Are you prepared for exam results to fall?

[noblegiraffe]

Apologies as I could only find this story on the DM, but Gove was quoted yesterday as saying 'There are going to be some uncomfortable moments in education reform in the years ahead. There will be years, because we are going to make exams tougher, when the number of people passing will fall.'

This reminded me of a thread on the TES forum about the latest EDEXCEL modular science results from November, where heads of science were discussing an alarming dip in results with students sitting the higher tier who got a U as they fell off the bottom and generally poor pass rates. There is a comment on the thread from someone who said they had a meeting with the EDEXCEL chief examiner who said that the A*-C rate for the biology module was 5%. While I can't find another source for that, it would seem crazy if true.

These students sitting the new science syllabus would be presumably one of the first groups of students Gove has in mind when he talks about falling exam results.

So, as parents, are you aware of this? What do you think? About time that higher standards were brought in or unfair on students who will miss out on a Cs that they would have achieved if they were a year older?

If you saw a fall in exam results on the league tables, or if your child came home with a poor result would you blame the exams or the school?

As a teacher I'm quite worried, as we seem to get the blame for everything.

[wordfactory]

I think the reason why I think it will be fine for my DC is that it will recalibrate and people will start to have more trust in the system.

An A will once again mean somehting special. A B will be pretty darn good.

10 A*s will mean the child is extraordinary as well it should.

[DilysPrice]

I generally agree that a recalibration is no bad thing, and I think that the universities will cope fine - if they have 2,000 places to fill in a given year they're not going to suddenly say "sorry, only 500 of the applicants had our required grades this year, so we're sending three quarters of the staff on sabbatical", and they'll have enough data to understand the difference between a pre- and post-recalibration grade.

But employers aren't normally recruiting from a single year group, and they won't have as good an overview of what the changes mean so I'm much more worried about the effect on them.

And of course I wouldn't trust edexcel et al to recalibration their way out of a wet paper bag with calibration marks pre printed on it in indelible ink, so I'm suspecting that no matter how good an idea it is in theory, it'll be an almighty cockup in practice. I'm grateful that my eldest DC is a little younger than the cannon fodder.

[Yellowtip]

Only approximately the top 2% of pupils get 10 straight A*s now, so that's still pretty good.

[ClothesOfSand]

There is an awful lot of scaremongering on this thread.

I'd really like a clear explanation of what is going to happen and when.

I am assuming that for the syllabus taught from September 2012 there will be linear GCSEs.

I am assuming that the new, harder GCSEs are a separate issue that the government is going to bring in for the syllabus taught in September 2013.

I am getting the impression from this thread that part of them being harder is that longer, more essay type answers will be required. If that is the case, then it is surely bad news for boys, not girls as has been suggested here.

So I'd really like more information before making out that this is the end of the world. I don't believe for a moment that only 5% of pupils in the whole country are going to get C or above in their Science GCSE each year. Something has clearly gone wrong with that module; there is no way that percentage can be reflective of how difficult the new exams will be.

[gramercy]

I'm sitting on the fence here, and I have a year 9 ds.

I'd like the exams to be harder and for there to be final examinations. Modular exams - ludicrous. You might as well have a modular driving test: reversing one day, hill start the next, emergency stop following week... and as I read on here once, who on earth wants to be treated by a doctor who gained his qualification at the 32nd attempt?

But I would like the see the exams renamed. The current year 10s would take a huge en masse gap year so they could apply to university with their 15 A*s and look bloody brilliant compared with their year 9 rivals.

I am also concerned that some private schools are going to clean up - they have been doing the traditional exam twice a year thing all along and state school students have not been reared on unseen exams.

[EndoplasmicReticulum]

I teach science in an independent school. We opted out of the science GCSE fiasco a couple of years ago, and now teach IGCSE. Looks like we made a sensible decision.

The best thing that Gove or anyone else could do would be to just leave the current system alone for a few years to give teachers and students a chance to get to grips with it. All the bloody tinkering does no good to anyone (except the textbook manufacturers).

