Uncle Johann confirms what I always suspected to be the case. I knew standards were slipping!
Coursework: a charter for cheats
It's yet another way the British middle class rig the education system in favour of their coddled children
If Britain’s coursework system were submitted for examination, it would be lucky to scrape an E grade and a place doing Golf Course Studies at De Montford University. This week, the AQA exam board warned (again) that teachers are routinely waving through material that had been “blatantly copied from the internet”, and another GCSE exam authority, Edexcel, warned that schools were now offering so much “help” to students that it amounted to “a kind of mass plagiarism”.
8 comments:
This has actually tipped over from tragedy into comedy.
Government will fund A-level rival
The Sunday Times
November 26, 2006
THE government is to fund a switch away from A-levels to an international diploma, a move that could further undermine the state exam system. Tony Blair is to promise greater choice for parents with the creation of a network of state schools offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) as an alternative to A-levels. The education establishment, which had assumed ministers were committed to the A-level “gold standard”, appears not to have been consulted on the changes.
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In face of criticism that too many pupils are getting A grades, ministers still appear unable to come up with a solution. The options are either to split the A grade in half to create an elite A* grade, or to make the exams more difficult. However, after more than a year of argument, ministers are still worried that a super-A grade would be dominated by independent school pupils, who would, as a result, take even more places at the top universities.
This unparodiable story must be close to the stupidest idea I have ever heard. And this guy Dearing is a dangerous prick who should be guillotined.
Language GCSEs 'could drop orals'
BBC
17/2/08
Oral tests could be dropped from language GCSEs because they are "too stressful", according to a report. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority could adopt a recommendation to rely on teacher assessments instead, reports the Sunday Telegraph. The QCA said its report next week would follow the line of a previous review which concluded one-off oral tests were not a reliable guide to ability.
A former chief inspector of schools has condemned the idea as "stupid". Chris Woodhead said the idea of abolishing oral tests was "predictable" and "stupid".
Shadow schools secretary Michael Gove told the Sunday Telegraph: "After being told they could get a pass without writing a word in a foreign language, now pupils are being told they can pass without speaking it. "Once again, this government is moving the goalposts on examinations and instead of proper rigour we have got a watering down of standards."
While the QCA would not confirm the story, it said its report would concur with last year's review of language teaching by Lord Dearing.
Mr Woodhead said: "It's predictable because it's another example of the current fashion for removing from our examination system anything that students... find stressful, don't like, or find too demanding. "And it's stupid because if one is wanting to know if someone has mastered a foreign language in any context, then clearly the student has got to be able to speak that language in any context." He said continuous assessment was "completely unrealistic" and not necessarily fair as one teacher's evaluation could differ from another's.
Lord Dearing's report affirmed the importance of speaking and listening in language GCSEs and recommended these skills should make up half of the marks. But he warned that the stress of oral exams might deter young people from signing up to take languages.
"It is interesting that when people spoke about the oral test, that however long ago it may have been, it is often remembered as a stressful experience," he wrote. "We therefore proposed that these parts of the examination should be over a period through moderated teacher assessment."
Lord Dearing emphasised that any change should not weaken the "validity of the assessment". But he said: "That has to be balanced against the risk that a test that is often highly stressful and over a short period, whilst accurate in its awards against performance on the day, is not a reliable test of the candidates' capability."
The report was accepted by the then-Education Secretary Alan Johnson in March 2007. A sharp fall in students taking language GCSEs had prompted the review. The drop came after the government ended compulsory modern languages up to the age of 16 in 2004.
Peter Hitchens opines on the whole language GCSEs dropping oral exam proposal.
Why do people still pretend that exams have not been devalued?
'Now that they plan to allow teenagers to pass language GCSEs without taking an oral exam in the language in question - because such a test is too 'stressful' - all we can do is laugh. We no longer have an examination system in this country, just a system for issuing increasingly-devalued certificates in ever growing numbers. Yet this is actually quite popular.
Of course speaking a foreign language in front of a critical stranger is ‘stressful’. That is the point of it. Or at least it was when exams were designed to find out if you knew about the subject. Now, of course, they are about filling quotas, and reassuring the ill-educated that in our super-equal society, it doesn't matter that they don't know anything. At all costs, no feelings must be hurt in the running of our educational system.
