The biting comments of St Paul's boys school head teacher on the quality of GCSE examinations are deserved. Old, and sample question papers can be looked at on line. The requirements are easily met and, as importantly, outstandingly dull. Looking at papers in English and mathematics was to look at questions reflecting years of wasted school time.
'A student in your class has been suspended. Write a letter protesting or agreeing with this decision'. What kind of teaching of English gives time to such a subject? The maths papers were even worse. Reading a rail timetable correctly should not form part of a school leaving examination in mathematics. The instructions at the head of the papers not to use a calculator were even odder: first because all calculation could readily be carried out at sight, secondly, because why ever should calculators be denied to those who prefer to use them?
As Dr Stephen noted:
'Our experience of the new GCSE in science is that it is not an academic qualification - it is a social qualification. It is not preparing pupils for further study. ... it is to a terrifying extent not academic... The new science specifications are much more easily taught without a degree in science...There is a deep fear among some people that the exam content is being pitched at the level of available teaching rather than an internationally recognised standard.' He goes on to comment on what was very noticeable in the English papers I looked at - that the content is so dull.
School is the place where people have the time and facilities to learn much that in later life they will draw upon but may not have time to concentrate upon. The children who have received an entire schooling under New Labour have not been offered food for the mind, nor have they even been competently drilled in reading timetables and writing letters of complaint. More than half of them fail to obtain even a Grade C in mathematics and English after eleven years of full time education.
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4 comments:
I can exclusively reveal that when I took my exams, *before* Labour had started wrecking them, my school taught way beyond the exams. GCSEs and A-levels papers seemed very easy to us because we had been stretched. I remember sitting in the GCSE biology exam thinking "we have been taught none of this" then realising that it's because we had been taught biology not the guff in the paper. I got an A*.
There is something very wrong with schooling if so many people can't get 5 A-Cs.
HG, when are you going to give us your wider thoughts on examinations, as promised ?
(or if not promised, at least tantalised)
That's why I was looking at past papers ND. Soon.
Go here:
http://www.rsc.org/images/ExamReport_tcm18-139067.pdf
for a wonderfully dry, rigorous, and fully documented analysis of the way our public exams have been dumbed down.
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