2014 GCSE league tables

[MaeMobley]

When do these get published? I see from the BBC website that it was January last year.

Yes, the daily mail knows fuck all about maths GCSE otherwise they wouldn't have produced such a stupid selection of questions 'for comparison'.

I don't know whether iGCSE is harder, I've never taught it. And I'm none the wiser from looking at the two questions the daily mail printed, which could have come from either maths exam.

peteneras
I did not click on the link : I try to avoid Newspaper articles as evidence - in part because a story with which I was intimately involved was reported by all of the papers in such an unbelievably erroneous manner that my utter cynicism was reinforced.

If you can find the link to the press release upon which the Daily Heil story was based and there will be one, they employ no investigative journalists and find out who paid for it and what their axe is to grind
THEN we are talking.

FWIW
The PISA tests were so deeply flawed that there is a whole academic discussion board devoted to dismantling their statistics
follow the money
then you find the truth behind stories

Private schools needed a marketing edge IGCSEs were it.
That went pear shaped. They will find another.
HGs son got more A* GCSEs than my DD she messaged me, the details are hers to divulge if she wishes but she spent £30,000 per year more than me for that difference.
I'm not stupid enough to think that she paid for a few extra A* grades : her DS will have riches in connections and doors opening that my DD will never get
but Fee paying schools cannot really brag about access to top jobs as its not compatible with charitable status

If the DFE were truly Intellectually honest, they would release the full 2014 GCSE data sets for independent analysis.
But they aren't
So they wont

agree the question comparison is flawed, even if it was possible to compare a truly representative sample of questions from each type of exam, you'd still need to know the differences in grade boundaries to make a reasoned judgement on which was easiest to pass/ get A* or whatever. For what it's worth, one of my DC did maths igcse and the other GCSE and there didn't appear to be much to choose between them.

TP to be honest I don't think the IGCSEs offered by some private schools featured that highly in their marketing.

A lot of private schools don't even use them (DDs for one, with the exception of MFL).

And when you're choosing a private school what type of IGCSE is really low of the list of priorities ( or it certainly has been for every parent I've ever come across).

It comes across your radar but it's not a factor the schools drive home IYSWIM. It's not enough of a USP to make you pull out your bank details .

Agree WordFactory -we chose the school when DS1 was 10, and I had no idea he would be doing igcse French and Italian until he casually remarked that he had his results (a few days before the regular GCSE results came out).

Oh is results day not the same?

I had assumed it was. I've booked a holiday .

I think it depends on the school how they choose to distribute them - some wait and release the whole lot together.
At DS school they can log onto the school intranet to get exam results, and the school published the igsce results a few days earlier as soon as they had them - gsces published on intranet on the normal results day.
Since I wasn't even aware he had done some igsces we (parents) would not have thought to log on earlier...

At DCs school it was all the same day : 10 am on 21st August last year

According to this (pretty random) link
they are on the same day
www.hamptonschool.org.uk/Current-Parents/examdates/External-Exams/Info,-Rules-and-Regs/Parents-Forum-Sept-2014/Candidate-PUBLIC-EXAMINATION-KEY-DATES-2015-%282%29.aspx

All of the results are meant to be embargoed to students until the release time.

that link says 14 august for CIE igcse and fsmq and 20aug for other GCSEs TiP. I think edexcel igcses are on the same day as normal GCSEs though.

Word
Check with your school as I can find no other link that says 16year olds get results on the same day as 17/18 year olds

Stick to the point giraffe, my opening post on this thread is to counter a poster’s assertion that experts and leaders at the top of the tree in education are adamant that IGCSE are not only not hugely more difficult than GCSE but without any shadow of a doubt easier. So you see, I’m not in the least interested in your fuck all Daily Mail not printing a true comparison between the two exam types - I link what they print. You print your own version here if you want to so that we can all see how very hard the fuck all dumped down GCSE is compared to the IGCSE. And I’m puzzled how anyone who hadn’t taught the ‘International’ GCSE before would think it is the ‘same’ or easier exam compared to the local version as you seem to imply.

And you’ve evaded my other equally important question. At the risk of repeating myself, are British students who take the hard GCSE cleverer than their overseas peers who take the easier IGCSE?

TalkinPeace, this thread is not about paying for a private education or not paying for an education. Put it this way, if you have extra millions in the bank yourself, you may then jolly well send your kids to a £50,000 p.a. school without batting an eyelid never mind £30,000. There are plenty of such people out there. But actually, there are many more people with very, very much less or perhaps with nothing at all and still struggle to send their DC to a fee paying school. Does that not tell you something?

