Dumbed down national exams? What do older people think?

[Lucia39]

To get an A* pass for GCSE English Literature now requires a mere 56%!

How do those old enough to have taken 'O' levels feel about this?

Is the Government right and are 16-18 year olds getting brighter year on year? Or have the powers-that-be simply dumbed down the GCSEs and 'A' levels thereby allowing candidates who would have failed 'O' levels (i.e. not gained a grade C) to now believe they are actually competent in their subjects?

You know for some students (dd1 included) it IS an achievement to get As and As at GCSE. Large classes of mixed ability, teachers having to manage behaviour instead of teaching, some students who want to do well have more hurdles to overcome than those in more perfect settings.
Please don't put down the hard work and research outside the classroom that a lot of students have to put in to get these As because they aren't getting the support and teaching at school. Dd1 got 10 A/As down to sheer hard work and determination. Leave her alone!

Bagsforlife, one of the Cambridge colleges, Christ's I think gives about 1/3 of its offers at 'matriculation offers' ie the bare minimum required to matriculate - 2Es. I know of 2 people who have been given one, I think you have to be a pretty fantastic applicant. It is in effect an unconditional, because if you have taken AS levels sucessful 2E applicants will have undoubtedly got A grades which translated to an E at full A level anyway as an A = 80+% and an AS level = 50% of the course so overall = 40+% which is an E. In fact my sister (one of the people who I know got a 2E offer) already had 2 Ds as she had got 100% on all three of her AS papers.
The fact that she could acheive 100% on not one but 2 AS levels is something else entirely (especially as one was english lit, where I would have thought the marking would have been a lot more nebulous than maths or physics say...)

That's interesting belladonna79.

Getting 100% in an AS module is not that rare though! Two of my DCs have done that, even they wouldn't class themselves as brilliant. Plenty of their friends are brighter. They just learnt the stuff they had to.

I find it thoroughly depressing that "older" people are so insistent that the current generation cannot possibly be brighter than they! This negative attitude must be demoralising for young people. I don't think it is possible to draw comparisons between the difficulty of 'o'level and gcse - how many here have sat both?

For those students who want to do well at 'a' level, the pressure is immense from the get-go. Exams can start as early as the January of the first academic year, and continue throughout the 2 year course. This means as many as six 2 to 3-hour exams, per subject, plus moderated coursework. Even if you think the content is easier now, did you have that workload?

Modern 'a' levels may well be modular, but synoptic exams ensure that the whole 2 years worth of subject needs to be learned. Essay questions are often integrated to bring different topics together, and require understanding and application rather than just rote learning. So not the easy, multiple choice questions the media will have you know!

I will concede that the trend of resits to bolster grades is wrong imo. If you don't work hard enough and fail to get the grade you want, well, tough!

juxal - the comparative method of marking is far better in my view than the absolute method employed today.

If they mark all the papers and then say the top 10% get A, the next 15% get B etc etc then you are being graded in comparison with your peers. Yes that does mean that students in different years could get different grades for the same marks, but for Uni admissions and job applications, they will be able to accurately judge between candidates who took exams in the same year.

As I understand it, the marking system now says that if you jump over x number of hoops you will get y grade. This system means that the very able cannot be distinguished from their peers - everyone who jumps through the releavnt hoops gets the same grade even if the able student jumps through even more hoops.

Hope that makes sense! It is a subject that makes me very cross and frankly quite sad for my own children.

Bagsforlife, not just in one module, in all three so achieving 300/300 and not dropping a single mark, not unheard of but quite rare by all accounts.
Dsis is clever, much much cleverer than me (I like to tell myself I got the looks... though I fear this may not be quite the case) she has a pretty much perfect academic record, 444 at year 2 sats (had to take the extension papers) 666 in year 6, straight A*s at GCSE, summer spent at Johns Hopkins university in Baltimore after GCSEs to work on a genetics project, 6As at AS level and 5As at A level, numerous academic competitions won and on the GB athletics junior squad. Its all a bit sickening really!

(The Eton summer school where you get to meet the admissions tutors the summer after lower VI probably helped too if you're feeling cynical...

Roomforthree do you really believe that human beings have evolved in the last 20-30 years? That teenagers these days are significantly brighter than their parents?

It's not a question of doing anyone down, surely it's a question that if the exams haven't got easier and children really have got that much brighter, we will have to rethink our whole understanding of evolution?

Shambolic - I haven't said that the current generation are brighter than their parents, just that it seems unfair to belittle young peoples' achievements with the year-on-year dumbing down debate.

I would argue that evolution has very little or nothing to do with any improvements in "brightness" over a few generations. If the difficulty of exams is the same, but the results are improving (and I'm not saying this is the case), I would imagine this would probably be due more to environmental variables, such as a longer compulsory eduction period (my grandmother left school at 13, for example) / more widely available and/or better educational resources / a better awareness of what is required to pass exams etc.

