Fascinating Archive - were O-Levels really harder?

[HPFA]

This:

www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/our-research/archives-service/past-exam-material/maths/

An archive of old exam papers -the link is to Maths but other subjects to the left.

As 1984 was two years after I did O-Levels this is particularly interesting for me. The paper did bring back memories of how I could sort of do some of it. (Got a C). I'm amazed at how difficult the 1957 paper is - is it just the different measurements and currency used which makes it seem harder? If noble has time to look at it her perspective would be very interesting.

Should provide plenty of scope for discussion. A-Level and GCSE papers also have links.

"German O-level would have been easier in some ways"
I have to say I managed a B in O level german despite the fact I've never been able to speak a word of the language, and spent many of the lessons in McDonalds with my then boyfriend .
Ironically I also got a B in French, which I was reasonably competent at and have used lots since.

For language exams I remember there was very little speaking involved. Something like 5 minutes. Hence it was possible to get an O level pass and not have sufficient knowledge to buy a train ticket or order a cup of coffee.

The English O level papers are much easier than the mock GCSE papers that my Y11ds has been doing. Also the amount of texts that they need to cover for the English Lit exam is far less.

If anyone wants to check out what the new 9-1 maths GCSE papers are like, there are some sample papers (obviously no past papers yet!) here:

www.mathsgenie.co.uk/newpapers.html

No BTEC either, you just did CSE instead.

Not in schools but ONC did exist in colleges.

Does anyone remember 'consolidation courses' basically you went to college for a year to resit O Levels/upgrade O Levels?

Can somebody please explain the term marking to fail.

When you sat the paper there wasn't already a pass mark or a grade boundary. The exam board marked them and set the pass (C - A grade) as the grade 50% had achieved, therefore 50% failed every year.

Sadik's example of a B in French and B in German flaws one of the many flaws i the system, loads of people took French and had been learning since they were 11.

Not many people did German and most of those would pick it up as an extra language a year or two later so a B in one subject is not the same as a B in another subject, it depends how well/badly other people did.

Theoretically with a very bright cohort marked out of 100 it could be scores 100% - A, 99% - B, 98% C or it could be 50% A, 40% B, 30% C.

I thought it was OND which was full time, and ONC part-time for day-release people, Apprentices and such like?

Plus RSA - Royal Society of Arts, for Office type subjects? City & Guilds? These were all quite rigorous qualifications - just typically under the radar of Oxbridge Educated MPs, but I bet there are a good many adults, now getting to retiring age or above, who built perfectly good careers based on these.

I think the modern "spoon feeding" approach was demonstrated with the furore over "Hannah's sweets" a couple of years ago where social media was alive with students whingeing that it was unfair there was a question type that they hadn't seen before nor been told how to answer!

It was actually remarkably simple - but instead of a probability question OR an alegbra question, it was a mixture of both. Cue teenage meltdowns and cries of anguish about how unfair it was.

Spoon feeding? Have you seen the new English and Maths GCSE's?

sashh - that marking scheme is still making me 35 years later!

I have been reading on MN about the umming and aaahing over the 9-1 grades and how in some subjects which attract a lot of able entrants there will have to be adjustments to prevent the problem of only getting a 2 grade even if you get 95% if everyone else has scored 99 or 100%.

I have just dug out of the bookcase a GCE English book I bought in a boot sale, first published in 1952 and written by the formidable-sounding TH Hewson, Senior English Master of Normanton Grammar School.

Boy, the exercises in it are hard . The passages for precis are difficult: Gilbert White, Adam Smith... and the comprehension passages not much better. The essay subjects are such corkers as "Time-measuring devices past and present", "Bells" and "Patent medicines" Eeek!

I love the idea that English Lit for GCSE is more difficult than O level! For O level we studied Silas Marner, Macbeth and Chaucer. None of these were easy. Is Chaucer on any GCSE syllabus today? Silas Marner? Surely not.

However, the vague History question about a medieval manor house would have been drilled in by the teacher about what the exam was looking for. Almost certainly a description of the house, why it was built like that, life in it, who would have owned it, what they did for a living etc. We did not look at any evidence, we were just told what to write and learned by rote from a text book. The big problem we had with our History O level syllabus, was that it was huge. We did the industrial revolution, essentially, but the syllabus was much wider than this and we did not get through it. Come the exam, we had barely covered 2/3 of the topics and there were lots of questions we could not answer. It was all essays so we just had to write what we could and wing it. The improvements to teaching cannot be discounted or under-estimated.

For eng lit gcse my ds has studied Macbeth, Jekyll and Hyde, an inspector calls and a collection of 15 poems which include Shelley, Wordsworth, Blake,Tennyson, Owen,Heaney etc.
Why are Silas mariner and Chaucer more challenging?

