7 Questions on GCSE Maths

[Tony_S]

I think I would have quite liked 10800's Oxford & Cambridge O level paper. I could have answered it from the maths my science teachers thought that were needed for physics. The mathematics syllabus (Midlands Mathematics Experiment) was so obscure it only really prepared students for the even more obscure MME A level. The A level paper only had one question I could recognise (vaguely). I failed to pass and was granted an O grade. The MME syllabus wasn't dumb but I'm not sure that a school should have chosen a syllabus that was only suitable for theoretical mathematicians. I didn't come across anything similar to the school maths until the final year of a chemical physics degree.

The situation described by Ivan (Horsetan) of a very simple initial question on a GCSE paper soon disappeared. The early "one paper for all abilities" that got harder was soon replaced by Foundation, Intermediate and Higher papers.

 

Mickey's (I think it was his, apologies if not!) point (somewhere in the thread) about clever kids will do well is quite interesting. At 11 my son wouldn't have got anywhere near the local grammar schools (yes they still exist in Essex) and he failed to register on the local "selective" comprehensive entrance exam, so he went to the nearest one. Matthew always seemed bright to us but never achieved much on attainment grades. He did just (and only just!) well enough to start A levels where the college had staff who didn't put us down as pushy parents who couldn't accept that their child was dim. Once why he wasn't achieving was identified he was fine. Now if he had been born a few days later and started at the 6th form college a year later (new Principal, standards blah blah) he wouldn't have had the grades to be allowed to start A levels. 

 

In the old days if a student failed to achieve at school there was the possibility of FE (the Tech) to re-address the problem. FE is quite different now. My dad worked in the engineering industry and if their apprentices needed to know some specific maths someone like Dad would show them how to do the trig calculations or there was "day release" as appropriate.

All different now. The present trend is to remove resits of school exams and stress how "dumbed down" everything is. 

I really don't understand why the powers that be insist on banging on about "dumbing down". Exams are different. Exams measure what exams measure. I really don't think the youth of today are dimmer/dumber etc than those of yesteryear. 

[Welly]

Clever kids are clever.... send em to any school and they  will still be clever.......

But clever kids need inspiration to reach their full potential, sadly too few teachers, schools (and parents!) can give such. I knew several kids so much smarter than their teachers when I was at school - sadly few of them reached their potential at school though most are doing fine in the wider world.

[47137]

But clever kids need inspiration to reach their full potential, sadly too few teachers, schools (and parents!) can give such. I knew several kids so much smarter than their teachers when I was at school - sadly few of them reached their potential at school though most are doing fine in the wider world.

Yes, but we deserve exams which are too difficult for anyone to finish. At least that way the bright ones can show the World what they can do. Get rid of the current ability for pupils to get strings of A* results.

 

[Oldddudders]

Yes, but we deserve exams which are too difficult for anyone to finish. At least that way the bright ones can show the World what they can do. Get rid of the current ability for pupils to get strings of A* results.

 

A*? Yes, a client of my wife was scandalised when her daughter failed to get an A* in English Lit A level. The girl can't spell, so how she could get any sort of A is beyond my understanding. Those who can spell should be awarded more points for equivalent work than those who can't. That is what we mean by dumbing down - reducing standards to make results look better, year on year, to keep the parents sweet.

[asmay2002]

Slightly off subject, but on a similar theme, I'm was saddened to discover how few of my fellow student teachers with whom I trained in 1968-1971 actually went on to teach for more than a few years. Seems like a waste of time, money and talent.

I don't agree with this.  Teaching doesn't just happen in schools and colleges.  At some point in their careers many people will need to teach their skills to the next generation.  Having some background in how to do it is surely useful rather than trying to muddle through as the rest of us have to. 

[asmay2002]

I really don't understand why the powers that be insist on banging on about "dumbing down". Exams are different. Exams measure what exams measure. I really don't think the youth of today are dimmer/dumber etc than those of yesteryear. 

 

Kids today are no smarter or stupider than the previous generation. The whole point of the exam system is that it is a sorting exercise.  It's the exams that have been dumbed down not the kids. Just dumping everyone in the same box fails at the most fundamental level - it doesn't sort them. 

 

The graph on the BBC website says it all. We've gone from 40% of people in the pass box to 70%.  How does that help employers or universities get what they want? 

 

[bluebottle]

Don't know how objective this is, but (sad I know) I have all my old exam papers - if they are legible here are the Maths and Additional Maths O level papers I took in 1969........