[LittenTree]

Oh, and the private sector who went IGCSE years ago....

[MigratingCoconuts]

The best thing that Gove or anyone else could do would be to just leave the current system alone for a few years to give teachers and students a chance to get to grips with it. All the bloody tinkering does no good to anyone (except the textbook manufacturers).

A big fat amen to that!!! I teach science and we have had 2 mjor changes to the course in the last year. made all the harder becuase our school runs a 3 year KS4.

One planned for and we knew was coming but we are adjusting to, which is the new style of questios that require greater analysis of data (which my top set described as just common sense really ). We are yet to see the impact of these changes requested by universities and science societies.

The other not planned for, which is the announcement that science will suddenly go linear. This means the mix and match modular system 9and the thinking behind it providing flexibilty as a child develops) has gone out of the window on a single announcement. Who knows what those exams will be like or how many there will be!

Its not just about making me not teach to the exam, its about me being able to advise parents which course or tier of entry their child is most suited for. Becuase I no longer know!!

And now we have grade deflation

enough already!!

(ps very impressed at the number of parents who are willing to sacrifice their children for this experiemnt! I wouldn't)

[MigratingCoconuts]

I really should proof read more often

I also wanted to add that when i did my O levels, they may or may not have been tougher but....my teachers certainly understood how the exams worked and had past papers going back 15 or 20 years. They would coach me in what the style of the questions would be and also how regularly certain topics came up. With question spotting like that, you could be fairly certain of what you were facing.

So trying to help students do their very best by becoming exam-savvy is really not that new.

[noblegiraffe]

Clothes - teachers would like a clear explanation of what's going to happen and when too. We have to get our education news from the BBC at the same time as the rest of the country. I'm a maths teacher and I found out about this new 'tougher' maths GCSE from BBC Breakfast, went to the Ofqual website and there wasn't even an announcement there until later in the morning to explain what was going on. And it's all very muddled, the rationale given for changing these 'four key subjects' is that teachers are only teaching part of the syllabus. But teachers have never only taught part of the maths syllabus and it is all examined, and a new tougher maths GCSE has already been introduced, leaving me (and many others) wondering what the hell is going on. It is very demotivating to constantly think we have a handle on the situation only to have the rug pulled from under us again.

[MigratingCoconuts]

But teachers have never only taught part of the maths syllabus and it is all examined, and a new tougher maths GCSE has already been introduced, leaving me (and many others) wondering what the hell is going on. It is very demotivating to constantly think we have a handle on the situation only to have the rug pulled from under us again.

hear, hear. That's exactly what is happening. As a science teacher, I have never only taught parts of the syallbus and would be amazed if any teacher in any subject could get away with risking that!

[EdithWeston]

"All the bloody tinkering does no good to anyone (except the textbook manufacturers)" aka the exam boards themselves; it's an overly intertwined system at the moment.

The best think to do now is move, lock stock and barrel, to the iGCSE. It's not an experimental system. It's not been fiddled with. It's not blighted by grade inflation. There are text books and the syllabus is well established and "proved" by use around the globe.

[noblegiraffe]

Those whose children will be the first to go through the new system should be aware that while their children will get worse results than previous years, they will probably also get worse results than subsequent years. Grades don't just go up because exams get easier, grades go up because teachers get better at teaching to the new expectations. The first year that As were introduced, hardly anyone got them because schools weren't set up to push their students to get exceptionally high marks in exams. Now top students are groomed for their A grade from when they start in Y7 (e.g. to get an A* in maths you need a level 8 at KS3 so the schemes of work are set up to ensure that the correct level of work is covered by this point).

I know that people will suggest that the solution is to grade on a bell curve, but would it have been right for say the top 5% of students in the first year of As to get awarded an A without necessarily having achieved the same high standards as subsequent years? That your grade is to be decided not by the amount of work that you have mastered, but by how much work the rest of your year group has mastered? In maths, if you can use the quadratic formula, complete the square, solve problems with vectors and correctly answer easier questions, why shouldn't you get an A*? Students should be measured by what they can do. Incidentally, if standards are falling, a bell curve would mask this as you'd still have the same numbers of students getting a C, but getting lower marks to achieve this.

