Scrapping GCSEs

[gelatinous]

Daily mail article here.

Good idea or not?

I am a HoD. I have been one for two years. In two years we have had the introduction of a new GCSE specification and a new BTEC spec, held our year 9 early starters in limbo owing to the announcement about a move to linear and subsequent changes to the new GCSE specification, which is therefore valid for only one year), have heard that the BTEC has changed and therefore needs to be re-written, two years after it was introduced. We were already braced for A level changes and the curriculum review, and I was trying to work out what the letter from Gove to the Expert Review panel, which referred to the removal of NC levels, would actually mean for us. Now this. Yes, I want to to lay my head on a desk and weep.

ooh a hod! TFMadonna, would the iGCSE give you some stability for the next few years? Sorry have no idea if there is BTEC equivalent...

We know what we are doing for the next two years. We have worked incredibly hard to prepare first ourselves and now our students for the changes. And as I don't know what the status of the iGCSE will be in the Brave New World, I'm not changing again until I actually get the details!

I like practical assessments in Science though. They make sense to me, scientifically...

I just looked at some iGCSE papers for maths and was quite surprised to find them really no more challenging than GCSE. There were a few more topics covered which we don't do, functions, set theory and very basic calculus but the questions weren't hard.

I was very surprised to see that calculators were allowed for everything. Presumably iGCSE candidates have time to learn basic set theory because they can completely neglect pen and paper methods. I wonder how their mental arithmetic holds up.

Evidence based decision making is NOT a Gove strong point.

I did O levels in 1974.
My 16 year old has just finished GCSEs.
It was normal back then to take 8 or 9 subjects at most. Today's pupils often take 12 or more.

I have to say that the Maths I did in 1974 was infinitely easier then as was the English Language, Geography and much of the science.
French was much more rigorous, we had to speak and understand the language and English Lit was also more demanding.

And whatever anyone says about the current GCSEs I have a very able and motivated 16 year old who has just worked his socks off over the last two years and I could weep for him when people go on about dumbed down easy exams.

On top of this my DS2 is in year 9 and will end up with the worst of both worlds harder GCSEs and new style A levels.

I teach English, and I don't think there is a lack of focus on linguidtic analysis. These are the criteria for A/A* pieces of work in relation to analysis:
Candidates
show appreciation of how writers use language to
achieve specific effects;
make assured exploration and evaluation of the
ways meaning, ideas and feeling are conveyed
through language, structure and form;
at the highest level, make assured analysis of
stylistic features.

there are 2 other assessment areas as well, but as you can see it is impossible to get a high grade without being analytical. THis is WJEC by the way.

I agree with whoever said schools asking for A orA* for students to take A level are looking to improve their results. It is possible to get good grades at A level for candidates with C or above - they have to work and the teacher has to teach, but it is more than possible.

Noble - there are specific non-calculator method marks on IGCSE papers, largely for fraction arithmetic questions.

One exam board's IGCSE is v similar in diificulty to GCSE (but with slightly different topics) and another's rather harder...

Speaking also as a HOD, I have to agree that I am also weeping at my desk.

We have had change after change which, in my opinion, will have little positive impact upon the outcomes for our pupils. We have worked damn hard to accommodate these changes and ensure that our pupils have the best possible outcome.

How can a system which divides pupils based upon statistics at an early age be right? How can you label children so easily? I teach pupils who just suddenly get it in Year 11 and yet they might already have been entered for the lower paper. I've had pupils who have had a statistical target of a D and through damn hard work have come out with an A. That wouldn't be possible in Gove's brave new world.

The posters who have said GCSE's are easy are wrong. I teach History in a good comprehensive and despite what people may say, it takes real hard work and a certain level of intellectual capability to achieve a grade C. It is not something that can just be magicked out of thin air, walk into the exam with no revision and you have no chance.

The worst thing about all of this is that Gove just randomly comes out with these things. How is it right that we, those are responsible for educating young people, because that's what they are, not statistics, find out from the BBC website what is going on in the world of education.

I cannot put into words what an arse the man is.

I am all for change when change is well thought out, consulted upon and will have a positive impact.

My DS has just finished his GCSEs this summer. I must admit that before he started high school I was a bit about the GCSE exams having taken O and A levels myself and being conditioned into thinking that they were the best thing since sliced bread.

After seeing him have to work his butt off these last two years with exams every five minutes and constant continual assessments, targeted continually and pushed to the limit I feel he worked damned harder than I did.

