Is it usual to need a grade A GCSE to do A level maths now?

[Jella2u]

Disappointment here too. Son has got 10 GCSE's grade A-C. So what's the prob? You have no prob! Yes I do!!!
He got a grade B, yes that's right, B for Bertie for Maths. The school (which is a comprehensive turned Academy ) will let him do his Physics, Chemistry and Biology, but not Maths for which they say a Grade A is required unless you've clocked up a total of 224 points between the last 2 module papers. Unfortunately his tally was 205. Husband went up suited and booted to the school this morning to plead son's case. Phoned us this afternoon - no go. Have said this to all who got a B. So nothing personal there.
Have tried to contact other schools this afternoon. Needless to say all are shut. Local Authority very helpful and recommended emailing. Are schools running a clearing system that I don't know about? Do tell.
School did offer Statistics as a replacement this morning, but by this afternoon that was off the menu as no-one wants to do it. There are 7 pupils in this maths grade B situation who want to do A level Maths. Strangely the school says Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Maths are the most difficult subjects. So they might be for most people, but what if your child is the one that has had to struggle with French, Music, English Language and bid their time to do the supposed hard four?
We feel he needs A level maths to support science subjects.
Unfortunately, I said we would be back with an answer as to taking up a place with some sort of substitute for Maths before term starts. Every chance if I can't get something sorted fast he will be a well educated NEET!!!
All ideas welcome. Thanks in advance.

Isn't the majority opinion on this thread, that there is a huge step up between GCSE and A level maths, really saying that the Maths GCSE isn't up to standard and should be revised?

I did GCE maths 2 years early and got a B. I took two further maths GCSE's (pure and applied) at 16. But I didn't take maths A level because I was rubbish at physics, and physics and maths were seen as complimentary subjects. In fact students weren't allowed to take Physics A level unless they were also taking Maths. As OP's son is going to take physics I would have thought the school would be encouraging him to take maths?

Genuine question - Why is the gap between GCSE and A level now so large as to preclude B graded GCSE students from A levels? Has this been a gradual change, and doesn't the school's attitude (and those on the TES thread) rather buy into the idea that GCSE's have been "dumbed down" over the years?

sorry that last question was rather inflammatory and I didn't mean it to be. What I meant to say was more "why are the two syllabus', GCSE and A Level, not more linked?" GCSE should be a stepping stone to A level, no?

There was a programme on the other day and they got some people to take GCSEs and O level English and Maths. The group that took English got similar grades in both GCSES and O level. The group that took Maths typically got A-C at GCSES and failed O level. So make of that small study what you want but it potentially does show a dumbing down of Maths at GCSE (as I believe is the case with the Science subjects).

Those gcse and o level comparisons aren't always accurate though as they are testing different things. So someone taught for o levels may excell at those and fail gcse!

I'm not sure anyone on the TES maths forums has ever tried to hide the fact that they're convinced the maths GCSE has been dumbed down. It seems to be a fairly popular opinion on there.

As a slight aside, I got a B at GCSE 15 years ago on what was 'intermediate tier'. Having helped a colleague who was taking maths GCSE for the 1st time after failing her O-levels, I'm reasonably convinced that I could have sat the papers she did and got an A. I've not learnt any more maths since I left school that could account for that difference.

iirc the old O-level was just arithmetic, algebra & geometry - though we used log tables (???) somehow but I can't remember what for. sines? cosines? & slide rules were in there somewhere too. trigonometry??? (I did scrape a pass but to this day I don't know how )

from what I saw of my kids' maths work GCSE has less of that but includes extra things like probability

so it is a very different syllabus now

do they still differentiate between Pure Maths & Applied Maths? Or is it just Maths & Further Maths???

They do still differentiate - I think the core modules are pure maths with the mechanics/statistics/decision maths being the applied part.

DS got a B at GCSE- he started the A'level course and it was apparent in the first week that he couldn't cope. He changed.

