What are peoples thoughts on the English Baccalaureate ??

[TheOriginalNutcracker]

I know what I think, but i'm wondering if i'm alone in my thoughts.

So, any opinions ?

[radicalsubstitution]

TalkinPeace2.

Perhaps we should bring back the study of punched cards and the merging of tape stream files to the 'computer science' curriculum.....

[CouthyMowEatingBraiiiiinz]

Even the current system doesn't fare well for those DC's on the C/D borderline.

Drop two marks, you get a 'D', employers rubbish the qualification you worked your socks off for.

Yet the school won't allow you to do vocational qualifications because they assume that your hard work will get you that 'C' without them putting anything extra in.

Then grade boundaries are changed and there's no chance of you getting that 'C' that you were predicted when the school told you to take 'traditional GCSE's'.

And they didn't have a suitable vocational program anyway...

And in some subjects, with the best will in the world, some DC's just WON'T get a grade higher than a 'G'.

My DD is working her socks off, doing practice every night, and she's just managing to get a mid-G prediction at this point in Y10 in Maths.

She has finally retained the majority of her times tables, except 6,7 and 8, despite daily practice from the age of 6yo. Eight years daily practice and she STILL can't get the last 3 to 'stick'.

What's your suggestion for her? She can use scales, a jug, a sugar thermometer and a calculator. What more does she need to work in a patisserie or a bakery?

[CouthyMowEatingBraiiiiinz]

And, for the record, Gove is an odious buffoon.

[noblegiraffe]

Children might have had to do calculus in maths at O-level, but so what? I could easily train a bright Y7 to differentiate or integrate a polynomial. It probably wasn't moved to A-level because it was too difficult, but because at that basic level, there wasn't much point. I just looked at an old O-level paper from the 60s and it didn't have any statistics on at all. Now statistics is much more useful and relevant to young people than being able to find the gradient of a curve at the point (2,3).

[ravenAK]

I did calculus as additional lunchtime classes for those of my O-Level group who intended to go onto A-Level. I think there might have been an additional paper involved, but can't remember.

As it happened, my A-Level teacher was dire, & I went from A at O-Level to N at A-Level. Never did really get my head round calculus.

& then I got a University friend, doing Physics, to explain differentiation/integration to me on the back of an envelope one afternoon in the pub.

So I can agree with noblegiraffe that it's clearly not a particularly higher order skill, at the basic, mechanical level taught at O-Level, if I can grasp it!

[TalkinPeace2]

I make my living with upside down spreadsheets
you tell me the tax bill and I work out the turnover and expenses - cannot see that in Gove's sheets
but then, he is Eng Lit obsesssed, rather than STEM
ARSE

[prettybird]

I remember liking exactly that about calculus when I was doing my Highers ravenAK : that it was actually quite simple algebra once you'd learned the "rules" and that as long as you were methodical, it was quite easy to get to the answer.

reminder to self: must re-learn those rules now that ds is in S1/Y7

[chloe74]

Its very easy for left wing teachers to proclaim the national curriculum but they are not teaching it. !!! The current GCSE?s are structured so you can pass an exam question on a literary classic with only having read the extract you already know you are going to be tested on. And exams boards tell schools what these are going to be. Isn't that why so many English students couldn't get a ?C? this year because they could only cope with the question they were expecting and weren't able to deal with the whole subject. A teacher even told me you are allowed to take a sheet of quotes from the book into the exam with you.

I admit a single exam wasn't the best solution for all but then if Gove didn't have to compromise with left wing liberals then we wouldn't have a problem. I think he has done the best he can with one hand tied behind his back.

TalkinPeace2 ? Our Prime Minister is called David Cameron,
Cameroon is a country in west Africa. If you knew anything about politics you would know David Cameron believes in keeping Ministers in the same portfolio, so they can become experts in that area. And as you say they are part of a team of experts not just a random teacher pulled of the streets.

Bringing in more Grammar schools would have been political, exactly what is political about improving the failing GCSE system?

noblegiraffe - Newtonian Physics is crucial for everyone to learn not the cornerstone to modern cutting edge physics, or social development. Keep up. The GCSE system wasn't perfect and neither will its replacement be, but the question is will it be better. After the GCSE was introduced it was watered down every year with modules, course work, Grade inflation, teaching to the test, until we get to the stage where its so discredited that it has to be replaced entirely. Where were teachers standing up for standards then?