 

........I've got A level papers as well if you like.

 

I collected cigarette cards, miself.

[Tony_S]

 

The graph on the BBC website says it all. We've gone from 40% of people in the pass box to 70%.  How does that help employers or universities get what they want? 

 

 

I'm not totally sure from my experience working in education that employers always know what they want. When vocational qualifications (GNVQs) were being developed there was a lot of advice taken from employers about the kind of skills that were required. Assessment was to be of the continuous assessment model rather than terminal or modular exams. Immediately feedback from the pilot project was that no exams meant no credibility. So exams were added. Then of course there was the requirement to know how they compared to GCSEs even though they were measuring different criteria. I went back to being an ordinary teacher, much simpler.

 

As for universities, many of them don't have an entry requirement even now for A or A*. Clearly those that are considered (or consider themselves) elite do but A and 2Bs seemed to be a common offer for many courses when my son was applying a couple of years ago

[BoD]

The whole point of the exam system is that it is a sorting exercise. 

It used to be the case and that worked fine when those 'sifted out' at fourteen, fifteen sixteen or whenever could walk straight into a non skilled job or apprenticeship. At one time those who failed could walk out of school turn right for a job in the shipyards or left for a job in the mines or wherever. The exams sorted the top 10% or so out for the universities.

 

That is no longer the case and the aim of the education system is get everyone up to certain levels and the exams have changed to reflect this. It's more like a driving test - if you are good enough you pass or you can retake your test (or resit exams) until you do reach the standard. If in an exam all pupils answer the A grade questions they will all be given an A grade.

 

Under the current system If you want to avoid the dumbing down you need to rewrite the criteria for each level and ask pupils to do more complex work than they did before. The driving test has added extra, more complex tasks recently.

 

Politicians and others must decide what they want the exam system to do - and if it to return to sorting there must be something for those sifted out to do - and that's another can of worms.

[ZiderHead]

I'm not totally sure from my experience working in education that employers always know what they want.

 

This employer wants the grades awarded to indicate the ability of the candidate, which the current system does not provide.

 

Over 25 years of grade inflation have made it almost impossible to assess the suitability of a prospective employee without either; finding some way to normalise grades by year to the 1970-1985 baseline, or to interview many more candidates and examine them ourselves. The former penalises the more able candidates, the latter is costly, time consuming and gives more candidates a false hope of being given employment. That we are forced to use a combination of both is ridiculous and detrimental to both employers and employees.

[asmay2002]

That is no longer the case and the aim of the education system is get everyone up to certain levels and the exams have changed to reflect this. It's more like a driving test - if you are good enough you pass or you can retake your test (or resit exams) until you do reach the standard. If in an exam all pupils answer the A grade questions they will all be given an A grade.

 

Under the current system If you want to avoid the dumbing down you need to rewrite the criteria for each level and ask pupils to do more complex work than they did before. The driving test has added extra, more complex tasks recently.

 

 

Except that the exam system doesn't get them up to a standard level like the driving test.  Employers and universities now have to do remedial ourses to do that. The level has become easier and easier to achieve for a generation. You don't need to rewrite the criteria.  Just go back to the uncorrupted ones we used to have and stop the fraud.  No one is asking pupils to do more compex work than before.   Just do work that is as complex as it used to be before the dumbing down started.

[47137]

Except that the exam system doesn't get them up to a standard level like the driving test.

I will give the teachers some benefit of the doubt, and imagine that they do get pupils up to a fair standard ... but the exam results do not reflect this.

 

 

Employers and universities now have to do remedial courses to do that.

 

In fairness to the system 30 years ago, I remember my first year engineering degree maths (1981) was designed as a leveller, it was necessary for students who had arrived via the OND/HND route instead of A levels. So for me, and everyone else who had done A level maths, it was a year of revision with a couple of 3-hour papers at the end of it.

 

Year two followed that (actually easier than the A level!), and then year three (on a four year course) and it was on year three where I came to grief ... suddenly, for the first time in my education I was being seriously stretched - and I didn't know what to do. I didn't take maths as a final year option ;-)

 

- Richard.

[Ashcombe]

I don't agree with this. Teaching doesn't just happen in schools and colleges. At some point in their careers many people will need to teach their skills to the next generation. Having some background in how to do it is surely useful rather than trying to muddle through as the rest of us have to.