If they're looking at old O-level papers, I'd probably fail them (maths teacher). All the old units, £ shilling and pence and whatnot, no idea. It does give me a good idea of why the older generation seems to have much better mental arithmetic than today though, they must have been doing it all the time. You can still sit O-levels today though (international schools offer them I think) and I've looked at some papers and they're not really different to IGCSE, so bright GCSE kids would do fine. Does that mean O-level has been dumbed down? :)

As mentioned, you won't get much disagreement on the TES forum that maths GCSE has been dumbed down, it's an embarrassment of a qualification these days. Although Gove has tried to fix this by making more questions long and unstructured, he really should bin the lot and start again with a double qualification - that's what maths teachers really want. The most recently damaging change to GCSE was a few years ago when they binned the foundation, intermediate and higher tier structure and just made it foundation and higher. It now means that the higher tier paper has to cover questions down to D grade instead of B in the same amount of time, so there is hardly any room for A and A questions - the brightest students aren't really stretched and don't get much chance to show what they can do. A student can get an A or A without actually getting many A/A* questions correct. This then directly feeds into the problem with the leap to A-level.

I got an a at GCSE maths (many many years ago) and really struggled with maths A level. I ended up dropping mechanics and only takins AS pure maths. I really regretted that during my chemistry degree, as maths was essential.

If your son is dead set on science or engineering degrees, he will need maths, no doubt. I agree with the suggestion above, revise the gcse syllabus and get him to sit another paper. Hopefully persuading the school to accept him onto the course. Or get a tutor and teach it privately outside the school.

But the A questions don't require any other skills than D questions, they just requires the confidence to apply all the same skills in combination to the problem that appears more difficult. The tiers system actually creates this barrier that to score A you need to learn A question by rote. If students know their BIDMAS it works equally well in D and A questions, no?

DS got an A for gcse and just finished AS. We did have a huge wobbly bit early on this year and has finished with A for maths and C for further maths. But his C is made up with an A and an E which he can retake and is cofident that he can turn it around.

Hismum I don't think it works quite like that. Rather than graduated answers within each topic, some topics seems to be aimed at some grades and others not. At DDs school, their revision materials even lists the topics associated with each grade.

Sad, this really would cap aspiration. Some would just say "I only need a C"...

I think that tends to be more of a school produced resource creamteas. The actual syllabus just contains foundation and higher level objectives. Although I think OCR have a legacy syllabus where the syllabus and exam papers were levelled by grade.

That's right creamteas, maths is different to most other subjects in that respect. Pythagoras is a C grade topic, therefore you can have Pythagoras questions on the Foundation paper which goes up to C grade. Trigonometry is a B grade topic, so trigonometry will never appear on a Foundation paper, and Foundation students won't be taught it.
If a student is aiming for a grade B, then they will concentrate on the topics up to grade B and probably won't be taught A* topics such as the quadratic formula. So on the higher paper, there will be questions that they won't have a clue how to do.

I know the OP has an issue with this, with 'not teaching the whole book'. However, it would be impossible to teach all students the whole syllabus, maths is a spiral curriculum that builds on and is harder than the previous year's work. If you think of levels, level 8 is GCSE grade B content, so A* is effectively a level 10. Imagining it as chapters in a book, if a student gets up to Chapter 4 at the end of primary school, they would need to master 6 chapters to have covered the syllabus by GCSE. The able student who got up to Chapter 6 in primary only has 4 chapters to cover. So the student who went more slowly than the able student in primary would need to go through the material at a significantly faster rate in secondary than they did in primary to keep up with the able student. But they need to go more slowly to master it. Rushing through the book will just confuse them and leave them with a poor understanding of all the chapters, and with the later chapters that require a good understanding of the previous chapters, they are just hopelessly lost.
And that is why, for those students, we simply bin the last couple of chapters of the book and concentrate on getting a good understanding of the others. It isn't outrageous or poor teaching, it is simply a sensible approach.

This fits in with ds's experience this summer - he is what I'd call a bright, competent mathematician but doesn't have a real affinity with the subject. He breezed through the IGCSE papers and got a very high A* (when he came out of the first exam he was pretty sure he'd only got one question wrong). But there's no way he'd feel confident enough to tackle A-level maths ..

