Send me your old O level, CSE, GCSE and A level science and maths papers, any format, any condition, email ben@badscience.net, fax 020 7117 3593, snailmail 119 Farringdon Rd EC1R 3ER. Anything more than ten years old gratefully received. Ideally I’d like the accompanying marking schemes, where possible, but I’ll take anything you’ve got!
I’m cracking on at work stuff today, but the GCSE results are out, and the inevitable squabbles are ensuing over the dumbing down of education.
It occurs to me that this is a very simple and familiar problem: on the reliability and validity of a test.
Test reliablility refers to the degree to which a test is consistent and stable in measuring what it is intended to measure. Most simply put, a test is reliable if it is consistent within itself and across time.
Test validity refers to the degree to which the test actually measures what it claims to measure. Test validity is also the extent to which inferences, conclusions, and decisions made on the basis of test scores are appropriate and meaningful.
Now clearly any thoughts or data you might have addressing the question of reliability, of consistency across time, is going to be confounded by the fact that the mission has changed: examiners are quite free about the fact that they aim to measure “different stuff” these days. Science education has been made into a bit of a joke, for example, and in many schoools they’ve stopped doing proper science GCSE’s in favour of “double science”.
However there are interesting things that can still be collected, and I need your help.
Firstly, we can look at whether, even when the mission has remained the same over time, the questions have remained similar.
But more than that, we can construct a narrative that people can simply experience for themselves. Can you believe I just said that? What I mean is: can people – and I know a lot of you are science teachers – send me examples of old science and maths papers which I can post, in the public interest? Either whole papers, or silly examples? Is there a good archive of old O Level science papers we can compare them to?
My fax number is 020 7117 3593, you can bung stuff at me anonymously or in the interests of your own microfame, at your choice, and if other people have blogged on this, do let me know. I’m happy to hold off writing on it until next week if it means doing it properly, and hang timeliness in the name of having something really interesting to say, but it would be good if I could bash it out tonight.
If we get a lot I’ll bung them all up in a nice database for everyone to see.
And remember: Positive Internet are gods.
Update:
Almost nothing more than ten years old coming in, if you can help, or know someone who can, please do get in touch, or just bung the papers over. There’s almost nothing online more than five or ten years old, except for this..
www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/downloads//exampapers/maths_html
NickConnolly said,
August 30, 2007 at 9:17 am
Plasecha:
“I know I didn’t rush to reply to your last post Nick, but post-stalking me with nonsense like this is even more desperate than usual. And a bit creepy. Really, you can disabuse yourself of the notion that I need lessons in English from you, or that any of us do, frankly. Especially since one only has to refer to your previous post – in which even though it was a brief post you still managed to make errors, writing “evidenced that”, and “no better at teaching and general” – to see that you can’t even use words like “that” or “and” correctly.
That was a correct use of a hyphen, by the way. You tend to use them in place of colons. Meanwhile, your suggestion I use a colon was incorrect, because “the number taking A levels in the country” etc., was not a point in itself, but evidence for a point I made later. Even as a pedant and a troll, you fail, and let’s hope you don’t teach English as well as maths…”
Did you maybe here a sort of whoooshing noise just above you as you were typing? That was my probably my point flying over your head. Looks like somebody’s sense of humour has gone the way of their psychic internet connection…
HINT: With a colon the “This” refers to what follows in “This is utterly missing the point”. Well it made me chuckle.
NickConnolly said,
August 30, 2007 at 9:36 am
“y the standards I had to do for my O level, that question was poor. ”
Oops making stuff up again.
“And you are still being a hypocrite”
And more childish name calling…
“This does not automatically mean that the lowest grade was only O level standard, and I do not recall doing O level questions on the A level paper. ”
An O-level was an awarded grade for A-Levels in the good-old-days. That you do or don’t recall something is irrelevant. As far as I’m aware what proper research has been done (i.e. something other than the woo plan of Ben’s or your gut-feeling approach) suggests that it the standard for a grade E is easier than in the past – but not by much.
But hey, where’s the fun in that when we could have a rant about falling standards based on reading chicken entrails?
RS said,
August 30, 2007 at 1:34 pm
“You claimed grades would improve as teachers learned to teach to the test, but if you haven’t actually changed the exam, that wouldn’t apply either.”
They would. Previously norm-referencing prevented any increases or decreases in quality from being detected.
