New maths and English GCSE fiasco continues - resit requirements

[noblegiraffe]

Currently the government requires students resit maths and English in sixth form if they don't get a C at GCSE.

With the new GCSE a good pass is to be set at a grade 5.

However, for at least the first couple of years of the new GCSE, students will only be required to resit in sixth form if they don't achieve a grade 4, not a 5. This will be increased to a 5 at a date to be confirmed.

Presumably the government have realised that the first couple of cohorts are not ready for these new GCSEs because they were rushed through and the information about them (maths in particular) has been terrible.

Of course in later years, students who got a 4 in the first couple of cohorts will be competing against better prepared students who were more likely to get a 5. They will be disadvantaged because they didn't have to resit to get a 'good pass'. They may find that they have to resit later on anyway.

Good work DfE.

Without wishing to reawaken a debate best left sleeping, it's fairly obvious that there were systematic problems with the then-current English specification - lots of routes, lots of flexibility in ordering, poor control of exactly what was permitted with controlled assessments, weak moderation, some gaming by schools - which led to the 2012 debacle and the need to alter the specification. But maths was historically three externally marked papers taken in stages, and is now roughly the same content taken as a single terminal set of exams, all externally marked.

Opportunity for gaming it seemed pretty limited other than early entry or multiple board entry, which you can't fix by changing the specification (they're matters for Ofsted, really). When I looked at GCSE maths it seemed pretty decent in terms of content given the (relatively high) grade boundaries. Nostalgics for O Level ("oh, I did integral and differential calculus at O Level" - so did I, but the pass mark for a C was around 40%, and you had a wide choice of questions, so most students simply didn't do it) are never happy, but the extra content in GCSE - notably good statistics and probability work - is well worth leaving calculus until later.

So why did GCSE maths need to be fixed in the first wave of GCSE changes? What were the problems? Not continuous assessment: there wasn't any. Not module gaming: there weren't any. Not (in my view) content: it looked pretty decent. What was the problem?

Apparently content was too easy, so it will be getting harder for Maths.

I believe the content was made harder (syllabus changed as well as exams) when linear exams were introduced for Maths (and Science).
This is the difficulty of having 9 grades though as the average grade would surely be 4.5? So am not surprised that this is causing the DFE a problem.

I believe the content was made harder (syllabus changed as well as exams) when linear exams were introduced for Maths (and Science).

The content was left alone. My younger was caught in the transition (started modular, took linear) and just had to take all the paper - NINE for science - at the end of Y11.

the average grade would surely be 4.5

One piece of useful content might be the fact that not all distributions are normal...

If 4 is the requirement for the first cohort then personally I'm delighted for my Discalculic DD who finds the retake requirement piles on the already stressful experience of maths lessons!

When the definition of a 'good pass' is raised to 5, I'll bet my bottom dollar the top grade will suddenly become 10....

That's the thing, the good pass will be 5 from the start. What the government is saying is that even though the '4' students in the first couple of cohorts do not achieve a good pass, they will let them off the hook in terms of resit requirements.

Because they are only making this allowance for the first couple of cohorts, they are basically admitting that the guinea pig kids will do worse than later years simply because of their age.

The government is saying 'we will accept your fail', but who else will? I doubt if these students apply for courses further down the line that require a 5 that they'll be able to argue that they were the cohort of 2017 so their 4 is ok.

There are many problems with the current maths GCSE and it did desperately need reform.

It failed the top end of students because it didn't prepare them adequately for A-level. The content wasn't so much of a problem, one of the main issues was the scrapping of the three tiers, Foundation, Intermediate and Higher, and replacing them with Foundation and Higher. Higher went from being a paper examining A-B material, to examining A-D material. Top students went from preparing for an exam which thoroughly examined the tougher stuff, plenty of algebra etc, to a paper with half of it at C/D grade, and only a few hard questions at the end. You can now get an A with a pretty shaky grasp of algebra.

Then at the other end, employers were complaining that C grade students didn't have the skills that they wanted - numeracy and functional maths.

However, while the new GCSE is certainly more challenging and will stretch the top end, I'm not convinced it will sort the second problem. There were solutions offered which did address both issues, which were recommended to the government in a report they commissioned, but they were ignored.

