Read this.

[teejay100000]

www.cps.org.uk/cps_catalog/why%20can%27t%20they%20read.pdf

'Dumbed down' exams seem to be a media favourite. I didn't see much evidence of it myself when ds did his GCSEs a couple of years ago, but I believe marking systems have changed, and have artificially raised grades. Is that true?

'At present A levels do not meet that standard.'

Says who? What qualifies you to say that?

'Their modification is currently under discussion in order to move them back to something more akin to A levels of the past.'

I teach and examine A Level. I have just marked nearly 300 scripts from a wide variety of different schools and colleges. The skills demanded of the paper I mark and teach towards are just as hard and probably harder than the papers I sat.

But, as I've explained about a zillion times, even if the papers are getting easier (which they're not) the entry requierements are getting harder.

Oxford and Cambridge routinely offered 2 Es at A Level when I was applying. Now they only accept 3 A grades and soon they're only going to accept A* .

To get A* you have to achieve 90% of your final 2 A2 modules.

I have made this point a number of times. Do you just ignore anything which doesn't suit your bizarre vision of the HE system as it is.

My job is to prepare 100s of students each year for university. I understand the system as it is and not as you mistakenly think it is or should be.

As I said I was until recently a reception class teacher and as such was asked by staff in the CC to mentor them in their foundation degrees (leading to a BA in Early Years ) the quality of their work left a great deal to be desired yet they passed.

Meant to say that Cambridge University has said it is against modifying the A Levels as am I.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-10725910

Is it just that you don't like change Breton.

Because you know what change can be a good thing. The modular system has been amazingly good in all sorts of ways.

Rolla it is a lot of hype. Universities actually get a breakdown of marks. If they want to and are in a position to they can distinguish not just between A and B and from this year A* and A but between those students who have got full marks and those who just scraped A.

BosombytheSea wrote: ?Teaching and learning shouldn't be the same now as back when you and I were at school because the world has changed. Information is not the currency it once was; as you identified yourself, students can easily get the information they seek - they don't need you, they just need Google.

And how are they going to comprehend all this Googled information without some guidance? This is the nonsense of ?independent learning? as advocated in schools. For the most part they don?t independently learn they want to be spoon-fed and teachers will spoon-feed because of the pressure upon them to get as many pupils as possible up to a C grade or above at GCSE. Remember, that nowadays if your Y11 cohort doesn?t manage this, it?s not their fault it?s yours, as teachers!

BosombytheSea wrote:? But what they do need is to be able to process that information, to refine it and understand it and apply it to what they are studying.?

Again I ask, how are they going to achieve this without guidance from a teacher?

BosombytheSea wrote:? A teacher imparting knowledge is not helping their students to develop the skills and attributes they will need in the world as it is today.

I?m sorry, but I regard that last sentence as PC claptrap worthy of Pseuds Corner in Private Eye.

Well mrz the standards for a foundation degree leading to a BA in Early Years (at what university a new one?) is not going to be quite the same as the standard for astrophysics at Oxford.

And by the way one of the most gifted teachers (the most gifted) I've ever met got D grades at A Level and a second class degree. She was battling cancer during her A Levels but don't know how much better she would have done if she hadn't. Some people just don't like the style of A Levels, some people don't see a point to study unless they can pin it down to the real worl etc, etc. But as a teacher this woman was not in the same league as me even though I had much better qualifications on paper. Don't think she would have made it as a teacher with the competiton today and that would have been the most enormous loss to the profession and the schools where she has worked and made the most enormous differnce to kids' lives and the whole school.

Another link about this year's admissions crisis. So much for dumbing down!

'For anyone whose hopes have been dashed by a late application or missed grades, there won't be much comfort in clearing this year, as it seems even the so-called "recruiting universities" are unlikely to have more than a few scraps left to divvy out.'

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/apr/13/university-admissions-limit-student-nu mbers]]

fivecandles the point is these students are obtaining a degree when a few years ago they would have been lucky to get a NVQ level 2 (so someone is being conned - the students who think they at degree standard - the employer who believes they are degree standard - and the parents who send their child to the setting to be educated by a graduate - and perhaps the tax payer who has funded it all)

Seriously, do you have children who are pre university? You want to spend some time having a look at the entry requirements for example from the universities you went to.

This is for English at Manchester University for 2011:

'Typical A level offer: Grades AAA-AAB, including Grade A Eng Lit or Eng Lang & Lit.

Course fees:

Fees for entry in 2011 have not yet been set. For entry in 2010, the tuition fees are £3,290 per annum for home/EU students, and are expected to increase slightly for 2011 entry. For general fee information, please visit: Undergraduate fees. '

www.manchester.ac.uk/undergraduate/courses/search2011/atoz/course/?code=00060

Where is the dumbing down again?