I agree that teaching is not the sole prerogative of schools and colleges. Learning continues thoughout life unless one closes one's mind. But I wonder how many parents of my peers at college made sacrifices (as mine did) to enable their offspring to study to be a teacher, only to see them settle for a softer option.

 

Apart from feeling some sense of duty to teach, I did find it satisfying (political interference aside) and also felt it important that I contributed to the income of our household. All three of our offspring have a strong work ethic and one hopes the attitude of Mum and Dad to work will in some way have encouraged that.

[Rabs]

In fairness to the system 30 years ago, I remember my first year engineering degree maths (1981) was designed as a leveller, it was necessary for students who had arrived via the OND/HND route instead of A levels. So for me, and everyone else who had done A level maths, it was a year of revision with a couple of 3-hour papers at the end of it.

 

- Richard.

 

I find this very interesting.  I completed my engineering degree relatively recently (2009) and my first year maths was just like this.  The only difference was that the revision year was to bring the people who had only done 'Maths' at A-level up to the same level as those of us who had done 'Maths' and 'Further Maths' (aka 'double maths').  This was about 1/3 of the year who needed the extra teaching.  

 

I occasionally find news articles like this one irritating because the journalists always cherry pick the easy 'loosener' questions from GCSE papers to make the most sensational news story that they can and to play to the sympathies of a (mostly) older readership - I'm looking at you Daily Telegraph!  I, and some other boys from my class at school, actually took an O level paper at the same time as our GCSEs.  It was undoubtedly harder, but not by nearly as much as the newspapers would have you believe.  Also, some of that additional difficulty was because the syllabus was different so the O-level contained some material which we hadn't been taught.

 

Another point is that while individual subjects are getting easier, pupils tend to study many more subjects now.  It's rare these days for a pupil who is aiming for a top university to study fewer than 10 GCSEs and I know people who took 13 or 14.  So some of what is seen as a drop in standards is merely a shift to 'less depth, more breadth'.

[ZiderHead]

Another double maths then engineering guy here So boring going over the same stuff again, and at a slower pace, just on the offchance there was anything new. The second year wasnt much better.

 

 

 

Another point is that while individual subjects are getting easier, pupils tend to study many more subjects now.  It's rare these days for a pupil who is aiming for a top university to study fewer than 10 GCSEs and I know people who took 13 or 14.  So some of what is seen as a drop in standards is merely a shift to 'less depth, more breadth'.

 

Certainly, and I suspect it is a good direction to go in considering the changes in the labour market in the last 50yrs. Its surprising just how different the US system is, especially at undergraduate level, where the aim is to produce well rounded graduates with a range of skills rather than specialists.

[A_S]

I suppose it depends what level/type of candidate people are talking about here but to answer some questions and points raised earlier, certainly in my line of work:

 

1.) My professional exams were/are impossible to finish.

2.) 90% of all Jobs I've applied for or interviewed for include psychometric testing (verbal and numerical reasoning) to assess a candidates suitability for a role (and they are tough to finish too!)

 

These would happen anyway, irrespective of the qualifications of the candidate and state of the school exam system - so the employers already have more "tools" on which to assess a candidate than "the school system". Surely this is the correct way, and correct place to assess these things - in a targeted environment rather than a catch all school GCSE or A-level which are a more general test of learning and should stay that way IMHO.

 

 

So i'm not sure about this argument that the exam system doesn't distinguish between candidates because at the end of the day if you are employing candidates with only school level qualifications and not on the basis of experience/CV, prof qualifications or psychometric testing you are not likely to be employing the chairman of the bank of england are you? I can't say I know many people in non clerical jobs without a degree or who weren't on a training program/have gone on to a professional qualification. The point being that a basic GCSE in maths or English should test candidates for the level of jobs to which they will be going into - lets face it if your in a clerical role trig, S.D or logarithms are not really relevant and if they are, then you are going to have a degree or be tested at a higher level for that. 

 

I understand what Rabs is saying about catch up at Universities, in my case we were only streamed for one module (maths) and you will always have that unless A.) The universities tighten their admision criteria or B.) everyone sits the same board of examination. Only the universities can influence that and with the reliance on revenue streams from far east/foreign students these days, that won't happen..!

 

Andrew

[Tony_S]

One of my nephews was rejected by 4 universities without an interview, on I presume his UCAS application's predicted grades, reference or personal statement. The one university that interviewed him, offered him a place and that is where he ended up. He really did well there. 