And while the new GCSE may bridge the gap to the current A-level, when they make A-level harder in 2017 I'm not sure that the gap won't widen again.

The 4 is being set so that the proportion of 4+ will be the same as the proportion currently getting a C+.

The 5 is being set at a level apparently "broadly in line with what would be required to match the average performance of 16-year-olds in England with the PISA mathematics performances of countries such as Finland, Canada, the Netherlands and Switzerland.” God knows what that actually means in terms of mathematical knowledge.

Thanks for that, I'd not thought about the assessment.

It strikes me that "maths for those going on to do A Level" and "maths for those that won't do A Level" are rather different problems, and solving them in one syllabus and exam is hard. #platitude

PISA mathematics

I looked at the recent test items, and I thought it was shockingly bad as a piece of assessment. It seemed to hinge on all sorts of implicit knowledge and understanding of complex and ambiguous language, while managing to not actually test very much.

www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2012-2006-rel-items-maths-ENG.pdf

There's a Feynman piece where he gets asks to review school textbooks, and is struck by how many have entirely spurious frames to hold simple arithmetic problems (his example is, I think, adding up the temperatures of a set of stars: why?) Is this the sort of content we should regard as a good metric for our maths syllabuses?

The obvious solution was to have two maths GCSEs, one functional, one pure. This was recommended to the government in the report they commissioned led by Carol Vorderman and supported by maths teachers.

Unfortunately this proposed policy was tainted by the fact that Labour had introduced a pilot of double GCSEs doing exactly that (imagine that, piloting your new qualifications) so the Tories couldn't endorse it.

What the Tories have done is acknowledged that maths really should be two GCSEs, by double-weighting the single GCSE in the performance measures

Isn't it at least partly that sixth forms don't have the capacity to take so many for resits, so they'll start off with fewer and then raise the threshold once they've had time to recruit more teachers, etc?

No, they want more students to achieve a grade 5 and improve international standing so they are expecting fewer students to fail as time goes on.

There's already a massive recruitment crisis in maths, and with the need for more maths teachers in colleges to teach the new Core Maths qualifications, the last thing the DfE needs is to recruit even more to teach GCSE resit!

Surely there is a case for a numeracy qualification that is not a GCSE and for GCSE Maths to be an academic optional subject for those who are interested, like history.
I see Year 8s really struggling with maths they will never ever need in their lives, and it is making them miserable and putting them off numbers.
How about all kids doing real world numeracy as a compulsory part of 'education' and a cert that they have passed it.

Surely there is a case for a numeracy qualification that is not a GCSE and for GCSE Maths to be an academic optional subject for those who are interested, like history.

Then a decision taken at 13 or 14 would rule out all STEM subjects at A Level, and it's absolutely certain it wouldn't be middle class children in naice schools going that way. It would widen educational gaps, reduce access to selective universities and reduce social mobility.

I see Year 8s really struggling with maths they will never ever need in their lives

There are Year 8s, without special needs to the point that they won't take GCSEs of any form, who will never ever need the contents of Y8 maths? Such as what?

How about all kids doing real world numeracy

Could you outline this "real world numeracy" in contrast to the current Y8 syllabus?

There is a numeracy qualification, it's called Functional Skills and it has different levels. But our local school, for example, isn't allowed to offer this and so all pupils have to sit GCSE whether or not it's really suitable for them.
FS maths is good because it builds confidence - you progress along the stages rather than having one shot and coming out with a very low grade.
Having said that, I am sad that the idea of two maths GCSEs was dropped - it makes sense to have one that focuses on functional maths and one that's aimed at the students who are likely to go on and do A level.

But our local school, for example, isn't allowed to offer this

Isn't allowed by whom?

But our local school, for example, isn't allowed to offer this

My understanding - and I'd be really happy if I've got this wrong - is that the govt insists that all children are put in for the GCSE at age 15/16 and that to take functional skills you have to be in the 16-19 category. I could well be wrong but that's what a teacher told me. Functional skills can be an alternative to resits of GCSE but at the moment it seems universities and employers are divided over whether a FS level 2 is equivalent to a GCSE pass (and it looks like that issue is going to get even more confusing).

the govt insists that all children are put in for the GCSE at age 15/16

I don't believe that's true. There may, however, be perverse incentives in the accountability measures which mean that schools feel they have little option but to do this.