I've just been talking to the Head of English at ds's school about the new Govelvels

[Hakluyt]

... And she says she reckons that to be on target for a 9 (the top mark) a year 8 would have to be finishing the year.on an 8c. She reckons that a child like mine, who has finished year 8 on a 6a and would have been on target for an A- possibly A*- will now be predicted a 7-possibly just an 8.

It will be very interesting to see how the press cover this when the time comes. And how parents used to their kids getting top marks deal with it!

Teacher - 15-20 girls in the year group getting straight As at O Level in the mid 1980s?! You are seriously underselling your old school. Didn't happen at my girls' grammar; 7 As was considered exceptional and Oxbridge standard. Most girls only took 9 O Levels, not 11 - and a fair number went to Russell Group Unis with Bs at A Level.

I took my O's in 1980 and my As in 82/83
selective private girls school
8 was normal
9 was exceptional
I got mostly B's at O
I then got ABC at A level and sailed into a Uni that later joined the RG

GCSEs are easier than O's : fact of life as I tell my DCs

Talkin - straight As were unusual but not as rare as hen's teeth. There were two people in my year at school who got straight As at O and A level - myself and my best friend. When we arrived at Cambridge we found that practically everyone there had the same grades, and some of them had S levels too. Obviously, rare - but not hen's teeth level. We went to a comp, incidentally.

Herc
you have merely confirmed my point, not refuted it
straight A's = Oxbridge
yup that is my point
Oxbridge is hen's teeth : it being around 1 in 200 of uni kids in our day and 1 in 2000 now

three years ago DCs comp had 16 kids with straigght A/A* ~ madness in the modular system

I was criticising your choice of phrase, not your key point. :)

LaQueen no, Oxford don't - they still have aptitude tests for several subjects, but they give offers along the lines of A*AA.

(As another data point, I got 7 A's and 4 B's at O level, 4A's at A level, and went to Oxford (with an EE offer :) ) - everyone had similar A level results, but I don't remember O level conversations!)

Summerends Sums it up exactly.
The present system puts ridiculous pressure on bright DCs to route learn perfect answers to everyquestion after carefully studying the mark scheme. It doesnt encorage deeper or broader study one bit.

One of DDs DFs wants to study physics, she was forever been told to stick to the GCSE sylabus and to remember her paper might be marked by a chemist or a biologist not a physisist and in anycase even Steven Hawkins would only be allowed to follow the marking scheme.

It's very sad, but every mark has to be defensible in a way they weren't when I did O levels.

If they had been, I certainly wouldn't havw my A for History (I hadn't done anything like enough work an got away with a pile of inteligent waffle).

They made EE offers to people who had passed the entrance exam. They had to offer EE because you weren't eligible to get your fees paid (although I don't think they called it that in those days) or a grant without EE at A level, plus for Cambridge anyway you had to matriculated which required (I think, such a long time ago) 5 GCE passes, 2 at o level, including maths English and a foreign language. The 2E thing was also the standard conservatoire offer, again because of the funding/grant issue, they didn't require matriculation.

As a teacher, my biggest concern is with the way these changes will impact the middle ability children - the ones who could work hard and get a C but would never get an A.

The new grades 1-9 have grade 5 as equivalent to a current C grade. However, the pass level is apparently going to be a grade 6 - a current low B grade. So thousands of children who would once have a grade demonstrating reasonable competence (regardless of whether that was too "easy" or not) will now have that chance denied to them. Employers won't understand the distinction, so these kids will be in the workplace against students with the same ability who took their exams the year before and got a pass (old C grade) but their grade will be a fail.

I agree with most of the posters who suggest that gcses are easier than the old style o level And would also like. A move away from the majority of test marks being for coursework. The grades are too easy to manipulate.

I agree that massive grade inflation has taken place in GCSEs and that something needs to be done.

Just to add some info to those giving the GCE equivs. I was first year of GCSEs so 1988. Good comp; bright students took only 9 GCSEs, no further anything; c300 students per year.

