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

It makes my teeth itch because I honestly don't think people can define it; it just sounds good (to them).

math, do you mean differentiation as in segregation? Totally agree re shapesorter mentality.

Oh we are pretty well practised at moving between different systems now MoreBeta. With weeks notice in the case of the new spec GCSEs.

Well MoreBeta, the Government have got three years to sort this out before our children start Y10. Can't say I fancy their chances of getting it right in that timeframe.

When it goes tits up it won't be the teachers I'll be blaming.

So does this mean that my kids that are in year 7 will be starting the courses in year 11?

No, year 10

I agree with others that results need to be 'normalised' as well so that say 20% get A, 25% get B, 25% get C, 20% get D and 10% get E.

The Govt needs to set the exam so every child does teh same subject. Allowing competing exam boards - even if it is the Universities was not a good thing even in my day 30 years ago. Everyone knew who teh easier eam boards were even back thne but it wasn't as blatantly dumbed down as nowadays

I think its a good thing. There is nothing wrong with a two tier system. There is nothing wrong with a bit of competition. I wonder if this will increase the need for home tutors or if Kumon centres will have an influx of children for Maths and English.

I don't think science is just a list of facts to be learned, but it would be very difficult to do any science without having some facts and knowledge at your fingertips. Of course you can look up something like an atomic number if you don't know it or you've forgotten, but if you don't even know facts like: sodium is an element, these are its basic properties, this is what an element is, what an atomic number means and what we can calculate with it etc, you are going to have a hard time understanding what's going on.

It might be unfashionable these days to have children sit down and just learn stuff, and it probably does seem a bit boring and pointless to them, but there is value in it sometimes.

Ephiny - most of those facts are year 7/8 stuff I think. You need that well before GCSE

Atomic number isn't. But elements, periodic table, they have different properties etc

And no, no, no to normalising! Doesn't anyone remember why that was done away with?

I can see what will happen though. People who can will be holding their children back from sitting their exams in their "natural" year if they know that their particular cohort is particularly clever, and pushing for them to sit them early if the year above is a bit thicker than normal. They'll be planning this from at least Y6 I reckon, using KS2 SATs.

I await the threads on MN. It'll be the new "Shall I rent a flat in.."

Random thoughts:

Only 20% of students used to take 'O' levels - do we really want to go back to this? Sheep and goats at age 13? Huge numbers of students leaving school with no qualifications whatsoever (I don't think I'd be bothered to put much work in once I'd been told I wasn't doing the 'proper' exam)?

I agree wholeheartedly with the need to stop grade inflation, but this has been brought about by league tables and the marketisation of education, not by GCSEs. If a school's very survival did not depend on its A*-C rates, then exam boards wouldn't compete to be easiest.

I don't understand why end-loaded exams are always considered more 'rigorous'. I have always done much better at exams than I ever did at coursework, because I am great at memorising and regurgitating information under pressure. How does this make me 'cleverer' than someone who panics and blanks at exams but writes amazing and well planned pieces of coursework? I'd say the latter person has better skills for the workplace (as my faltering career has confirmed, if only all of life were exam based!).

Sure, but that was just an example (as someone happened to mention sodium/atomic numbers earlier in the thread)! I actually work as a research scientist, and while I do look things up all the time, it would be very difficult for me to read and understand a paper, plan an experiment, think about applications for my methods, understand the questions people asked me etc, without the basic body of knowledge (in cell biology/biochemistry in my case) that at some point during my schooling or degrees I sat down and learned (probably for an exam!).

Also, if you don't have a certain level of knowledge, you don't know what you don't know IYSWIM. So the point really of my example above is that of course you can look up the atomic number of sodium, but if you don't know what 'sodium' is, or what an atomic number is, you don't know what to look up, or indeed that there is anything to look up.

What is wrong with 'normalising' btw? I don't remember why it was changed, I think that was before my time!

Jenaimarr how could that possibly work? How could a parent know that one year group was thicker than another . The results are national not school based so how would they possibly have that sort of visibility?