[The Lurker]

I agree that teaching is not the sole prerogative of schools and colleges. Learning continues thoughout life unless one closes one's mind. But I wonder how many parents of my peers at college made sacrifices (as mine did) to enable their offspring to study to be a teacher, only to see them settle for a softer option.

 

Apart from feeling some sense of duty to teach, I did find it satisfying (political interference aside) and also felt it important that I contributed to the income of our household. All three of our offspring have a strong work ethic and one hopes the attitude of Mum and Dad to work will in some way have encouraged that.

From my experience, I think that the attitude of parents is a crucial element of a child's education. If what the school is trying to do is reinforced, and expanded upon, then the child has every chance of reaching full potential; but that chance is lessened if the attitude at home is that homework doesn't matter, school is about having a nice social life, and supporting the school (workwise). Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but it seems no accident to me that the children in my son's year who passed the 11+ (we still have them in Bexley too) seem to have had parents who expected their children to do all the homework set (for example) and didn't allow them to not make an effort (however little fun it was for all concerned!).

[Rabs]

So i'm not sure about this argument that the exam system doesn't distinguish between candidates because at the end of the day if you are employing candidates with only school level qualifications and not on the basis of experience/CV, prof qualifications or psychometric testing you are not likely to be employing the chairman of the bank of england are you? I can't say I know many people in non clerical jobs without a degree or who weren't on a training program/have gone on to a professional qualification. The point being that a basic GCSE in maths or English should test candidates for the level of jobs to which they will be going into - lets face it if your in a clerical role trig, S.D or logarithms are not really relevant and if they are, then you are going to have a degree or be tested at a higher level for that. 

 

I agree in the case where you are applying for a job and have higher qualifications, specific experience, etc.  I guess the people who are really hurt by an exam system which doesn't differentiate are the university admission tutors and people who are looking to employ school leavers. 

 

I was fortunate enough to go to a good university but it surprised me how many of the people there had jelly for brains (no comment on whether I was one of them ) - although they must have got straight As at A-level!  Then there are the inevitable newspaper stories about some super-brain who got 4 As and didn't get into Oxford/Cambridge/The-Queen's-Christmas-Card-List.  These completely miss the point that so many people get very high grades because the exams are easier and because there are many, many more people taking them than before.

 

For more some subjects a few universities now use additional exams, which are taken in the final school year.  Medicine and Veterinary Medicine both have the BMAT, Maths has STEP and I was asked for grades in Maths and Physics AEA (the replacement for the old S-levels) for my place for Engineering.

[Mallard60022]

From my experience, I think that the attitude of parents is a crucial element of a child's education. If what the school is trying to do is reinforced, and expanded upon, then the child has every chance of reaching full potential; but that chance is lessened if the attitude at home is that homework doesn't matter, school is about having a nice social life, and supporting the school (workwise). Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but it seems no accident to me that the children in my son's year who passed the 11+ (we still have them in Bexley too) seem to have had parents who expected their children to do all the homework set (for example) and didn't allow them to not make an effort (however little fun it was for all concerned!).

Exactly.  Expectations and aspiration.

It saddens me to see just how little some 'parents'  engage with their offspring. Poor little souls will have almost no chance. A desire for learning is formed within a couple of years of birth and if that is not nurtured then it fades away. People might mock Sure Start and similar schemes, however it can really help especially where young parents have had little support and input themselves. I accept this is a bit of a generalisation.

Here is something to ponder.

The Youth Centre in our town is open every night of the week during term time. It is closed almost all the time during school holidays. I ask why young people between the ages of ten and sixteen have the time to slob about outside the place at about 17.30 and then mess around in the Centre until 20.30? Should they not be doing homework and other activity and the Youth Centre opening for them on Fridays and Saturdays and during the school holidays? I don't quite get this. I'm told that if the Centre wasn't open they would just hang around being a nuisance. Why?

P

[DDolfelin]

I've read some of this thread with interest but will not venture to give an opinion because there are those at the chalk face far better qualified.

 

We used to get away with the odd side-step of a question. e.g.:

If it took so many men to empty a bath in so many minutes, how long would it take for another number of men ... etc., etc.,.

We were encouraged to state that the bath had already been emptied.

 

Another memory:

Instruction on first page of exam paper:

A) Write name at top of paper

B ) Read through paper thoroughly before answering

blah

blah

K) Ignore Section One and begin answering at Section Two

blah

blah

 

Edited for stupid smiley thing.