Sorry marner - autocorrect

I think the modern "spoon feeding" approach was demonstrated with the furore over "Hannah's sweets"

Now that was fascinating, to me at least. There were lots and lots of (alleged) grown-ups in news media BTL comment posts proclaiming kids today were rubbish and this is how you do it... then doing it wrong. It didn't have that many words and wasn't 'tricksy' but they just couldn't cope with, even perceive, the back-to-front nature of the question.

I recall Chaucer with modernised spelling being on O-level syllabus and I think GCSE. The original text (for a couple tales) was A-level.

Learning German made Chaucer much more comprehensible!

I was the guinea pig year for GCSE and got 4 As 3 Bs and a c.

I think some O levels would have suited me better, eg I am better at exams than coursework, so the B I got for my English Lit GCSE (100% coursework) might have equated to an A for O level.

But, I got Bs for Chemistry and Maths and feel sure I would have only got Cs if I had done them for O level.

I wonder whether the new, supposedly harder, GCSEs are actualy more like the GCSEs I took. My German GCSE in 1988 was much harder than my Italian GCSE in 2001, when I was allowed to take an English-Italian dictionary into the exams and got an A*. So my feeling is that GCSEs had got easier over the years and a reboot was necessary.

I did 8 GCSEs in my grammar school, my son's comprehensive school has also decided that most students will do 8, which indicates some sort of perceived parity with the old GCSEs.

I can't comment on O level because I didn't do any, although we did do a certain amount of O level questions as practice, as there weren't that many specimen GCSE papers available.

I'm glad I started the thread - lots of fascinating memories.

Interesting that in certain sections of the media O-Levels are still seen as the Holy Grail, yet the picture emerging here is very nuanced. Some affection for the old exam yet also a recognition that success often required a good memory rather than understanding. Pehaps all exams have their pros and cons.

GCSE lit 100% coursework? Wow! How was that assessed?

I'm glad you started this thread, HPFA, it's making me and my GCSEs feel really young!

Talking of Hannah's sweets, the problem with it is that a quadratic appears out of nowhere (I was wtf the first time I read it), and it's a prime example of a really annoying tendency for exam boards to try to shoe-horn 'real life' situations into maths questions.

No one ever solved a quadratic to find out how many sweets they have.

For our 100% coursework English (both lit and lang), you had to submit 10 pieces of work for each subject. At least two, I think max 3 had to be from 'controlled assessments', ie done in exam conditions in the classroom over one or two double lessons. The rest were basically your normal homework essays, minimum 400 words. For lit there had to be two Shakespeare ones, a poetry analysis, a compare and contrast poetry, a character analysis, and some other categories. Actually I think you could even use two pieces in multiple categories for lit! Language was similar, there was a formal letter-writing one, a creative story, various things. One had to be from year 9 so you could show improvement.

I know I got away with only submitting 15 pieces overall and still got an A.

[off to try to solve Hannah's sweets]

Eng Lit O level required quotes learned by heart and Chaucer isn't that easy to memorise. So does anyone do Chaucer for GCSE? Aren't the texts allowed in the exam? I think Medieval English, even if modernised, is a challenge which eclipses Wordsworth.

My recollection of O level lessons is that there was a lot of Chalk and talk with little discussion and regurgitation of facts was vital. Expanding the facts by having books at home helped or access to a good library. We had none of this. The web has changed this immeasurably and there are now fantastic opportunities to learn and research. My memory wasn't up to it so I wasn't so good at exams. Coursework would have suited me better.

ONC or OND typically replaced A levels and HNC and HND was equivalent to the first year of a degree at the old polytechnics. With a high grade HNC (Distinction) you could go into the second year of a degree. I made a huge mistake not doing this when it was offered to me.

I was in the last year to do O levels (1987). I did a pilot GCSE in geography in 87 and a physics GCSE in 88 so have done both. The physics GCSE was definitely easier. I got a B after studying the course half heartily for a year. Admittedly I was studying maths and chemistry A level at the time and there was a lot of overlap but I would not have passed the O level based on the O level past papers that the teacher gave us (he thought we wouldn't have either).

Teachers at the time definitely thought the GCSEs were easier and that the syllabuses had been reduced. When I was in the upper 6th I remember my chemistry teacher complaining that the lower 6th were badly prepared for the A level after the GCSE.

HOWEVER - we weren't expected to get 90-95%. Above 70% was an A and that was considered exceptional. There was no forsenic analysis of performance against marking schemes, or endless testing or even that much revision tbh. I think students work much harder today and expectations are so much higher.

Fascinating but irrelevant.

When I was doing my Geography O Level, plate tectonics was "fringe theory"
By A level it was important.
My Degree HOD was Ken Gregory who taught nothing else.

Maths was based on slide rules and casio fx31's and computers (where they existed) used 12 " Winchester discs

Physics still allowed mercury to be handled at O level

French was the language that was taught because China was a sub third world country

THe BREADTH of things that kids are expected to know nowadays makes past comparisons facile