[thirdhill]

So as to avoid the early adjustment period, why not move to the iGCSE, which is not changing? Or even O levels, which are still available in the full range of subjects and very well thought of?

[noblegiraffe]

All the problems associated with the current GCSE changes would also be associated with a switch to iGCSE which is linear and more academically challenging than GCSE.

I just had a look at an iGCSE paper and it would be nice for our top set students compared to current GCSE. Since the previous government scrapped the intermediate tier a few years back (a move which annoyed maths teachers who would quite like it back please), the higher tier paper has presented very little challenge as it now covers such a spread of grades that there are very few A and A* questions. (Hey Gove, there's a suggestion that teacher might actually approve of, why don't you ask them how to differentiate between the top candidates?). However we don't have any resources to teach set theory, differentiation and functions to KS4 students, so a switch would require quite a lot of work.

The foundation iGCSE paper would be completely unsuitable for our lower achieving students. I admit I was shocked to see trigonometry and simultaneous equations on a paper which only goes up to C grade as these are B grade GCSE topics. I expect this is why it is mainly selective private schools which favour the iGCSE as they wouldn't have (many) foundation tier students.

[thirdhill]

Thanks for such a straight, simple and professional answer, noble.

Which also seems to imply that Gove is trying to steer state education towards what fee-paying parents buy for their kids.

Is this bad, or is the worry about the transition? Because we managed the transition "downwards". If it's "wind-back" time, could we not work to get a system that is even better not just than this, but also the original one?

If we don't "wind-back", is the cost to us that the rest of the world has O levels and iGCSEs, while UK state education is a poor product?

[MigratingCoconuts]

I think that is a fair comment about Gove, that is after all, what his experience of eduction and what he personally found successful.

I, as a teacher, am mainly concerned about the transition. This is because I feel as though I have been reacting to this change and that ever since I started teaching twenty years ago.

About very 2-4 years so education minister or other comes up with some initiative that they will 'fix' education with.

However, I do have concerns about those less academic kids, as the curriculum shrinks, both in the range of different types of course available and the option choices they can make.

[ClothesOfSand]

Thanks for explaining NobleGiraffe.

It still seems to me that most subjects are not becoming more difficult and becoming linear at the same time. So with the exception of Geography and Maths, year 9s are not all having all the changes thrown at them. The changes are being staggered.

DS is doing a pilot maths GCSE anyway, so I don't even know that they are going to change the pilot.

[MoreBeta]

EdithWeston - I definitley agree we should have normalised 'bell curve marking' back again. The top 20% get A, the next 25% get B the next 25% get C and so on as we did in my day.

I also think we should have one national exam in each subject.

[ClothesOfSand]

In fact I've just read that OFqual have said that the other change to the GCSEs, the separate marking of grammar, punctuation and spelling, will be applied to candidates who are already studying towards their GCSEs, so that will not hit pupils who are in year nine first.

It does seem that these changes are being staggered over a few years, with changes announced all the way through from pupils sitting this summer through to pupils sitting in 2017. It is not just going to hit one year group alone.

[OddBoots]

As mum of a Y8 boy I'm watching with interest. There is time to decide but I am seriously thinking about offering him the choice to HE and do iGCSEs.

[Kez100]

I like the idea of a new name for the new exam system. I said before, as an employer, I want stability. A rapid adjustment downwards would be fine if that was then the stable level going forward and a new name used so employers know when we are not ranking peers.

[msinsecure]

Slightly on a tangent but on the topic of GCSE reforms .... some children who can't get C grade in maths are very able in other subjects. Do you think there should be a route for them to go to uni without the C grade but maybe having demonstrated they can do arithmetic, %s etc? I know a couple of people who got into respected unis without the GCSE maths at grade C (not quite sure how I must admit) and did really well in their disciplines.