write 3 essays in 3 hours.

I wasn't thinking of polytechnics when I said 3 a levels as they weren't universities then.

Was that in the North? No one I knew ( London) did general studies, but it seemed the norm for JNB

Depends what type of school you went to
Grammers school where everyone took O'levels, you would have a distorted view and think not so good.
Comp where only top sets took Olevels and more representative of the general population then 5 olevels were good. As i said above 5 O'level passes put in you in the top 15% nationally.

General Studies was the norm for our school (yes, north-ish).

Yes, but it also depended on the actual aylabus you did.

As someone has already said, O Levels were for the top 20%, CSE were supposed to be more practical and for the next 30%.

It was expected that half of students would leave school at 16 with no qualifications.

So some subjects you could only do CSE eg typing (thinking back to my school days an age ago) which fitted with being more practical.

But CSEs were offered in academic subjects too. I struggled with Chemistry so I did O Level and I also did CSE.

@Violinist64

I would say most of the computer science curriculum is identical to what it was in the 1980s. The only big difference is knowing about the internet and online safety.

Programming - the languages are more advanced but the principles are the same.

Different types of networks are the same.

Software mediums have changed.

But the binary, bytes, nybles / nibbles, input and output lots is the same.

@bruffin
It was a grammar but I did have friends at the secondary and they didn't do O levels at all. Our world was very narrow though.

Just looking at my English Lit exam, we studied Silas Marner, Macbeth and The Nun's Priest's Tale - Chaucer. I think this was very hard. Would any DC do this combination for gcse now? I doubt it. I imagine CSE didn't do these either. We took Oxford Board.

The other problem we faced was teachers not completing the syllabus. The exam papers contained questions on topics we had never studied. We were never ever given guidance on how to write a good answer. I never had any advice on how to improve. Teachers' comments would just be "satisfactory" or "try harder". Where we covered most of the syllabus and received some guidance, results were better. We were not well taught but obviously no one complained. The Head said we were "drones" and not "worker bees". The only dc who got away with under performance were the county sports players. They were lauded. And clearly not drones!

Mine was similar. I was in a northern comprehensive.

I was put onto CSE courses, mid 1980’s. Some classmates did GCSE and a few did O-levels. I’m fairly sure it was the year they were introduced, or possibly when my school area introduced them.

I was at a grammar school (selective at 11+ exam) in the 1950s and did O levels - so far as I remember - the grades were 1-9 and we took all of them. It was exam only and no practical part of the qualification.

When I took A levels - the grades were A,B.C.D and E or a fail - correct me if I am mis-remembering.

My son took GCSEs in the 1980s as he was at a comprehensive and I think they were just as difficult as GCEs.

On comparability of 1972 O levels v 2016 A levels, I found some of my old 1972 and 1974 papers. DS took them in to show his (quite young) teachers, and came home telling me that the Latin teacher thought the AS level students would have struggled with the Scipio and Catullus set texts we had read for O level. But as noted, O level was a grammar school exam, so designed to identify (and challenge) the top 20%. Nobody struggled much with the step up to A level, AFAIK.

Also, back then, a CSE 1 was rated equivalent to the lowest passing grade of O level.

Yes JMB board, it was also considered as qualifying A-level for some degrees if you applied to Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds universities and useful if you bombed an exam in one of your other subjects

This has got me thinking about General studies Alevel which was a really interesting exam. Paper 1 was multiple choice questions on every A level subject so a lot of guessing on MFL and social sciences for me. Then paper 2 was essay A-level on philosophical and ethical issues. I remember answering a question about justifying funding art and music in a modern society. It was also a long exam 2 hours for each paper and took the whole day.

It shows that he did well at school. There was little chance as everything was based on class. If he’d have been at a grammar (got in through parents wealth being an influence on the middle school teachers) or at a private school you can be sure he would have got good o level grades.

I went to a girls only grammar school and did O levels (Cambridge syllabus) over two years (1976 and 1977). We sat two or three early when we were 15 years old (English language, Religious studies and Biology) so that we could fit all the others in for the final year. The top stream did a lot of exams including all three sciences, Latin, German and French, separate English Language and Literature, Maths, Geography, History, Art, and a choice of Music, Needlework or Cookery. The lower stream could choose less languages (one was minimum) and two of the three practical subjects. Our school didn't offer any CSEs.

You needed at least 5 grade C or above passes to be allowed to continue to sixth form to sit A levels. The school prided itself on its high Oxbridge entrance so in reality, they expected a lot more than 5. Not many girls got lots of A grades but I think there were two in my class that got 10 grade As each and both went on to Cambridge. They were considered exceptional. These exceptional girls also sat S levels alongside the A levels.

I came away with several B grades at O Level (including 2 English and Maths) and the rest at C grade and was very happy with that. I eventually went to a good university and did a BSc, Masters and PhD.