GCSEs are to stay!

[SPBInDisguise]

I didn't see that coming. Sorry if there's a thread already, I did look.

story here

Russians you're saying that to the wrong person, I have a Geography degree and adore maps!

But yes, Gove should just BUTT OUT of curriculum choices as he does not know his shit.

Presumably though there is more to geog than being able to read an OS map? I wondered if he was trying to move kids away from learning about things like climate change by focussing instead on identifying steeples etc.....? The mention of capital cities etc also seemed to be a bit old fashioned. Obviously very useful in a game of triv but unless he is suggesting that many more kids go the route of earning their living via quiz machines ........

Normal distribution grading is a terrible way to grade exams as it doesn't actually tell you what the students can do, merely how they compared to their peers in any given year. Cohorts perform better as exams get bedded into the curriculum, 'grade inflation' is not the only reason that results go up.

Incidentally, with norm-referenced grading, the number of students passing O-level maths doubled in the first few years, 100% increase in pass rate, how's that for grade inflation?

Didn't the numbers taking maths go up too, though, hmm?

The most useful (for all users) of exam grading would be to combine both criteria marking and norm referencing. Especially when you are talking about an exam which is supposed to be accessible to practically everyone and where you have an expected minimum acceptable attainment.

Noble
That early year statistical blip was due to the standard of pupils coming up through the schools as the brand new system bedded in.
A statistical anomaly of change, nothing to do with the normal distribution.

It was due to the number of students taking the exam doubling. As this doubling in number was probably due in part to students joining from the bottom end, it seems unlikely that standards were maintained. As I said, norm-referencing only gives you a comparison against that year's particular cohort. Some year groups will be weaker than others.

As an aside, GCSEs aren't completely criterion-referenced, from what I understand, pass marks are set and approved with an eye on what percentage pass rate they will give.

Normal distribution grading is a terrible way to grade exams as it doesn't actually tell you what the students can do, merely how they compared to their peers in any given year.

Sorry this is nonsense, norm-referencing is by far, easily the best way to grade.

The great thing about having 100,000s of pupils taking the exam each year is that the mean and distribution of ability of each year cohort is indistinguishably different year to year. It is therefore almost axiomatic that the mean and distribution are the best and indeed extremely accurate references.

I really can't understand why anyone would prefer other grading systems

(BTW University degrees are different where maybe only 50-100 students take exams on a particular course and there can be significant inter-year variability of mean and distribution of ability.)

Any exam where the grade boundaries are determined after all the raw marks are in is very unlikely to be wholly criterion referenced. Any exam where the grade boundaries is set before the raw marks are in cannot be anything other than criterion referenced, by definition, even if they set the criteria in the hope or expectation that they would give a certain result.

AIUI the grade boundaries for controlled assessments, ISAs etc may not yet have been set (although maybe teachers don't know them but they have already been agreed). If the boundaries were set before the marks were in and there was no procedure to fiddle with them if they didn't like the result that they gave, then they would be purely criterion referenced. If the boundaries were set before the marks were in and some (but not all) of them were fiddled with afterwards then they would still be criterion referenced but the criterion would be completely different and there might be an element of norm referencing. Grades can only be wholly norm referenced if their boundaries are derived with respect to the normal distribution once all the marks are in.

But I thought we wanted pupils to get better at Maths year on year - how will we know if they do?

I think that GCSEs and A-levels are in desperate need of scrapping. We are expecting our children to stay on until 18 years old and GCSEs were a system set up when most children left school at 16.

However it is a good thing that the brakes are put on. We need a system that is carefully thought out and will recongise vocational learning as well as academic learning. We also need new qualifications to encourage children to study maths and English who can't cope/ or don't want to do A-levels in these subjects. The replacement for GCSEs needs to be carefully designed in consultation with universities, teachers, employers as well as the general public.

No 'we' clearly don't want pupils to get better at maths year on year. We want pupils to take maths at A level. At some point after the introduction of the GCSE they realised the only way they could do this would be to make maths A level easier. There was a consequential adjustment to the level of maths skill and knowledge required for Maths GCSE (although that didn't necessarily make maths GCSE easier, it made it narrower in scope. Some of the things that were taken out were easier than the things left in).

Maths and mfl are specific cases though, where there was a political (and economic) imperative to get more kids with some level of qualification in these areas, that would be more economically useful than no level of qualification. The other subjects by and large seem to be far more searching and rigorous (difficult probably isn't the right word) than 20 or so years ago. Gove doesn't accept that of course. But he's wrong.

But I thought we wanted pupils to get better at Maths year on year - how will we know if they do?