He will deserve every high grade he will (hopefully) get and I feel sorry for the DCS that have worked so hard that people say they are "easy" and "dumbed down". They are so better prepared to take these exams than I ever was. In fact I don't think we had any prep at all - not even past papers. We just studied the course for two years and took the exam. Some people coasted for eighteen months, worked for the last three or four and then took the exams. The teachers never took revision sessions and basically couldn't have cared less whether we passed or failed - and I went to a very good state comp. I am so grateful to my DS's teachers who have really gone out of the way to help all the students.

The current exams are perfectly fine and constant fiddling with the system just creates confusion for students, parents, teachers, universities and employers.

I think the only good thing about this is having a single exam board. This is the norm in many European countries including my own (Netherlands) and I don't understand why the UK's commercialised race to the bottom system was ever allowed to develop.

The rest of it is more of Gove's ideaological Fifties fetishist ill-thought-out rubbish. What we need is to do bring teaching and exams in vocational subjects up to speed so that these are valuable and useful in developing skills and careers, making them as valuable as an 'academic' GCSE.

As for the accusations of dumbing down - I had a look at a section of a 1985 O level maths paper as reprinted in the Guardian here. My Yr6 DD could happily pass both the O level and the higher level GCSE paper - neither seems more difficult than the other. Based on this (and obviously I have not looked at a large body of exam papers) I'm not convinced that GCSE maths is easier than O levels were when they were scrapped.

What really concerns me is the emphasis on having one final year exam - it means that children who are good at cramming will do well. It does not mean that they will have a more in-depth education, not at all. When I went through the Dutch system in the 80s, we had modular A-levels - exams set by the school accounted for half the mark, the centrally-set final exams accounted for the other half. On the whole, the school-set exams were much harder, in order to prepare us for the central ones.

Cramming alone would not get you a good mark. Because of the modular system, you would not know what subjects would come up in the exam - the curriculum was enormously broad and deep, and the modular exams would tackle one or two at a time in depth. The knowledge ended up embedded far enough that I was genuinely able to apply it at University. It is perfectly possible to have modular exams and topic-based teaching and have academic rigour - as long as the number of resits is limited (I agree with Gove on this and am that it is not so already.

I found an o level paper from 1984, and my top set (so the ones who would have done o level) would have been fine, apart from the question asking them to draw and label the central surface of an earthworm. They would have wondered where the questions were on gene therapy though, and genetic engineering, and neuroscience.

Ventral surface.

And there's a word I've had to add to dictionary...

pointy i can see how one exam board would work for some subjects. Not sure how it would work for mine as we would all have to study the same bits of History and I think that would be a shame.

As for breadth. I would challenge anyone to cram in a couple of days for a history exam. We have chosen to stay linear despite modular exams being introduced as the level of thought required to attain the top grades often doesn't mature until Year 11. We too have no idea what will be on the exam papers and we have to cover everything that is on the exam syllabus despite Gove's assertion that we all teach to the test. I teach my pupils historical skills such as analysis and evaluation, I foster high level thinking. That is good teaching not teaching to the test. The knowledge needed to apply those skills is definitely something that cannot be crammed and it makes my blood boil when Gove suggests that's all we do. He would have us return to the old days when History was all about reciting dates. My pupils may forget dates sometimes but they can tell you why something happened or the impact it had. And that is what history is all about if it is too have any relevance to pupils.

fallen one of the main differences would be that in 1984 the students would have had one or two exams in their final year and that would give them their result.

They wouldn't have sat the paper in modules. Done assessments etc. And they certainly wouldn't have been able to resit little chunks of it along the way to improve their overall mark.

For all those who feel GCSEs are as hard as Olevels why do only A* and A grades matter for GCSEs whereas for Olevels even a C grade was very respectable? And no I don't believe we've been breeding geniuses over the past 20 years

Also Wordfactory, all Olevels and Alevel resits had to be declared and your uni grade offer was usually higher if you had to resit any subjects

I've spent a fair bit of time with year 11s recently and they'll often say of a course 'Oh I only need to get x or y to get an A*' becauae they've already banked good marks in their modules.

Am unsure about having one exam board - isn't this creating a monopoly. Having a common syllabus may work for Maths, and I would welcome a move back to separate Sciences, but do not see how this would work for subjects such as English Literature or History.
Also wordfactory the current changes in GCSEs are already addressing the issues regarding modular GCSEs and restricting resits. Declaring all resits as suggested by mumzy would reduce the number of re-sits considerably.

ellie I don't know enough about the history syllabus in the UK and I didn't take history in the Netherlands... I do know that history in the Dutch system = 20th century history and focuses very heavily on politics and the mechanisms of the modern state.

