New GCSE levels - what should a top student be aiming for?

[RhodaBull]

Under old (current) system, the benchmark was at least 6A*s for Oxford for humanities, rising to ten or more for Medicine (extenuating circumstances excepted).

But now how is a pupil to know what is good or not? Ten 9s? Five 9s? What if, say, Westminster pupils all get ten 9s but someone from a comprehensive gets 8s (when they would previously both have got all/mostly A*s)?

Is 9 even achievable? Obviously in Maths it is easily done for a very able person, but what about English/History? How is one to know if a 7 is decent or a disaster?

That's useful in that it tells you where your child is compared with their year's peer group.

But useless if you have no idea whether their peer group is particularly bright or not.

The numbers of students taking GCSEs each year must be large enough that percentiles would be a useful measure.

I'm sure data exists to be able to work out the historic position and from that gauge where the functional level for English and Maths falls. Obviously it won't be exactly the same place ach year but I bet you could come to a pretty reliable small range.

when I did O levels and A levels all marks were normalised so they could be compared year to year.

If say physics was a particularly hard exam one year and a bit easier in the year before an A still meant you were in the top 5% of candiidates. That is what employers and universities want to know. They know candidates dont change from year to year on average so they just want to know where a candidate is compared to peers.

The stupid grade inflation of the last 20 years means employers now have introduced their own online English and Mathematical ability exams before they interview anybody.

Oxford and Cambridge always had exams to find the very best candidates.

Exam systems have to differentiate between candidates - not everybody is going to get the top grade whther you call it A* or Grade 9.

I don't understand the hysteria. Bring back exams that are hard enough to differentiate and then normalise the result to make them comparabe between years. It is common sense.

Also cut the number of university places from 50% of the population going to just 25%. Thats a different arguement but really we need only the most academic going to university and we need an exam system that identifies them and then fund them properly so they don't come out with huge debts.

Yes, I think the 50% going to university was a nice woolly idea, and certainly does massage unemployment figures, but in a practical sense it's a disaster. All these kids lumbered with massive debts, and thousands more who will never repay their fees. And the idiocy of someone being able to get financial assistance to do English at a tin-pot ex-FE college whereas another person wishing to do Physics at a RG university receives no help - based on marginal differences in parental income.

I have much less of a problem with obviously vocational degrees although they may sound a bit silly - Golf Management Studies, for instance - the ones that are really crap are "normal" subjects at a 10th-rate institution. If you can't get in to do English at one of the top 20, then I'm sorry, your English ain't good enough. And no anachronistic Journalism degrees either, nor any of those CSI ones where they don't tell you it's called forensic science for a reason.

I've been marking dds past papers and I've been really surprised that for aqa biology you only need 47 out of 60 for an A*. Thats 13 marks just floating around!

I suppose a '9' in the new GCSEs equates to a 55 out of 60 or something similar

The top grade is a centile i thought? The top 3% or something of the grade 8s

Exam systems have to differentiate between candidates - I completely agree. I think the regrading is a good thing. I think that, for A levels, a C used to be the average grade, which imo is a good idea. My Dad went to Oxford, albeit quite a while ago, and he said it was almost unheard of for a student to get straight A's at either O or A level. I think most of his peers had one A at A level with a mixture of Bs and Cs.
If the exam system can't distinguish between the brightest students then it isn't working.