One person in my year got 9AS, five got 8As and a B (me being one). I can still remember the names 25 years later as it was such an achievement. Three of those six top students went to Oxbridge.

Friends who would have agreed they were 'average' students were delighted with mainly Cs, with possibly a couple of Bs and a D. E rather than C seen as poor. Plenty of people got Fs in a number of subjects - because it was not unusual it was not seen as the disaster it probably is now. These kids tended to go on and become apprentice electricians, plumbers etc and are probably now earning more than many of the A/B/C students.

Just to add, year 1 GCSE was 20-30% coursework (two or three assignments) but you got one go at it. You handed it in and that was it.

It's not just grade inflation leading to higher marks. I was in the first year of A* grades. Hardly anyone got one. Now loads of kids get them.

But I know that my schooling was nothing like the kids receive today. I didn't know what grades I was aiming for, exam preparation was poor, the most resources anyone had was a revision guide, no revision classes, no catch-up sessions for people falling behind, no teaching of exam criteria, no showing us mark schemes. Kids were left to it back in the day. Nowadays there is enormous pressure on teachers to get every kid the best grade and so of course kids do far better than they used to, and kids have a vast wealth of resources open to them with the internet. They are far better prepared. I know if I went through school now I would do far better than I did then, and not because the exams are easier.

Teachers a re also under a lot of pressure to "not fail" children, even if they have done f**k all work all year , and come at the last minute wit ha sob story for how johnny couldn't help not doing any work all year round.........

Where has this info come from? I was on a course not long ago where the exam boards themselves didn't tell us the boundaries or what to expect!

Proposals re exam grades are here:

news.tes.co.uk/b/news/2014/04/02/gcses-quot-pass-quot-grade-to-get-tougher-with-new-recognition-for-really-exceptional-pupils.aspx

Don't know whether it's official yet.

I agree with noble. If teachers are absolutely dead set on the top grades in the current league table arms race then they can make a huge difference by tightly focussed exam preparation. You still won't get an A* without working and knowing the curriculum but it does make the process a lot more "productive" in pure grade terms that it was in my day ( only one of my O level teachers was gaming the system to achieve top grades for least effort, and he really stood out amongst the others who were "just" teaching the syllabus).

Sassy you are right about the middle/ lower grade children needing their attainement level acknowledged correctly. However at present the C grade can mask a lot of missing skills such as coherent writing. This means that employers although setting it as a minimum level for some jobs know that it is fairly meaningless. A completely new system will be more rapidly recognised than resetting grade boundaries with the present nomenclature.

Course work - other than Art etc and controlled assessments "went" 2 years ago.

Also if exceptional DCs what their abilities recognised, what was wrong with doing extra maths papers and S level papers on top of A levels like we did.

Setting a maths paper with two or thee questions only the brightest DC can do is daft. Unless they say A* next to them, less able DC waste time trying them. A few may even pick up a few lucky marks and cross a grade boundary their understanding doesn't justify.

Meanwhile a pupil gets all the A* questions right, but makes a mistake on a C- question and doesn't get their grade.

Any exam that requires ~100% becomes a bit of a lottery.

"Also if exceptional DCs what their abilities recognised, what was wrong with doing extra maths papers and S level papers on top of A levels like we did."

Because many (most?) schools didn't offer the option of S levels or extra maths papers? Mine certainly didn't - neither further maths nor S levels, and it wasn't a sink school by any means.

Elephants

1. We're talking about GCSE's, not A levels.

1. At least in maths, everyone knows the questions get harder as you go through the paper, and plenty of B students won't bother having a go at the last couple of questions.

1. You can lose about 10% and still get an A*, so a mistake on one C grade question won't matter if everything else is correct.

1. That isn't what the current GCSE's are like. But why shouldn't someone who gets 100% be seen to be exceptional? They probably are better at the subject than someone who gets 85% and still gets an A*.