I do know that I would find it difficult to handle a system where one exam board focused on the Reformation, WW1 and its causes and the Enclosure Act while another tested knowledge of the feudal system, the social and economic underpinnings of the emergence of early states and the Restoration. As a teacher I wouldn't know where to start or what to choose. I think that's the problem - history is such a huge subject.

Having said that, I think that as you say the key to teaching and assessing history well is not reeling off lists of dates and memorising Kings and Queens, which seems to be what Michael Gove wants. To my mind, history is meant to hold up a mirror to ourselves and teach us to think critically about the choices our ancestors made, the reasons behind those choices and the assumptions underlying the way society worked in the past. That kind of teaching is probably not tied to any particular period of history at all. However, handling history in that way would imply gasp trusting schools and teachers to do their job. Assessment would also have to be done by people with at least some understanding of the subject rather than someone doing piecework with a mark scheme on their desk.

mumzy I suspect that some GCSEs don't match up, most likely those relating to languages and literature. As I have said on a different thread, I'd want to see a wide range of suggested whole texts, going from the 21st century backwards, including poetry, plays and prose, from which schools and/or students could choose to build a reading list. I don't actually trust Gove to do this either, he seems to have a severe case of heritage literature disease.

crazymum when I did my A-levels in the Netherlands, assessment of Dutch literature was in two stages: an oral exam with my own teacher assisted by a colleague, and an essay under exam conditions. This essay was set individually and based on the reading list I'd chosen, which had to include five works of fiction either by one author or on a particular theme (the latter would earn you more marks) plus secondary literature study.

The essay was then marked by my own teacher and sent away to another school where it was marked by a teacher who had never met me, and the mark averaged.

This is clearly labour and resource-intensive but the way the system was set up meant there was thorough benchmarking all the way through.

In MFL exams the literature exams were marked internally and were oral (i.e. a French literature exam would be about the reading list and would be conducted completely in French). We were also required to write a 400 word essay in the language we were studying, which was marked on content, spelling, grammar and punctuation. By the time the central MFL exam rolled round (which would be multiple choice text comprehension) we were all quite looking forward to it because it was a walk in the park compared to what had gone before.

I think internal assessment with benchmarking has a lot going for it in subjects where there isn't necessarily a 'right' answer. I disagreed fiercely with my examiners about Slaughterhouse 5 but was able to argue my case using my understanding of the book and so got the marks. This kind of exam really prepares someone for further education.

In Holland if you take the equivalent of A-levels, you bypass the equivalent of GCSE completely, but friends of mine who were in that stream worked in a similar structure, but with less demanding content.

And breathe.

I am already angry at this idiot who is leading (messing up) our exam system. Yes there is a need for some changes, but THERE WAS A REASON WE DROPPED O-LEVELS IN THE FIRST PLACE, YOU IDIOT!

The man is a complete gimp. Really.

I'm not going to try to argue with the random, anecdotal evidence and assumptions on this thread (sigh), but I really can't believe that our Education Minister is deliberately ignoring all of the research carried out in the past five decades or so.

Basically though, exams favour the way in which a minority study and learn. They favour bullshitting boys who do nothing for two years and cram at the last minute. In my own subject (English), the exams are actually the easiest component of the course. They do not favour the careful study of girls and don't actually teach children how to write well.

Oooo he annoys me. He really does think that we should just dump 90% of the population.

pointy the history the exam
boards offer has a heavy 20th century bias. From World War 1 to the Arms Race. Within these specs, you pick the units which appeal to you most. We, however, do Medicine Through Time and the American West. I bloody love it.

To be fair to the exam boards, you have to be qualified in history to mark exam papers and I am currently commencing my own marking marathon for the exam board.

For pupil to engage with and understand history they have to see the big picture through constant themes such as power, the monarchy and movement and |settlement of empire. If Gove has his way and I have to teach a string of dates and events, pupils will disengage from history pretty rapidly.

Well said tortu.

He is the only man on this planet who, every time I see, the word wanker escapes from my mouth.

tortu I agree with you - assessment needs to cover all the learning involved in a particular subject, not just cramming. In a subject like English we should be assessing writing (in many forms, from factual essays to business letters to fiction), the analysis and appreciation of literature and poetry, comprehension of complex texts, spelling, grammar, punctuation and of course the spoken language as well. The much maligned skill of 'persuasive writing' which someone on a parallel thread was railing against is actually one of the cornerstones of, say. writing a really good covering letter for a job application. Just ever so slightly useful in real life, in fact.

Everything Gove does is done with 1950s blinkers on. Even if a few of his ideas have merit, and they probably do, the whole is just another scattergun approach with little research and solid thought about it. The speed with which he wants to bring all this in alone is enough to make me despair.