And once you accept that as your aim, this is where you end up. And it is the aim. Look at the most heartfelt argument of enemies of the eleven-plus - that failing it was so 'traumatic' for those who didn't pass. No doubt it was. Look at what happened to John Prescott after he failed it. The poor man ended up as Deputy Prime Minister, so traumatised was he. For the sake of all those other little Prescotts, denied their grammar school place and their new bicycle back in the 1950s, and who never got to play croquet at Dorneywood, we must have a school system in which nobody is ever again upset by failing...'
Follow link to read whole article.
Wembley, Dan & I were this weekend discussing precisely the question of whether there was any objective evidence that exams have got easier. I wonder what Wembley makes of this:
The Royal Society of Chemistry ... last Thursday... published the results of a naughty experiment. It corralled 1,600 bright 16-year-old children and set them chemistry questions from O-level and GCSE exams of the past 50 years. And the society found that, whereas children scored only an average of 15 per cent on questions set during the 1960s, they scored 35 per cent on questions set today. The questions are now much easier.
The stuff about the International GCSE is fascinating too.
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A testing education is not rocket science
Telegraph
29/11/2008
By Dr Terence Kealey (vice-chancellor of Buckingham University)
Would you like a GCSE in science? Don't worry, you may not need to know much science actually to get one. Last Monday, Graham Stuart, the Tory MP for Beverley and Holderness, read out to the Commons Select Committee for Children, Schools and Families a question from a recent GCSE science paper: "A nuclear power station is to be built. (1) It will provide more employment in the area. But (2) any release of radioactive material would be very dangerous. Which of these two statements argues in favour of siting the nuclear power station in the area?"
Mr Stuart then asked if "the department is really sure that we are providing pupils with a rigorous scientific understanding?" But he was answered by Jim Knight MP, the schools minister, with "Yes. I am absolutely happy that we are, and we have set up Ofqual to provide more public reassurance."
Are you reassured? The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is not. Last Thursday, it published the results of a naughty experiment. It corralled 1,600 bright 16-year-old children and set them chemistry questions from O-level and GCSE exams of the past 50 years. And the society found that, whereas children scored only an average of 15 per cent on questions set during the 1960s, they scored 35 per cent on questions set today. The questions are now much easier.
And since a score of only 20 per cent will get a child a "good pass" or grade C in a science GCSE, it is no surprise that more than half of all pupils who sit a chemistry GCSE now achieve an A or A*.
The department claims that "standards in science have improved year on year thanks to 10 years of sustained investment in teaching and the education system", but the Royal Society of Chemistry, more honestly, bewails the "hard evidence for a catastrophic slippage in school science standards".
Tragically, that slippage is concentrated on the state schools. Dr Richard Pike, the chief executive of the RSC, has found that, whereas state schools still use the GCSE, half of all independent schools now use the International GCSE. Ironically, the International GCSE is recognised by every government in the world but our own, so our state schools cannot offer it because they are bound to government targets.
But because the International GCSE is harder, pupils need to be taught better to pass it, with the result that independently educated children actually know some science. Consequently, 40 per cent of all pupils now progressing to study maths and physics at A-level are independently educated. The cliché of the northern working-class chemist is now dead: science is for posh kids and, bizarrely, physics is now second only to classics for public-school bias at the older universities.
And because, as a report published last Thursday by the 1994 Group of older universities showed, science degrees are the route to the highest salaries in later life, the failure of state science education at the level of GCSE perpetuates class differences and social immobility.
Yet since some 80 per cent of physics teachers in independent schools are qualified in the subject (compared to less than a third in state schools) and since the independent schools tend to teach maths, physics and chemistry as separate subjects (while state schools tend to teach something just called "science") the life chances for ordinary children are reduced.
The problem is that the exam boards and their regulator, Ofqual, are only nominally independent: in practice, they appear to share the Government's commitment to grade inflation. So this year, for example, it became obvious that the science GCSE of one of England's three exam boards, AQA, was tougher than that of the other two boards. Did Ofqual force the other two to raise their standards or did it force AQA to regrade downwards, giving its examinees better grades than it had originally awarded? Yup, you've guessed it. Down went AQA's standards.
The credit crunch has exposed the failures of governments' monetary bodies to control the money supply and the failure of their regulatory bodies to regulate the banks properly, encouraging those banks to squander our wealth. But at least, in finance, such failures become apparent, and they can be addressed.