Clay, it isn't really just a school produced resource. While the grades of topics don't appear on the syllabus, they are widely understood. There is a basic equivalence between levels and grades, and levels are clearly defined because of SATs papers. At KS3, you could sit a 3-5, 4-6, 5-7 or 6-8 paper, so teachers would know what content was in each extra level to teach the papers correctly. Level 7 is a C, level 8 is B. When we had the old intermediate paper, there was a clear distinction between what was B grade content and A grade, because the intermediate tier stopped at B grade so teachers knew what topics they could leave out as they were A/A* topics.

The only grey area is A/A* because we've never had a paper that distinguished between these grades.

Maths GCSE papers start with easy questions and get harder, so on the higher tier paper, the A/A* questions will be at the back.

OP I find your posts exceptionally arrogant and blinkered.

However, it was this post by someone else-
The teacher was unable to get round the desks because of being overweight and relied on checking with the top students they'd understood

That has really left me

Outrageous.

Reading this really depresses me... This tiered thing and foundation thing, so am I right in thinking if they expect you to get a c you'll do Pythagoras, but not complete trigonometry, they don't bother teaching trig because they don't expect you to be capable of it? Am I completely misunderstanding?

I'll admit I've been wobbled by replies.

I suppose he must have done really really badly to get 113 on paper 3 up from 92 on paper 2. His total mark was 300. He clearly has made little progress throughout the year or even the 5 years in gaining only a B. I suppose that is all that can be expected if a child is 2 marks off SATS 5. So both the school, myself and more importantly my son have wasted a lot of time.

I've never been able to find out what that Paper 3 mark was out of since if you pull up 5MB3H 2013 you can only score a total of 80 marks. I had hoped we'd get up to the school entry qualifier of 224 for the last 2 papers, but were that vast 19 points short.

Had the school offered GCSE Further Maths next year with progression to AS Pure Maths with Mechanics the following year we would have accepted that though being disappointed he wouldn't be able to do the whole A Level. Instead he is now putting in to take Sociology with Criminality. As this course only requires a grade C English Language surely it was supplied to and taken up by the school as that "great little filler". Anyway son is quite looking forward as it comes across as quite a topical subject. It has an advantage in that it reinforces essay skills.

Will see what C1 book is like tomorrow. If it turns out too much work we may have to pick out work to reinforce science work as it comes up. Maths department doesn't suggest that, suppose the Science Department are left to cope. Most likely it will be us left to cope.

One thing's for sure though - he can't do absolutely no maths work for two years before uni with science subjects in mind.

There is no flexibility in the school timetable. Pathways are followed. The school has always had a rigid attitude and personally I feel this has been stepped up since it became an Academy.

Husband still mystified as he only got a grade 3 Northern Board GCSE and is a Chemical Engineer and a Fellow of the Institute Measurement and Control. Clearly if you up a 3 (C) to a B with grade inflation, he should not be sitting where he is now and is a dangerous prospect as he designs Petrochemical Plant!!!

Our son may not follow him to be an Engineer. Our middle son took a Sports Science Degree and is happy in that parallel universe.

That makes sense, noble. I hadn't really though about the correlation between levels and grades and other than the OCR syllabus I've never seen anything produced by an exam board that sets out content by grade.

CaptainJamesTKirk

Spot on. You've got it.
The parents or a tutor have to make up the difference.

In a weird world you could be paying out to a state employed maths teacher as a tutor to teach a student that is deemed not capable of achieving the work to be learnt.

Captain technically yes, if you are sitting the Foundation tier and are aiming for a C, you will not need to be taught trig as it isn't on the paper.

In reality (in good schools at least) the level of paper a C targeted student will be entered for is a complete juggling act, as they can sit either Foundation or Higher. In most cases in my school, a C grade student will be considered a Higher candidate, and be prepared for that paper, which would probably involve being taught some select B grade topics to improve their chances. However, a C grade student may have their confidence knocked by being faced with the higher paper where they can't do most of the question and bomb out, in which case it would be safer to enter them for Foundation. When it was modular, you could enter a student for higher tier for some modules and foundation for the others, which was really useful as many could cope with higher statistics but not higher algebra.

What we do is enter D grade and lower students for foundation, but push to teach the top end C grade stuff so on a good day they might just grab a C - the B grade stuff would be a step too far. And if a C grade higher student is floundering, we may then downgrade them to Foundation.