By recruiting people of different ages at random to take exams and comparing their school grades with their performance on the exam.

Other than by doing something like this you really can't.

More and more children are taking maths early. When I was at school hardly anyone took maths early. Now more able children are taking maths in year 9.

Maybe having a functional qualification that children take when they are ready is good and the really clever kids could do GCSE functional maths at 14 and GCSE further maths at 16. Average intelligence children who take the functional qualification at 16 could do GCSE further maths in sixth form and the clever kids could do A-level maths. The low ablity kids could do GCSE functional maths at 18.

I expect I shall be totally flamed now for suggesting that children vary dramatically in mathematical ablity.

Cumfy do you think that you haven't learnt anything since your school days? I got a C at O'level Maths in the old days, I am totally confident that if I sat the same paper I would get an A. I could also get straight A's at GCSE, and am surprised when helping my DS how well A'level comes back.

However O'level and GCSE test different things. O'level was much more about regurgitating facts, GCSE is much more about understanding and applying.

russians, not sure where you got your info about gcse maths being made easier in order to get more people to take A-level. That would surely make A-level more inaccessible as students would be inadequately prepared? One of the major problems with GCSE maths was the switch to 2 tier in 2006 but that's because the higher exam became less rigorous as it needed to cover more content, not because content was removed.

A-level maths was made easier in 2005, with some of its content being moved to further maths, but that was because of a disastrous dip in A-level uptake due to A-level maths being made too difficult under the Curriculum 2000 changes, and not to do with GCSE.

Where do I get my info? I'm a cambridge maths grad (which means nothing except I understand what is being talked about and am interested enough to listen instead of drifting off to talk about other things and the BILs assume I will be interested in talking with them about things mathsy when we all meet up) with a BIL who is a maths prof and another BIL who is a maths examiner. I'm obviously not going to say which board or which uni :)

GCSE was made narrower because some GCSE topics were moved into the A level syllabus to replace to 'difficult' topics which were dumped from that. I've seen you deny this on MN before but it's a fact - maybe not for the particular board that you teach but for others, it definitely is. I can understand that as a maths teacher you don't like people saying that your subject is not as difficult as it once was but to deny it is futile really - since it's true. It's not the fault of maths teachers - in fact, they are doing a great job considering the fiddling the government have done with their subject and the criticism they pick up from practically everyone for things that aren't their fault (I also have maths teacher friends some of whom I have known since uni).

I've never denied that maths topics have been moved from GCSE to A-level , I'm asking you where you got your info from because I'm interested to see the details as I am unaware of them and googling 'gcse maths content moved to A-level' hasn't given any answers. Neither have you!

JugglingFromHereToThere Yes, My daughter achieved her Grade 5 Theory a couple of years ago. She was told it is harder than GCSE ,more like an AS level. It took her two attempts to pass (She missed it by a couple of marks the first time!)

No 'we' clearly don't want pupils to get better at maths year on year.

But if (according to another thread I am on) 46% of pupils don't achieve a grade C at Maths GCSE and below a C is seen as a fail, are we happy to continue grading 46% of people as failures, even if maths standards are/were improving?

(or have I missed something here)

LaQueen, yes in maths. Not in English, or history, or music, or RE. Or most of the other subjects. It is possible to argue over whether the history curriculum of now is narrower or deeper than the curriculum of 30 years ago but certainly more is asked of the students in terms of the skills and knowledge they are required to demonstrate. Much more. Even if you do believe the scope of the area of study is narrower or less 'valid' (personally, I'm sad they don't do all the industrial revolution stuff I did and I don't see the point of learning about the American West at all - but I'm sure other people think history of medicine or lurgy through the ages or whatever it's called is very interesting and that the American West is more important than, say, Jethro Tull's seed drill). They have to do a lot more writing, a lot more research and use skills we didn't even have to develop when I was doing history O level, let alone be assessed on.

LaQueen, I would assume your BIL meant that MacBeth was only being used as an extra reference.

Both my DDs have done GCSe (and A level) English. If they were studying say An Inspector Calls, they had to know that play inside out, they read it, saw it at the theatre etc. they also dipped in and out of other plays/works by the same author, inorder to provide other references for exam questions.

There is no way a child could get an A grade if they had hadn't read and analysed the play from cover to cover.

LaQueen I only had to read one compulsory novel for my entire english GCSE over two years, and some people didn't bother to read it and looked at the extracts the teachers gave us and did well anyway.

For all our coursework texts, we were just told "oh you don't need to read it just look at these few extracts"

A disaster, I agree with you

I'd would really like to hear from some teachers on here to see of my DD's school is an exception or the rule.

Grow when did you do your GCSE?