That's an incredibly negative way of looking at it, mrz.

'these students are obtaining a degree when a few years ago they would have been lucky to get a NVQ level 2'

Who says?

These are students who are getting what is essentially a vocational degree in early years education yes?

So they are learning about the theory and practise of early years teaching with a view to becoming early years teachers?

In what way is this a con?

I'm really glad that there are people who want to be early years teachers and are going to be trained and qualified. They get better opportunties and hopefully better paid.

I see it as entirely positive.

How old is your infant prodigy, five candles?

8 and 6.

I'm very happy that my taxes are funding the education of early years teachers. Although, again a point which has been largely unacknowledge on this thread, increasingly students are expected to fund themselves.

Very unfair how published entry grades have been raised when offers have been made this year. There are lots of worried kids around.

no fivecandles it is a realistic way of looking at it. Their writing isn't up to the standard of most of our Y6 children.
I've been involved in supporting NVQ students for 15 years so I'm well aware of the standards so feel I'm qualified to make the comparison.
Incidentally the standards have dropped on college courses too perhaps paying lecturers based on how many students pass the course isn't the way to raise standards

fivecandles I'm not talking about teachers Early Years or otherwise.

"I'm really glad that there are people who want to be early years teachers and are going to be trained and qualified. They get better opportunities and hopefully better paid."

They aren't teachers and aren't qualified to be teachers but many like you seem to think they are which is why settings can charge parents more for having a "graduate" employed while still being able to pay minimum wage.

RollaCoasta: Oh there's no doubt that GCSEs have been dumbed down and the marking has certainly been artificially raised.

I suggest you look at some recent GCSE papers in Science, English, and Maths and then look at early GCSE papers from the late 1980s. For a real eye-opener find some O level papers from thirty or forty years ago and compare the differences.

5candles - what qualfies me to say that? The calibre of many sixth formers and undergraduates. I am not alone. Lecturers have regularly complained of being pressured to award higher marks than work merits and to hand out ever more First Class and 2.1 degrees.

The article I cited from the TES in an earlier post highlights serious concerns that many undergraduates have no understanding of how to construct an essay or write a grammatical sentence. Here, and I quote:

?Higher education orientation. The phrase sounds so innocent, but it incorporates so much. Where I work, the compulsory first-year HEO module officially covers academic essay writing, referencing, research skills and bibliographies.[...] One might think, however, that the idea of an essay having an introduction, a body and a conclusion should be very familiar to a student who's been through A levels and been accepted into a university. In practice, the essay-writing skills I teach are very rarely revision. From the basic subject-verb-object sentence construction to the possessive apostrophe, this is a world of revelation to first-year students. More often than not, they are bewildered to hear that they can't copy and paste paragraphs from Wikipedia. I can't count the number of battles I've had with students when I've tried to explain that Wikipedia isn't a valid academic source. As far as I can tell, these basic academic skills are not being covered at A level at all, and students are coming straight to us with no idea of how to write academically - or indeed how to write at all.?

This is not a particularly recent problem either. As early as the mid 90s the University of East Anglia handed out a booklet entitled ?A Guide to Essay Writing, Oral Presentation, Grammar, Punctuation, and Related Matters?. This booklet assumed undergraduates were completely ignorant of the most basic techniques of essay writing and of the English language itself. Why was it necessary to produce such a booklet? Surely those attending the University had already demonstrated their skills in essay writing and their command of English in their A levels? Yet this was clearly not the case ? hence the necessity to issue the guidelines.

Cor! I thought that BosombytheSea was being satirical!

Try this:Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work

Breton, I did O Levels 40 years ago and found the standard of GCSEs equivalent in English and Maths. In fact, I thought the English exam was being recycled from 1973... Far From the Madding Crowd, War Poets, some Shakespeare rubbish . Who chooses these texts?

I thought dual science GCSE easier, but MUCH more relevant to real-life.

maizieD - Perhaps she was but, as you are fully aware, so much of this bombastic nonsense is produced in education nowadays it's difficult to tell!

Thanks for the link BTW!

RollaCoasta: It's not the texts, which have remained fairly constant for years, it's the way the questions are formulated and the way those questions are then marked.

In our day we didn't take "clean" copies of the text in with us. We had to know the work and be able to discuss it in detail.

Nor did the exam paper provide us with handy tips on what to include in our essays!

www.articlesbase.com/education-articles/inquiry-based-learning-and-language-teaching-1080813.html

We can all Google, Maizie. Hey, perhaps we're all involving ourselves in a bit of self-initiated research?

No Breton, we had to spend hours and hours learning quotes from the books, which always struck me as a total waste of time. It is a positive thing that you can take a text into an exam! You have to know where to look for the answer, after all!

The exam questions my ds brought home certainly expected him to discuss the text and make character comparisons, etc.