Gove?s suggestion that our head of state has a yacht was a great one and it wouldn't have cost the tax payers a single penny because after discussion it would have been funded 100% by private donations. I am a bit ashamed our country doesn?t provide our monarchy with a vessel appropriate to their status. What has all that got to do with education! Exactly what is wrong with an intelligent man defending free speech? And as for the Bible thing, well I disagree with it but having RE in schools is pretty stupid and until we disestablish the church its going to happen.

ET ? It doesn't surprise me that a budget is overspent, the reason we are in this problem is because Brown not only spent to much money over a decade he have spent money he didn't even have and we will be suffering the fall out for years to come. It will be our children that suffers most.
I do not mean to deride the expertise teachers have, its certainly more than I have, but it does not make them experts on the whole education system. We have a department of Education for that, so it is entirely logical for me to take their words over teachers.

lurchlover ? are you one of the examiners that failed to keep standards high and continually allowed grade inflation to destroy our system? Were you party to the system of telling schools what questions pupils were going to be asked in their exams?

squeezedatbothends ? you never explained why consulting an expert makes you a buffoon, in most peoples opinion its exactly the right thing to do before you create a new system. So it shows Gove is doing a very good job.

ravenAK ? Glad to hear the bible is being used for something worthy of its content

I think what really gets parents backs up is when you have evidence in front of you that the education system is failing your country and children. Like: dropping down the international rankings, businesses having to give remedial education to employees, children to lazy to get ?certain? jobs so that we are forced to give them to people from other nations, grade inflation, cheating exam boards, teaching to the test, and of course the personal knowledge of children not being stretched. And yet teachers are frothing at the mouth saying its all fine, its better than ever. The words just don?t match reality. So when we get a respected man like Gove trying to introduce reform, opposed by teachers, who are we to believe. And quite frankly its hard to believe teachers when every time they want more money they just blackmail parents with the possibility of strikes.

[TalkinPeace2]

you have just outed yourself
BYE

[lurcherlover]

chloe [wearily] I wish you would take my earlier advice and look at GCSE papers for yourself, rather than believing hearsay. To correct you on a few points (you will see I'm right, if you bother to find the papers online and read them):

1. Students answer questions on whole texts, not just extracts. The current AQA GCSE Literature exam requires them to write about two entire texts. They also have to study a range of poetry, both modern and pre-1914.
   
2. Students may have a clean, unannotated copy of their exam texts in the exam. Nothing else, and certainly no sheets of quotations.
   
3. Exam boards have never communicated exam content to schools, and never will. They do obviously share assessment objectives and suggest teaching methods that will best enable AOs to be taught. That's not the same as sharing questions at all. There are always at least two separate exam papers prepared for each exam series, so that if there is any possibility of a leak to schools (a van carrying papers was stolen one year, for example) the papers can all be recalled and the subs issued.
   

No, I was not party to grade inflation. I mark according to the markscheme and monitor the marking of other examiners to check that they are marking according to the markscheme. Grade boundaries are set separately.

You clearly have very fixed (if erroneous) views about the exam system, so I shall not waste any further time trying to enlighten you. If you're in the business of correcting other posters though(Cameron, indeed), I will happily point out the basic punctuation and grammar errors you are making in your posts, if you like. You will be reassured to learn, I'm sure, that we teach students not to comma splice these days.

[ravenAK]

That last post is too hilarious to deconstruct. But I'll give my subject specific bit a go, just for shits & giggles.

'The current GCSE?s are structured so you can pass an exam question on a literary classic with only having read the extract you already know you are going to be tested on.'

No - Eng Lit GCSE for AQA requires you to answer questions on two novels (one classic, one modern) with no prior indication of which part of the text you'll be tested on, or indeed whether the question needs you to draw from several points in the text. You also have a paper on a range of pre & post 1914 poetry, which asks you to compare two poems from 15 you have studied, & an 'unseen' question requiring you to write an essay on a poem you have not studied.

'And exams boards tell schools what these are going to be. Isn't that why so many English students couldn't get a ?C? this year because they could only cope with the question they were expecting and weren't able to deal with the whole subject.'

No - I don't think you've quite understood that English Language & English Literature are separate GCSEs. Please see many other threads to inform yourself about the Eng Lang shifting goalpost grade boundary fiasco, but no, the exam was entirely as expected & prepared for.

'A teacher even told me you are allowed to take a sheet of quotes from the book into the exam with you.'

No - you are allowed a planning sheet, including key quotations if you want to waste your time copying them out - I discourage this - for Controlled Assessments, which are open book as they test analysis, not parrot recall. This is distinct, completely separate, from the examination.

Honestly, you are woefully & embarrassingly wrong on all points.

There's plenty to get cross about re: education, but you have possibly now convinced me that Michael Gove is not the least informed person expressing opinions on the subjects. I'm quite impressed.