My point is that "difficulty" from our perspective is subjective because we probably have not directly compared old and new exam papers. To achieve an A today requires a lot of work and commitment, just as it presumably did way back when, so why the constant derision and sneering? Why the need to do down achievement?

education

Why can't people retake?

Surely the aim is to gain the education/knowledge. If you don't get it first time round you shouldn't be written off, but get more help, try again and give it a second try.

Then, you know what you need to know to go onto the next level, into the relevant job etc etc. If you know what you are doing and are competent at it, who cares how long the training took?

Belladonna79 I thought you were probably going to say 100% in all modules!!! That is rare, I am not in any way implying your sister isn't very bright, there is no question about it. She absolutely deserves the 2 Es offer because she is an example of someone who cannot get any higher grades. I am sure she would have got As in the 'old days' too. Someone of her calibre is going to find A levels very easy.

I suppose what I mean is that there are students who do get 3 As nowadays who are nowhere in the league of someone like your sister. I imagine she is slightly frustrated that she cannot work to a higher level.

I suppose so Bagsforlife but at the same time its nice for the children who aren't THAT bright but still very clever, I mean no-one gets 3 As at A level (in academic subjects - but thats a whole other debate) unless they're well above average to get a good grade. Perhaps once you reach a certain level of intelligence its people skills, the ability to work under pressure and innovative thinking that take over?

I think more than anything what annoyed Dsis is the fact that she was't told what her weaknesses are. She is bright and definately at the top end of 'normal' but she's not a genius and she knows this, she had to work for her A level grades and to a certain extent is the result of her circumstances (private education at a very good school). She loved it when she got to university because she was told what wasn't so great about her essays and how she could improve.

I think the fact that she got 5As (one was general studies though) shows she has drive and determination, if I had a 2E offer I'd have spent the next 2 terms on a mini gap year but I suppose that's why I didn't get one

And from a slightly different perspective I don't feel it does someone any good at all to be CONSTANTLY told they are the best and cannot improve. Certainly from about 11-16 (ie when she was old enough to know she was one smart cookie but too young to see how constantly showing this could make her seem irksome) she was a bit of a madam. In fact on more than one occasion she pointed out that even without any revision she'd get A*s so why not watch TV instead? Obviously for a child with that attitude getting told that your results are in the top 5 in the country for RE (I think...) and you have actually acheived 120% (possible because you are marked for every mark point, so you can get 8 marks on a 5 mark question if you put every markpoint down, they then total the raw total for everyone who gets 100%) probably isn't in their best interests long term!

FWIW she's grown up a lot in the past 2 or 3 years and is a lot nicer now! I think being an average sized fish in the pond that is Cambridge is enough to knock most egos down a peg or two!

I would say my subject (music) is a lot easier to get an A than it used to be when i took it.

thats at GCSE btw - an AS grade C i would equate to a GCSE grade A in 1989 (when i took my GCSE) and an A2 grade A is the equivalent to an A level grade C back then too (speaking as someone who teaches music)

If the standard of the application forms from younger people that I have to wade through every time I have a vacancy is any indication, then yes, the standard of education is much poorer nowadays.

We've got so obsessed as a society with going to university and getting a degree that we're in danger of so many people getting them who probably shouldn't have (and wouldn't have been able to 30 years ago) that they are becoming worthless and meaningless.

Paolosgirl

Couldn't have put it better myself.

My mother was a maths teacher for about thirty years and taught O Level and CSE for years in a borstal and a comprehensive. She also taught GCSE until the mid-nineties. She reckons CSE grade 1 was considerably harder to achieve than an A at GCSE. Pretty sad, IMO. Why aren't we trying to challenge and stretch our brightest students who are likely to be those who go on to run the country and its industries and hopefully boost our economy etc or discover interesting and useful things? I absolutely agree with the idea that all students should be able to show their level of achievement and there's no point in going back to the days when only 20% could achieve a pass. But there is equally no point in teaching bright students that a mediocre effort is enough.

I was in the second to last year to do O Levels. We sat several practice GCSE papers before we did our O Levels as part of a study that was being carried out. Not one student failed to get an A in these and many got 100% (highly selective academic school). I assure you, not all of them got As in their O Levels!

(BTW am seriously suspicious of Lucia39's reasons for posting...not very subtle am afraid)

you're right

it's lazy cheap journalism again

trebles all round

She's on other threads too. I think she's the one who kept doing that idiot link to Tom Browns something or other a few weeks ago, Jennifer Barnes? Started a stupid thread about school puddings.....

Please God someone knows what I am on about!

oh yes the tom brown's thing was deleted and i put it back

maybe not journo, maybe researcher

maybe someone who just takes more interest than most..

yes I know bags!

and breeaathe

She has got a point though....

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