Is school harder now than it used to be?

[Notcontent]

I was at secondary school in the late 80s and it was not in the UK (Australia) so hard to make a direct comparison. I was pretty bright and did really well at school. But now I have a dd who is in year 9 at an independent school (not that this makes much difference I don’t think) and it seems to me that a lot of the work - maths, science and English in particular - is of quite a high standard - stuff I don’t think I did until much later.

I did O Levels and thens spent 6 weeks in Australia which included an evening at house with a teenager so (I was a geek even then) I got to have a look at her 'Leavers' exams.

They were fairly similar.

But you have to remember the history of GCSEs. Way back in the day there were O Levels for people who stayed at school until 16, which mean the academic children of families who could afford their child not to be working.

Once education became compulsory for all then CSEs became available. So the 'top' 20% did O Levels, the next 30% did CSEs and the remaining 50% did no external exams, with the possible exception of something like city and guilds typing.

GCSEs came into replace both O Level and CSE but it became the expectation that every child would pass some exams so they were initially easy.

Also the O Levels and CSEs did not have grade boundaries, 50% were graded below C for O Level and I can't remember what they did for CSEs. But basically if you were in a cohort that achieved higher scores you might come out with a D which in another year might have been a B. Your grade depended not only on how well YOU did but how well or badly others' did.

With GCSEs if you got 95* you got an A, regardless of how others did.

The new GCSEs are more like O Levels were, but we expect all children to take and pass which is ridiculous.

Also the O Levels and CSEs did not have grade boundaries,
really?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_Secondary_Education

There is a table not too far down with them all in.

I am old enough to have done O'Levels (took them in mid 70's). I thin the Science GCSEs now seem pretty similar to what we covered , though Maths seems a bit harder even I'd say. English, Languages and History seem similar in terms of difficulty, though it is hard to judge exactly as they don't do as much memorising as we did and history seems to involve a lot more interpreting of original sources which we did not do at all

However as already posted, we had CSEs for those who couldn't manage the O'Levels,. Now everyone seems to be expected to pass O'level standard work which is pretty ridiculous really

I think there is a lot more pressure on children today, ds does his GCSE's next summer & the pressure is really being piled on, 3 sets of mocks, I only did one set, he has extra classes nearly every night of the week. The level of things that are taught is much higher, ds was doing what I was doing in Y8 in Y5/6.

I think there is a lot more pressure on children today

I agree. I don't see a great deal of difference between what I remember doing for o level and the GCSE content.

It's the pressure to achieve targets and how high those targets are that's changed.

It is the pressure. Back in my day (1980s), people aimed for C grades and only the swottiest were looking at A's. You could get pretty decent jobs with 5 O levels at grade C and above inc English & Maths. You could get into pretty decent Unis with A level grade Cs. Nowadays, you're made out to be a failure if you don't get As with the odd B and decent jobs require a degree (which mean you needed good A levels to get into Uni!).

I was going to come on and say “of course not”, but I have been helping DS (Y6) with his maths homework this afternoon, and it’s stuff I didn’t do until what used to be called 4th year of secondary school -Y10? - for O level maths. I was the last year of O levels in 1987.

I'm not sure that the earliest iteration of GCSEs were "easy", though - we had to do calculus, for example, which I believe isn't taught until A level now.

The thing is, for everyone sitting them, they are the hardest exams they've ever done, so in that sense, it doesn't particularly matter if the material included is "easier" as it isn't for that cohort

Likewise, there's a reason that Science degrees switched to being 4 years "Master" level - students were coming in lacking the fundamental learning that enabled people originally to get through the material to reach graduate level in 3 years. Obviously, there'd have been an outcry if people were expected to study for a further year for the same qualification, hence the rise of the undergraduate master's. (At least, according to the Science dons and academics I know) It doesn't mean, though, that A levels are objectively easier, necessarily, because the students have been taught different material.

I don't think the pressure has increased - admittedly, I went to an extremely academic school, but everyone took at least 12 GCSEs and 3-5 A levels. We sat unseen exams in every subject every term from the age of 4, and grades were read out to the whole year group, although we were also streamed on ability. It's quite a useful lesson, to be honest, that no one comes top of everything/all the time, good preparation for how university was in those days, based on three hour unseen exams (it was actually easier in that sense than A levels, where you had at least 3 3 hour exams per subject) - but again, we knew no different.

I am not sure, as a result, how helpful it is comparing generations in this way, as it's not really like with like, especially as there are so many additional variables.

At my grammar school in the early 70s we could take a single science O level so that’s a big change. Most do all three now but in less depth one would assume. I cannot really comment on the difficulty of exams now but I do know that at my local secondary moderns nearly everyone took the CSEs. Back then people didn’t like the two tier system. It might now be more acceptable to have higher and lower levels in all GCSEs but then some people wouldn’t like that.

We now have huge numbers going to university. Back in the 60s snd 70s this wasn’t the case. At my grammar only half the 6th form went and many pupils hadn’t stayed on anyway. Now everyone in a grammar will expect to go and plenty from comprehensives too. This adds to pressure.