The tragedy with education is that its failures are insidious, and that generations of state-educated children can find their life chances reduced before their plight is recognised. And because a government can always inflate its exam grades, the truth can be lost in spin.
The target for the state should not be to reduce standards until every child can claim a GCSE in science, but rather to accept that only some children have an aptitude for science - an aptitude that should be fostered by rigorous standards of teaching and examination.
Otherwise, the time will come when British scientists, like British Olympic medallists, will be largely public school alumni, and everyone else will be also-rans.
The very funny Now Show on Radio 4 just gave the best take on exam grade inflation in the UK. According to them, the government have adopted the "Spinal Tap" system of exam marking: 'normal exam marks only go up to 10, but this one goes up to 11'.
This man displays the internationally recognised signs of genius - he's saying what I've been saying for ages.
The problem is that we want exams to do two things: rank the pupils, and find out whether their performances were better (or exams easier) than last year... However, there's a simple solution that would fix many of our problems at a stroke: rather than tearing up the exam system, we could – as many other countries do – simply publish two different measures. Alongside their grade at GCSE or A-level, pupils would be given a percentile score, telling them what proportion of their fellow students did better or worse.
GCSE results: A simple solution to grade inflation
Telegraph
27 Aug 2009
Pupils should be given a percentile score, telling them what proportion of their fellow students did better or worse, argues Neil O’Brien
Every year, when GCSE results come out, we have the same old debate about whether standards are rising or falling. But no one ever suggests a way of putting the issue to rest.
The problem is that we want exams to do two things: rank the pupils, and find out whether their performances were better (or exams easier) than last year.
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One obvious solution is to return to the old system, where the top 10 per cent of pupils got an A, the next 15 per cent a B, and so on. But that has two problems: it becomes much harder to compare different years, and the band for a particular grade can be very small. In one subject in 1982, the difference between a D and a B was as few as eight marks.
However, there's a simple solution that would fix many of our problems at a stroke: rather than tearing up the exam system, we could – as many other countries do – simply publish two different measures. Alongside their grade at GCSE or A-level, pupils would be given a percentile score, telling them what proportion of their fellow students did better or worse.
The benefits are significant. Employers and universities would be able to distinguish different levels of ability: this year, a fifth of students got an A or A* at GCSE, and a quarter got an A at A-level, which doesn't help universities select the brightest. Percentiles would also make the system fairer, by showing which students had just missed a grade, or scraped in above the grade boundary.
There are other advantages. The new measure would help end the widespread manipulation of the exam system, which sees schools neglect students of greater or lesser ability in favour of those hovering between grades D and C, on the grounds that league tables count the number of pupils with five GCSE passes at grade C or higher.
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Then there is the issue of assessing different subjects, and different exam boards. If a mark gets you an "A" with one board and a "C" with another, you know which one has devalued its standards. Similarly, there could no longer be the pretence that all courses are equally difficult.
Already, research from the University of Durham has shown that a child doing film studies at A-level can expect to do a grade and a half better than one doing science.
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Yet perhaps the best thing about this reform is that it would be incredibly simple to bring in. The raw marking information is already collected by the Government, which uses it to create a complex measure called "contextual value added", which tries to assimilate pupils' social background.
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Ultimately, the best way to drive up standards is to give parents a proper choice between schools. But to make that choice, they need to have confidence in the exam system. Publishing percentile scores alongside GCSE and A-level grades would make that system far more deserving of a passing mark.
Neil O'Brien is the director of Policy Exchange
"This man displays the internationally recognised signs of genius - he's saying what I've been saying for ages."
Brilliant! I request permission to use this line as my own at the next available opportunity! ;)
Maths standards 'no better than mid-70s'
School maths standards have failed to improve in the last 30 years, even though the number of good grades has doubled, according to research.
Telegraph
05 Sep 2009
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Figures show the number of teenagers gaining at least a C in GCSE maths increased by almost one percentage point this year to 57 per cent – more than double the number in the early 80s. But a study published on Saturday at the British Educational Research Association’s annual conference suggests rising scores over the last three decades “do not appear to stem from real increases in mathematical understanding”. “The overwhelming conclusion is that there are far fewer changes in mathematical attainment over a 32-year period than might be expected, or which have been claimed," researchers said.
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