The return of the O Level.

[hermionestranger]

Leaked reports suggest that the government is to scrap the GCSE from 2015, 2013 option takers will be the last year to take them.

I'm sorry it's the mail bug they were first on my twitter feed. I 'm on my phone so can't link properly.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2162369/Return-O-Level-Gove-shake-biggest-revolution-education-30-years.html

'O'-Level MFL defo did not teach fluency and neither did 'A'-Level. However, at 'A'-Level you would be able to have a conversation with a lot of effort.

I find that very offensive Acumenoop, you do not have to have special needs to find GCSEs hard. You must be very intelligent (or lucky) to have passed without putting effort in. For most people, they really are not a 'piece of piss'.

The Old Fogey I mentioned before claims that A Level German students of yesteryear studied Goethe, for example. I have to admit, this sounds far more challenging than now. I am presently working my way through A level mfl, and I have reached the dizzying heights of reading a broadsheet newspaper veerrrrrrry slo-oooooowly. I am also trying to read Lord of the Rings in my chosen language. I never realised exactly how long the habits of hobbits chapter was, until now!

Sorry I offended you. It's always difficult to apologise for causing offence without taking back what one said. Hm. I disagree with you that the exams I took were hard and that I am very intelligent. I am bright, but not abnormally so. I also have special needs, so I'm probably less offended by the idea that one might have such challenges.

I am sorry I upset you. I will withdraw my further opinion from this public conversation and have it in private instead.

"But, what we have now, are hundreds of thousands of more 18 year olds, going onto university, and they're just not actually academically inclined.

But, because they have garnered a few GCSEs, and a couple of very mediocre A Levels, they reckon they are of university calibre ...

So off they trot...and pay upwards of £27K for the privilege of studying Media & International Relations at a uni somewhere...and, then when they graduate, they're stunned that they don't just stroll into a £25K a year, graduate position ... because hey, they're a graduate, right"

I would argue that that is the fault of the universities, rather than GCSEs. If these courses weren't available, more people would go on to do useful post 16 courses such as level 3 Btecs and apprenticeships. In short, courses such as media, fashion etc should be transferred from universities to FE colleges. This would widen participation due to lower fees as well as be more geared up towards working life and employment.

gabsid, school in Germany sounds like school in Belgium. I agree, there should be a happy medium. You wouldn't believe what my dd had to learn for her French exam (in a French-speaking school so 1st language) a couple of weeks ago (she's 12). Problem is, they don't apply what they learn when they write because it's all too much to put into practice.

The problem with this theory is that doing well at school doesn't have all that much to do with being 'academically gifted'.

It's more about opportunity/ social and economic factors.

I disagree that universities should be free, however they shouldn't be the extortionate fees that they are now. FE should also be funded in the same way that uni is to encourage more to go.

I agree with LeQ -- it should be free. All third level should be free imo.

No criticising GCSEstudent doesn't make me feel big, it makes me feel sad. This is someone who, I have to speculate, has had eleven years full time education. I'm also assuming (s)he is not using English as an additional language.

I teach teenagers and I have to teach them basic English along side my actuall subjects. So taking GCSEstudent's post:

Sorry for gate crashing but I found this when I was reading about the proposed change.

What is the subject of the above sentence? Why is there no comma after 'crashing'?

I'm doing my GCSEs at the moment and thought I would put a few things straight.

OK this is an informal context so I will allow the contractions with apostrophes.

No one at my school has been allowed to take a single resit, all of our exams have been taken this term, 27 in total.

Again as it as informal writing I won't pick up the '27' instead of twenty seven

People do not cheat in coursework as we do controlled assessments, which are essentially exams. Again in the two year course there is no time to resit these.

Nice to see one comma but it would make sense if there was a second one, so that it would form a single sentence, not start a second one with 'again'.

Me and my peers have worked so hard for two years to hopefully get good grades.

Er do you mean, "my peers and I..."

This sounds so immature but how would you like it if all of your work was undermined by people saying you only achieved what you did because it was easy?

Use commas. Oh and my grandmother would say,"I don't know why anyone thinks there so hard, they are only 'Ordinary' Levels", so yes I have had my hard work belittled.

Finally, our teachers have commented that the exams we've sat have been the hardest they've seen in recent times, and believe me no one I know has come out saying 'that was easy, definitely an A for me' everyone is struggling.*

Again ignoring the contractions, this has better use of commas but is still missing some.

That's just my view on it, maybe my peers are just a group of thickos though and are obviously not at all 'academic'.

Please learn to use commas.

I did not say anyone was or is thick, I said you would not have passed 'O' Level English, and that is based on this single post, riddled with errors.

You don't use commas appropriately. You missused a personal pronoun. Your first sentence both does not make sense, and appears to have no subject.

I hope you do well in your exams. I really do not want to put you down or devalue your hard work. I am genuinely sad that you do not use standard English conventions, and rightly, or wrongly, I have assumed this is because you don't know how.

Oh dear god sashh, it was a post on an internet forum not an assessed essay. As an aside, if o-level English was so obsessed with commas that they were seen as more important than content and other factors, then I don't see why they called it English and not Punctuation.

