will GCSEs be harder from 2016?

[2catsfighting]

I was wondering about families with children of different ages, and the different educational challenges they face. My eldest DS's education was at the time when course work was able to be repeated. His sibling seems to have a much tougher time of it.

Bookmarking and quaking. DD1 also Y7.

For English Lit, I had to do P&P, Macbeth, and Poems by Tennyson.
DD has had to do LOTF, OMAM, Henry V and 20 poems on Character and Voice. So in fact 1 more book, and more poems than I had to study.

For English Lang I can't quite remember what I had to do, but it wasn't a great deal, and just an exam.
DD had to look at language in OMAM, study of spoken language, 2 pieces of creative writing, S&L assessment, PLUS the exam.

I think what she has done has more relevance to today's world than the old O Level. It will be a shame if everything rolls back to Dickens etc.

To tHe poster who said her current year 9 son will be doing of mice and men. He won't as it is not on the curriculum. Do you mean me? He is in Year 10.

Which you could have inferred from my comment that he will be sitting his GCSEs in 2016.

I did have a slight moment of panic when I read this thread title. I thought the OP was saying that the changes would affect the students sitting exams in summer 2016 onwards, which is why I commented in the first place.

Teen - that's another issue for us too, lack of ability to engage from some parents because their school experiences were so poor. It feels very much like class engineering

Also, I think people who criticise the lack of scope in English qualifications are perhaps forgetting that we cover TWO GCSEs in the same teaching time as Maths deliver one (not criticising Maths here BTW!)

Of course, from September there's no requirement to do this - and there was always just GCSE English before - but given that it's being set up so that if both English qualifications are taken, one is doubled for Progress-8, it's unlikely that schools will drop one for the other.

Oh dear dd1 is in year 8

First why so arsey? Lots of posts on the thread re: years.

Sorry; arsiness was not intended. The child in question has had two years of chronic ill health and has had to work harder than most to try to catch up; the idea that he has been studying the wrong syllabus for the past year did not bring out the best in me. Sorry.

I think modules have the same impact as CAs though camel in terms of constant exams, breaking up teaching time.

It makes exams, marking schemes, revision and results the constant focus of years 9/10/11.

I'd much rather teachers be allowed to just teach their subject with plenty of time and space to ski off piste.

I love how the government is so against resits to boost your score except in maths and English where if you don't get a C it's government policy that you have to resit till you get a C or turn 18.

And now they want kids to resit their KS2 SATs as well.

But the problem is, Camel, is that the year group following the multiple goes at GCSE cohort were not able to avail themselves of this - so a student may well have got an A* too had he/she been able to have several bashes at the exam.

Controlled assessments are ridiculous: obviously some candidates are going to have far more help - from teachers or parents - than others. When something is worth 25% of the mark, say, what parent in their right mind is not going to seize hold of it and give it a good going over? I have seen some parents on here dissing parents getting involved and saying they trust the school: I would say in 100% of cases these parents are paying to be able to say they are hands-off and have the moral highground.

I thoroughly agree with WordFactory - just get on with the teaching. And then with one final exam at the end - "hell yeah" it often wasn't fair, but a lot fairer than what we have had in recent years.

Controlled assessments are ridiculous when many lessons are spent on drafting and redrafting them, with extensive help from parents/teachers, so that in the end all the pupil has to do is learn it by heart and regurgitate it

When something is worth 25% of the mark, say, what parent in their right mind is not going to seize hold of it and give it a good going over?

Of course, just because a parent has given it a good going over doesn't mean it'll be better for the experience.

There's an interesting set of assumptions about parental help. At GCSE there's huge amounts of pearl clutching over take-home work, parents getting involved, etc. The concern is that some large proportion of parents can provide guidance on a GCSE history (say) assessment which will improve it over the child's unaided work, hence the need to move continuous assessment to exam-condition (yeah, right) CAs. In MN land, it might be true that all parents can read and make helpful comments about a history submission; for a lot of kids, it won't be.

But the same concern isn't present for A Level, where take-home coursework is still a large part of some history (in particular) syllabuses and the EPQ is nothing but. It's as though there's an assumption that the only people with post-16 qualifications are the teachers. We read and commented on drafts, and provided some technical help on referencing and so on; nothing that a teacher wouldn't do, but available on tap rather than once a week. A large portion of children won't have effective parental help in constructing an A Level assessment, but for those that do, it will be extremely useful.

But you can't be sure that that's not what happens, Camel, if you allow CAs

I had so many parents ask me to check their DCs MFL CAs that I could have set up a business.

Ditto the learn in advance oral questions.

Controlled assessments were only ridiculous if they could take them home and where teachers had to spend hours marking and moderating them. If they had to do them in controlled conditions in school and sent off, they would not be ridiculous.

That's what we used to do for maths coursework before it was scrapped in 2009. The booklets couldn't be taken home, it had to be done in school and teachers didn't mark it, the exam board did. It was still a massive pain in the arse taking up way more than the 'recommended' allocated time and was way open to cheating. The kids couldn't actually do the tasks on their own and needed their hands held every step of the way. Still, it was an easy way to boost grades.

I particularly think the MFL GCSE is unfair - some schools appear to play by the rules and make the pupils work on their controlled assessments in lessons. Some teachers, however, as good as write the CAs for the pupils and, like DorothyL says, the pupils just have to be arsed to learn it off by heart. The speaking exam is a joke, too - all it is is reciting what possibly someone else has written. And as others have noted, the unpredictable question is often anything but.

A like iGCSE then?

The oral involves a picture (student chooses) and then any question of five topics.

The picture can be prepared in advance though. The student gives a short presentation on it...this is a family having a picnic etc...then is asked questions. Obviously you can do some prep for that as there are a limited number of questions that could come up; what's the weather like? What is that person wearing? What did that person do before this photo was taken etc.

The unseen questions can be anything but based around 5 topics. So you need to know your vocab for those topics. But you need to know your way around the tenses as the examiner will dot around.