Of course the results should be normalised but an A should really only be the top 5% or it will be back to the current system of everyone gets and A and still are pretty lacking in intelligence.

Oh they'd find a way Virgil. It might not work, but they'd try. They could easily find out average KS2 SATs results for a particular cohort (nationwide I mean), for example.

Ephiny, because you could easily score the same as someone in year x and get a C, whereas had you sat the exact same exam in year x, you'd have got an A (or vice versa).

In our three tier system in the 70s only 30% of children - at grammar school - sat O levels. The tech school children had a choice (O levels/CSEs) and the sec moderns had no choice but to take CSEs. The CSEs (i.e. the exams taken by about 70% of the population) meant nothing, unless you got an A grade which was 'seen' as equivalent to an O level (what grade O level, I don' know).

At 11, a child's fate was sealed by the type of exam they were to take at 16.

In the 70s, unlike now, many jobs required neither qualifications nor fancy application forms. You turned up at a shoe shop willing to work, you got the job. No mock sales to test your selling technique; no need to list your GCSE grades.

Life is different now, and, even though I live in a grammar school area, many children from the sec modern schools can aspire to go to university, even to Oxbridge. When I was doing my 11+ that door was already slamming in most children's faces due to the elitist exam system.

Is this just fluff to please the DM readers - ex-journo that he is?

the Top 5% get an A*
the next 10* get an A
the next 15% get a B
the next 20% get a C
the next 20% get a D
the next 15% get an E
the next 10% get an F
the bottom 5% get a G

so yes, an A at Chemistry will mean being brighter than an A in General Studies - but so it should be.

Jenai
They would only swap from an A to a C if the cohort varied by a mahoosive amount
but all of the studies show that innate intelligence has varied little across time and the differences between individual year groups are fractions of a standard deviation.

What WOULD alter is the mark to get an A
if the paper was easy it would be 95%
if it was hard it would be 70%
but getting an A would still state that you were in the top 15% of the population for that subject - a truly valuable measure

When they used to normalise results, did it really make for a huge variation in exam grades compared to not normalised results?

Well said, Flex.

wrt normalising, all it does is tell you how much better or worse a student's results are compared to the rest of their year's. It doesn't really tell you how much they know.

Jenai
How does the current system tell you what they know?

If the paper is released and you know a student is in the top 10% of responders, that is a lot more use than knowing they were in the top 53% (A* and A grade for Chemistry last year)

And the papers are moderated and checked (or should be anyway) same as they have been since we took GCEs in the 80's

Just for the record, GCSE coursework has been scrapped anyway. It has been replaced with controlled assessments which must be done in school, often hand written and usually under test conditions with a time limit.

From next year, GCSE modular exams will also be scrapped and all exams will be taken at the end of the course.

@Josephine Can't come soon enough. GCSEs aren't worth the paper they are written on now. You could get a decent job with good O levels back in the day.
Mmmm....so no-one had got a good job or got into university or trained to be a doctor since 1987 then?

I am worried that some teachers just will not make the transition between new and old systems and hence not prepare the pupils properly.

Funny, I'm a teacher and my concern is that apparently there will be a 'competition' to decide which exam board 'wins' the right to set these exams, then there will be lots of wrangling over wtf 'O-level' actually means if they intend 75% of kids to sit it. Then they have to decide on what content needs to be in it to make it one of the hardest exams in the world yet also suitable for 75% of students (re the much beloved calculus, I could probably teach a bright 10 year old how to differentiate a polynomial in ten minutes, I expect it was removed from GCSE because being able to answer a differentiation question at that level and actually understanding differentiation were two different things). Once they've gone back and forth over that, they need to sit down and actually write the syllabus, decide what the exams will look like, write specimen papers, get it all checked, get it all approved and then get it to schools in time for teachers to actually have a clue what they're meant to be teaching. Oh and some textbooks might be nice. September 2014 this is supposed to happen by? Don't make me laugh.

When the teachers are poorly prepared for the changes, rest assured it won't be their fault.