No, most of these parents/guardians don’t even know what exams (boards or types) their kids would be taking. They leave it entirely to the good hands of their selected school(s).You may or may not know not all private schools opt for the IGCSE. Likewise, not all state schools opt for the GCSE.

And for your information, schools like the one HG’s son attends don’t need a marketing edge. They can triple their fees tomorrow (if it’s fees they’re after) and still be three times oversubscribed!

As for the PISA test re Maths, Science and Reading, I see countries like Poland, Estonia, Macau, Ireland and even war ravaged Vietnam, are all putting the UK in the shade. These are not countries “where the money is”, are they? Where the money really is, the USA, Germany, France, Saudi Arabia and a host of other Arab countries are all lingering in the next division.

Peternas
THE 2014 League tables are deeply flawed. They may even sound the death knell of headline comparisons.
GOOD.

But please do not hold PISA up as a good model - its methodology is flawed beyond belief.

I didn't say leaders in the plural peteneras, I said one, uniquely well positioned to make a valid comparison. The difference clearly isn't big, but enough to scupper any notion that the IGCSEs are actually harder. As uilen said, one litmus test is whether or not universities treat them differently, which they don't. And all independent schools including Winchester and Eton need slick marketing, or they wouldn't have it. It's a hugely competitive market, even at the sharp end.

On the international front, although there's a great deal wrong with the current system in the UK, I much prefer it as a model to a lot of overly maths/ science focussed models. The work ethic seems way over the top - I don't think it would suit my kids :) My nephew was educated wholly in Poland - that sort of model is one we'd do well to imitate. Incidentally the Polish economy is actually doing extremely well, puts the UK to shame.

I don't know molio I think the money spent on marketing is very often wasted.

Frankly, I think many private schools, who can fill their ranks any day of the week, do it...because it's become the thing to do.

A bit like Oxbridge. They spend fortunes on marketing. One wonders if it's necessary.

WordFactory
puts utmost cynical hat on The naice schools have produced lots of naice alumni who have gone into marketing and have persuaded the school that its a good idea
and then the arms race commenced

A local Uni used to have an eye wateringly expensive marketing and graphics and design consultancy team. They were rubbish.
They fired most of them and made designing brochures and doing publicity part of the relevant undergrad courses.
Mucho money saved, students get real stuff for their portfolios.
Only losers were the consultants.

Draylon
www.statslife.org.uk/opinion/1074-the-problems-with-pisa-statistical-methods

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680939.2014.892156#.VM94IJ2sUTQ

www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6344672

If anyone wants to see some good marketing for maths and science IGCSEs they only have to look at the St Paul's School website; www.stpaulsschool.org.uk/academic
The IGCSE at St Paul's has led on to 70 As at Maths A level (plus 46 As), more members of the UK International Maths Olympiad team than any other school, 66 entries in the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge (plus a bunch of gold and silver medals), prizes in Physics and Biology, 52 Oxbridge offers this year and 8 Ivy League offers. I think they've done a rather good job of convincing fee paying parents that they offer a superior education with IGCSEs. Interestingly, the boys also take IGCSEs in modern languages but not English - but that might be because it's a boy's school and it's easier for boys to get an A in English with a GCSE?

If you read the St Paul's website it says that they were one of the first schools in the UK to introduce the IGCSEs because they found them more rigorous than GCSEs and better preparation for A levels. Maybe St Paul's feel that English IGCSE has lost it's rigour or maybe boys and English don't mix that well, I'm only guessing?
I agree that quite a lot of schools seem to be choosing English language IGCSE for whatever reason but I'm not sure it's the same for any other subjects is it?

On a much more prosaic level, the private selective in my town made a great hoo hah about using the I as proof they were more rigorous
which all went ever so quiet when the set 3's at the comps started sitting the same exam (in Maths BTW)

Middling private schools whose niche is to get middling kids through the system with above middling grades were always conning the parents as to how bright little Jocasta and Darius were.
The only difference between them and the comp kids was parental wealth and the choice on where to throw it.

Big Name schools are not really about exam results - same as big name Unis - they are about the doors that open only to those with the right information.

It tends to be the more academic private schools and grammar schools up here who use IGCSEs in various subjects - the non-academic private schools don't seem to use them at all. The maths progress for the set 3s at your school seems to have gone down by 10% this year Talkin - perhaps they found the IGCSEs harder? Do the comps use IGCSEs for science and languages?

Dunno, Look at their websites.
DCs school mainly used it for English (where the changes hit them so hard) and Maths.

And please, stop placing such reliance on the progress figures.
Having been a governor at their primary school - I assume you know which one as you track everything else about me - I know that the Raiseonline data was utter bilge.