[lurcherlover]

Great minds, raven...

[squeezedatbothends]

Chloe74, you are clearly quite mad so I'm not sure why we're all bothering, but since you mention my post my point was that he consulted experts AND THEN IGNORED THEM because he didn't agree with them. You must be related.

[squeezedatbothends]

Chloe 74, and you need to look up the correct usage of too/to too.

[ravenAK]

Aye lurcher!

Although I suspect we are wasting our time & should just have PM'd some dried frog pills over.

[EvilTwins]

Chloe74 - you know NOTHING, and are embarrasing yourself with your ignorant posts.

That is all.

[MsAverage]

EvilTwins, I see that blunt ad hominem keeps being your favourite type of an argument.

[MsAverage]

ReallyTired, we can not investigate in modern students failing O-level papers without a control group in a form of 50-s students sitting GSCEs. Children doing O-levels were preparing to O-level, and O-levels were far from "universal knowledge", it was quite specific set.

I actually once had a go on 50s maths and English O-level papers just to find out if their superiority is as self-evident as I read in various forums. I would say they O-level papers were actually more concentrated on knowledge that skills, and I do not find that great. English papers included loads of vocabulary testing (of course, all words Greek and Latin origin). Cool, but I more appreciate skills to express oneself clearly in the simplest form, rather than ability to give definition of elucidate or verisimilitude.

[chloe74]

I think personal attacks / insults are all most people have when they run out of coherent arguments.

The problem on here is most teachers like to believe that every child is taught the most perfect form of the curriculum by the most perfect teachers. However I refer to the real world and what actually happens in classrooms and exams all over the country. The two aren't obviously the same.

[lljkk]

Thanks for this thread which made me concentrate to focus on Gove's idea for new EB replacing core GCSEs. I read that Gove wants to extend it to include history, geography, other subjects.

I will have to ponder to figure out what I think. It seems like moving towards a American-style High School diploma. Where you have to pass minimum thresholds in many things to get any qualification at all. Except that in US system you are allowed as many course repeats as you need.

Traditionally and by convention, the American approach is overwhelmingly coursework based. You do get exams, big ones & little ones, but these are regular & frequent along the way, it's not like you have one big set of exams at the end that counts for 90% of the marks. Also, daily or weekly homework contributes to the final marks. If you fail a course then you repeat the entire course, Saturdays or evenings if needed. I think the English final-exam-is-everything-system is sheer insanity, obviously. Although I am comfortable with standardised (normalised curve) results, that is fine in my mind (yet I don't think Gove is saying there will be a return to it, though, which means further grade inflation, no??). We had no end of efforts to cheat in our pre-WWW era schools, too, so I don't see why WWW makes such a difference to ability to cheat. I can think of heaps of ways to cheat without Internet help.

I know USA is not Singapore/India/China, but seems to me that their education has had its fair share of successes. Whereas what Gove suggests might well be worst of both worlds.

Isn't Finland always held up as having the most splendid education system? yet they leave at 16. How does Finland assign final grades or qualifications for school leavers?

[lljkk]

OECD data, % achieving equivalent of High School Diploma:

Korea 80%
Finland 82%
USA 89%
UK 74%

So even in high achieving Korea, 20% of pupils still don't achieve the basics.

From what I'm reading about Finnish system it's too different from UK for me to know where to start comparing.

[noblegiraffe]

One interesting thing about O-levels and norm-referenced grades is that in the first few years of O-level, the number of students passing went up by 100%. How's that for grade inflation?

The thing was that the number of students being entered for O-level doubled. If you say 'the pass grade will be determined by what the top 50% of students achieve' then that is only fair if the number and standard of entries remains static. If you have more and more students giving it a go, from the lower end (the top end having always been entered, but the lower end now being pushed towards the qualification which will open doors) then the average mark will inevitably drop. If the pass grade is decided by the average mark, then the mark required to pass will drop and the exam will get easier to pass.

[MsAverage]

Noble, exactly the same story happens further on the educational pipe. University lecturers complain about quality of modern students, comparing the modern lower end (when almost a half of the population cohort goes to higher education) to average students of their, of course, golden, times (when 15% did so).

[EvilTwins]

Sorry, chloe, was a bit pissed and fed up with your blind worship of Gove. I still (sober now) find your assertion that it must be true because a politician said it laughable.

[TalkinPeace2]

Msaverage
Your numbers for University attendance are WAY out.
When I went - in the mid 80's - it was 5%
it is now 30%

Bliar wanted 50% but that was always cloud cuckoo land.