A pass is a pass? GCSE

[Rumplestiltz]

At GCSE, a 4 is a pass. When employers/apprenticeships/further and higher education institutes ask for a pass in maths and English, it’s a 4.

So why the fuss about “strong” passes, which is a 5? Why does the Government organise its data on the proportion who get “strong” passes in English and Maths? Bridget Phillipson saying it’s a travesty that white, working class boys aren’t getting “strong” passes in English and Maths and their life chances are affected as a result. It kind of undermines those who work very hard to get to that pass line of a 4 (teachers and students) to be told it’s not good enough.

I am sure I will be told it’s very easy to get a 4 etc etc, but for some kids in these subjects, it isn’t.

So my AIBU is - a pass is a pass.

So how do you account for the thousands of children who don't have additional needs who have to repeatedly resit maths and English?
Why can't you just accept that a grade four is good enough for many level three courses?

There are also loads of kids without SEN who struggle to get grades four in maths and English, the system needs to change as it's soul destroying, for kids repeatedly failing.

Poor teaching, poor discipline, lack of interest and/or extenuating circumstances (including poverty). I don’t see how it can be contentious to say that lots of children don’t live up their academic potential and I’m not sure what there is to be gained from pretending otherwise.

As has been repeatedly pointed out, grades 1-3 are not fails.

I also didn't invent the exam system or the "rules". We have Gove to thank for that.

Congratulations to your DD, she has done very well.

However, the fact that there are some children for whom a 4 represents their maximum potential does not change the fact that this is not the case for most children.

I'm not sure what you mean here by 'if your contention is that a 4 represents most children living up to their potential, then that’s just incorrect.'. It is certainly incorrect, because most children get higher than a 4 in Maths. But for many of those who do get a 4, irrespective of circumstance or additional need, it does indeed represent their and their teachers' best efforts. Teachers and students know the difference a 4 makes post 16.

Point to the posts saying that a 4 is a great achievement for anyone and that all those kids who are capable of 7s/8s /9s are living up to their potential if they get a 4. You can't, because that's a straw man argument. There are lots of posts saying that kids achieving a 4 are barely scraping, barely functioning, haven't truly passed, there's not one saying that a 4 is an achievement for most or all children.

No one is suggesting that we shouldn't encourage our children to be ambitious. Plenty of posters are denying and denigrating what is a significant achievement and the realisation of high ambitions for some children, and it really showcases some people's privilege and snobbery.

My DDs 2 5s, 5 4s and 2 3s is a much greater achievement than my much GCSE higher grades, because I find academia easy and she finds it very challenging. She worked harder than I did and deserves her achievements to be acknowledged, not sneered at.

I personally dislike that they took out the intermediate paper that used to be an option.

DD could have tackled the Higher paper, in Mocks she was getting a solid 4 just under a 5 only completing 60% of the paper, however, because of her ADHD and attention span issue that used to fail her after 30 mins or so in any exam, myself and her teachers decided it was safer for her to do the Foundation paper and guarantee her the 5 (she nearly got full marks on the paper).

Had the Intermediate paper been available like it used to be, she'd have made it to a 6/7 without issue.

Not every pupil who does Foundation in Maths is doing it because they can't do the higher questions.

A 4 simply says that your child’s performance on that occasion sits towards the lower end of the top 70% or so of the cohort taking the exam - because the Government, via the exam boards, have decreed the percentage who are allowed to get a 4 and above.

A predetermined percentage will ALWAYS fail to get a 4, because that is how the system gas been set up. If every single student between U and 4 scored 5 marks more, the grade boundary for a 4 would simply go up accordingly. It does not reflect a given body of knowledge. It does not reflect a fixed standard of attainment. It does not reflect potential or underlying ability.

It shows the relative performance, on that day m, in that test, against the cohort.

And when the grade boundaries change, kids who would have 'been a 4' last year, aren't this year. Are they any worse? Probably not. We always mark cautiously, but the year the boundary went up 12 marks scuppered a lot of our borderline kids.

And let's not forget that one slight misinterpretation of a question can knock 10 marks off. Or running out of time.

I could fly across the page when I was writing. I was lucky. In amongst the shite, i could knock out some good stuff. Ds is articulate and has an excellent vocabulary. He reads extensively. But he writes fairly slowly and it's hard to read. His sense of time is also.... idiosyncratic. On the actual day, he could be an 8 or a 4 (and screw his teacher's spi).

