Science GCSE standards 'lowered'

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wemorgan

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This is a bit of a hobby horse for me: BBC article.

Though to say that Maths has held its standards is hard to imagine. Looking at the bigger picture, when I did my Maths GCSE in 1990 I looked at my father's O-Level paper he did in the 1960s and it looked orders of magnitude more difficult.

Just ask University accadenics who teach 1st year engineering students what they feel about the standards of GCSE and A-levels.
 
Ok sorry......was new to me :)
 
Working in a school, exam standards are quite a big topic...

Let me put it this way; we had speakers from Oxford, Cambridge and MIT... all said pretty much the same thing - they can't rely on the A-level results anymore and are looking for alternative methods of picking students.

Imperial's speaker went so far as to say that they PREFER students who have not done the A-levels and favoured the IB (international baccalaureate) over the A-levels...

I feel that the easiest way to see how effective an exam is at sorting out students is to look at how many get the highest mark... if I remember well, the IB issued a 7 (the highest grade) to 2% of the candidates, no more...

Or to put it another way, I got into both Oxford and Imperial without attaining the highest score in Mathematics, I read/am reading Computer Science, for which the only pre-requisite IS mathematics...

A quick google shows that we as a school are not alone - more and more are ditching the A-levels in favour of the IB...

M.
 
I could never sit exams, I'm not sure if this made me "thick" or just unable to retain information about something that was not of interest to me.

Basically this means my route in life was destined to be working for myself or running my own business as I was never going to have the required bits of paper stating I'm intelligent.

I have a high enough IQ to be a member of mensa, but I couldn't sit and pass a GCSE maths paper...it would never happen.

I would however easily gain a PHD in common sense and application, something which none of these exams are ever able to quantify.
 
I could never sit exams, I'm not sure if this made me "thick" or just unable to retain information about something that was not of interest to me.

100% with you there. I've found i've done far better in the 'real world' than I ever did at school, college or university, I am simply a practical person. Exams cause me to have mental blocks, and this was always evident in my very high practical coursework marks and poor exam grades.

My father never seemed to grasp this concept and normally told me off for these poor results, but he returned to University to do a degree and masters and funnily enough, he saw my point of view and suddenly started to agree with me, so I know where I got it from! :devil:

Incidentally, I've tried out the quick honey and mumford test which I was introduced to at work, and it clearly highlighted that I am a practical person which I knew all these years. (I used this site: http://www.brainboxx.co.uk/A2_LEARNSTYLES/pages/learningstyles.htm and came out 50 50 between 'Activist' and 'Pragmatic'.

It really makes me wonder why schools don't try harder to work out an individual's learning style, exams simply do not work for some people.
 
It really is a minefield, I agree...

We're implementing a program called the MYP (middle-years program). It's essentially the IB for middle school. The intereting thing is that it's tailored on a student by student basis.

I'm not a teacher, so I'm afraid I don;t know it too well, but from what I've seen, each student is "evaluated" and depending on his ideal learning method the method of teaching is adapted. Obviously this works only in small classes (we're England's second most expensive school, beaten only by Eton - so as you can immagine, our classes are quite small).

I think the main problem is that the "problem" is extremely complex, and simplifying it too "oh, the exams are too easy" isn't the way to go. Humans are intrinsically complex and diverse, and students (most of the time) are human too :p

As I stated in another thread - education can only give you so much. I feel that for some, it's a fantastic base, but it's not the end result. It's a base to help in a career, but it's not a get-out-of-jail-free card...

M.
 

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