I'm undecided about the fees. I think those going to university should be the ones to pay and not those who don't. I didn't go to university but by the time I was 26 I was paying 60% tax. I imagine that funded some of the huge growth in provision and expectation that took place in the 1980s. My SILs both went but neither has ever done a day's work in the UK. It has to be paid for somehow and better it is paid for by those who benefit. However, I do think the fees should have been phased to help families and society to cope with the change, ie, rising by £1000 a year until £9000 was reached so that the market correction could have been better managed, not least for the institutions who may well be closing courses and planning redundancies in October due to poor enrolment.

I do think the fees will bring about a much needed correction though and hopefully a growth in FE. The young people I interview for admin jobs are really not university calibre and would be in a better position with more resources channelled into foundation skills rather than getting soft degrees from former polytechnics.

For a lot of young people at the moment the choice will be between going to uni and coming out saddled with debt, or going on the dole and staying at home with their parents. There aren't any jobs for them to go into.

If GCSE students write on mumsnet they should be encouraged. However it is true that those of us who receive CVs and covering emails receive some very badly written ones.

Anyway on return to O levels (and my children would be the first if it goes ahead in those subjects their school does not do iGCSEs (although perhaps they woudl go to O level and drop the iGCSE if O levels returned)) I do not think it really matters. Under either set of exams teachers can teach spelling and grammar and how to write essays. I certainly have children who adore source questions which are more common GCSE than O level as you don't need to learn a thing so if you are bright you can get away with no work.

I think it is hard to compare the old and new system and people doing exams today can only do their best under the current system. People mention German above. I did A level German in 1979. In all my subjects UI read widely around the subject. I read lots of books for English and for German in the language concerned. I still know and can speak the language all those years on.

I remember by heart one of my A level English questions as it is so short. "Is Tess a moral fable?" Those who weren't very good (most of the class) just wrote all they knew about the book Tess which of course was not what the question wanted. What they wanted was the ability to write an essay and use arguments. Anyway that is A level. The thread is abotu GCSE. I did O levels. Some people in our school which was not very academic did CSEs only. I remember we were forced to do one CSEs however clever we were, English (as well as the O level) just in case we failed the O level. I remember feeling insulted to be made to take a CSE as they were so associated with the thick and stupid. On that basis I suspect we are better with a combined system where if you are bright you will get As and A* at GCSE and peerhaps the odd B and if you are not you will try to get 5 GCSes but they may be in car mainteinance and tourism and childcare which seem to be the most popular ones at our local comp.

I think Gove should let education alone. Let us have 10 years with no changes to anything. I am not against the suggestion that schools be told that clever children ought to be doing science, maths, english, a language etc as all good private schools already do that and the fact some comps don't is terrible for the children as employers want to see those subjects on CVs.

sashh,

You might want to review your own writing before criticising someone else's use of punctuation on an informal internet forum. I won't point out your errors as that would be cruel and pedantic.

Sashh,

You have actually made a number of errors and some of the corrections you demand of GCSE student are quite unneccessary. Others are simply incorrect. At least GCSE Student is:

A) young
B) writing on an informal forum

Whereas you, presumably, are doing your very best to be accurate in your criticisms?

sashh's comments are bizarre. Why on earth would you write "twenty-seven" rather than 27? In most British newspapers, for example, house style is to write numbers one to nine out in full, but numbers 10 and above as numerals.

And what's wrong with using contractions? Even in formal writing, it's usually fine to write "it's" rather than "it is" or even "I'm" rather than "I am". I thought the post from the GCSE student was well written, particularly compared to a lot of the stuff that appears on this forum.

A spokesman said, " we have been conducting an investigation for the last year, and it has become clear that many O level certificates were issued in error. Many users' posts were repetitive and littered with mistakes. Credibility must be restored to the exam system."

P.S: there =/= they're

This seems to have descended into pettiness - I don't think the grammatical/linguistic quality of posts is relevant here.

I am not close enough to GCSEs to understand the content (re the teaching to pass the exam point) - however i think this is a problem with any exam based system - including o'levels -hugely magnified by the development of exam based league tables. I guess if the content of exams is carefully thought out then working to the exams won't necessrily be too bad .Also I thought course work was supposed to help!
On a different note using one board shouldn't restrict students- I remember my a level papers ( i think) having lots of different choices - so the school would select the periods they wanted to cover and then the student would just select from the essay questions for that period. I do think getting rid of board choice matters; the boards varied hugely when I was at school and although I seem to remember my school deliberatelty picking hard/academic boards I can see the pressure to do other wise.

Good Heavens
I agree with Xenia about something! Especially the first two sentences...

"I think Gove should let education alone. Let us have 10 years with no changes to anything. I am not against the suggestion that schools be told that clever children ought to be doing science, maths, english, a language etc as all good private schools already do that and the fact some comps don't is terrible for the children as employers want to see those subjects on CVs."

For what it's worth, I did my O-levels in school in the 1970s. A few years later - the year GCSEs were introduced, in fact - I took a GCSE in night class. It was much much easier than my O-levels had been. The course lasted nine months (September to June), there were six of us in the class, and five of us passed with grade A. I suppose it's possible that GCSEs have got harder since then, but unlikely.