Why? It makes no difference. It’s just numbers instead of letters a more detailed results structure but it’s no different to understand

My son is at a comprehensive in a posh area. Five 4s needed for sixth form. With 4s you can do psychology, sociology, and b techs. Maybe some others but I didn't look at those. Need 7 for maths, 6 for the sciences, and 5s for everything else.
Boys in particular mature late. It all resets for a levels and many kids do relatively better in their a levels than gcses because they are doing fewer subjects and have dropped anything compulsory that perhaps wasn't a strength

Maths gcse is hard. I got A in gcse and A in a level in the 1990s. Could do my son's gcse paper. The pp who said a 4 is only basic algebra and equations is talking bollocks

Didn’t 50% of all children not get a 4 in maths or English? So not that low for them.. and that’s a lot of children

I think you’re wrong. If 50% are not getting a 4 then 4 is not low for ‘most children’.

59.7% got 4 and above in English; 58.2% in Maths.

This is lower than the 67% across GCSEs as a whole this year, probably because up to 1 in 4 entries for English / Maths are retakes - ie the cohort is skewed with 1 in 4 having previously already scored 3 or below. Other subjects gave very few retakes.

The A* and the new numeric grades were introduced because the grade boundary for an A was too wide. About 10% of students achieved an A at O-level, and there was no way of identifying people who were good from those who were outstanding.
Taking Maths as an example: the boundary for an A at O-Level was somewhere in the high 70s most years. So anyone getting 78% got the same grade as someone getting 100%. It was hardly an accurate method of identifying those who got the "very highest marks".
Now that an old "A" has been split into three bands only about 5% of students get the top grade (9). people who would have been at the middle and bottom ends of the old 'A' get an 8 or a 7 respectively.

And that's great for the very top performing students. It's not so great for the average performing ones, who now have multiple grades above their pass (and grown adults quick to tear down their pass as barely functioning/scraping through/not really a pass).

When I did my GCSEs an A was the top mark, and a C the lowest pass. Now a 9 is the top mark and a 4 the lowest pass. So the person who scraped a pass was only 2 grades below the top mark. Now the person scraping a pass is 5 grades below the top mark. What does that do for the self esteem of the majority, who don't get 8s and 9s? What does it do even for the very able kids who get 7s and see it as a poor mark?

The adding of more and more grades at the top benefits the few and I think can damage the many. Presumably Gove just cared about the few though when he reformed GCSEs to basically replicate the O level/CSE system they were originally supposed to be an improvement on.

Just to clarify when you did GCSE C was a level 2 pass, the grades below were still a pass, they were however a level one pass.

I agree with this. You do see kids disappointed with 6s and 7s. Whereas As and Bs previously would have been good grades.

More than 30% of kids got less than a 4 in maths this year.
That's a large number of kids who are not able to move on with things that they maybe shine at as they have to retake maths.
Have you looked at a GCSE foundation paper recently? It's easy for mumsnetters it seems, but you need more than basic fractions and percentages to get the 60% needed to get a grade 4.

Past papers from one of the boards are here:

https://revisionmaths.com/gcse-maths/gcse-maths-past-papers/edexcel-gcse-maths-past-papers

Well that foundation paper is very similar to maths i did in primary school

That’s not entirely surprising as you can get a 3 in Foundation using only Maths from the primary curriculum IF you have a really strong grasp of everything from that curriculum (so those who go on to get eg 8s and 9s at GCSE)

Y6 SATs for comparison:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/key-stage-2-tests-2024-mathematics-test-materials

A minimum of 54 marks across the 3 papers was required for children to meet the expected standard, 93 to get ‘greater deprh’.

However, the scope of the Maths needed to get 60%+ in the Foundation papers at GCSE is definitely beyond ‘fractions and percentages’ - just the first few questions cover angles at a point; graphs, statistics etc.

(About 73/74% of children achieve ‘expected’ in Year 6. Again, the scaled score of 100 to achieve this is set at a specific raw score each year to achieve this - a given percentage MUST fail to reach expected each year, many the same children who are set to be in the 30%+ not getting 4+ in Y11)