Criterion referencing allows the increase in teaching to the test that will naturally proceed from the accumulated familiarity with the test however long it has been running.
Changes in the syllabus, which inevitably happen periodically, could potentially be picked up as step changes in the pass rate.
“Why did the introduction of criterion referencing alone raise grades? You may say that since the norm-referencing had been removed, more people could achieve higher grades. But the thing is, under the old system, the marks followed a normal distribution anyway. In other words, there actually WAS a top ten percent in terms of raw performance.”
I’m afraid I don’t understand your point. I’m saying that it is inevitable that some teaching to the test will happen, and this will continue to happen as experience accumulates over time – a good example is the familiarity and past questions that Public schools had with the Oxford entrance exam. Therefore a criterion referenced system will always show a trend to increasing marks – and obviously this could not happen with norm referencing – the question is whether we think the increase in passes is greater than would be expected by teaching to the test, and genuine improvements in teaching methods.
RS said,
August 30, 2007 at 1:37 pm
“so long as the grade for a D was around 70% for the OCR paper and 40% for the AQA paper (with equivalent intervals) then it would be just as hard to get a D on the ‘easier’ paper than on the ‘harder’ paper.”
Of course there can be questions as to the validity of the test itself. For example, a completely random multiple choice exam will still sort people into percentiles without necessarily revealing anything about students ability.
plasecaha said,
August 30, 2007 at 2:41 pm
“HINT: With a colon the “This” refers to what follows in “This is utterly missing the point”. Well it made me chuckle.”
That doesn’t make any sense, because I wasn’t missing the point. Why would I see something that doesn’t make any sense? Unless you mean HE was missing the point. But since I was going on to make my point, it still doesn’t make any sense. Keep smiling.
“y the standards I had to do for my O level, that question was poor. ”
Nope, I gave an example earlier to show why.
“An O-level was an awarded grade for A-Levels in the good-old-days. That you do or don’t recall something is irrelevant.””
I agreed with that. I disagreed that the standard automatically had to be O level.
“As far as I’m aware what proper research has been done (i.e. something other than the woo plan of Ben’s or your gut-feeling approach) suggests that it the standard for a grade E is easier than in the past – but not by much.”
But hey, where’s the fun in that when we could have a rant about falling standards based on reading chicken entrails?”
OK, so we have your “awareness” to go on instead. Cool. Personally, I think we’d be better off with the entrails…
Meanwhile, back at the debate: being as you teach GCSE maths, how does the standard of those questions on the OCR paper compare with GCSE?
“Now if the above ISN’T the case then that is another story. But you don’t know which way round the issue is. Lets say the 40% paper actually gave at D’s for a score of 30% and the 70% paper gave them for 80% then actually your subjective impression of difficulty would be way off. the ‘easier’ paper would actually be too hard and the ‘harder’ paper too easy.”
That’s exactly my point. When I said I was wondering why, I wasn’t wondering how grade boundaries work. I made clear earlier I understood, when I gave the example of how you could shove the grade A around to compensate for differences in difficulties in papers. Oddly, you have overlooked that. I was making the point that we don’t know which way round, but that it is POSSIBLE there is a disparity between boards.
I chose the A grade example, rather than your D grade, because it highlights better the LIMITATIONS in moving the grade boundaries around. You can only move the A grade up so far to make an easier paper harder in practice. You chose an example that, strangely, makes your case seem stronger than it is. Is that a failure to understand grade boundaries on your part, Nick? Or something deliberate to hide the truth?
Oh yeah, you can drop the requirement for an A on the harder paper. You could drop it to 10 percent if you like, but who’s going to do that? The lower you set the A grade on the harder paper, the more you make the questions redundant. And there is still a hard limit.
The folly of your approach is highlighted in the example you gave. You’re setting a D grade at 70 percent, thus cramming all of the grades into the top part of the paper. What’s the point of all the lower scores and questions then? There are limits to what can be reasonably expected of grade boundaries, Nick.
If OCR papers as a collection are significantly easier overall, then the more difficult questions on the AQA are either redundant, OR the paper IS harder.
plasecaha said,
August 30, 2007 at 2:41 pm
RS
“They would. Previously norm-referencing prevented any increases or decreases in quality from being detected.”
Not necessarily. You can spot and account for longer-term trends in the data, adjusting locally for blips up and down each year. In practice, there doesn’t appear to be evidence there was this gradual improvement. But then again, there wasn’t as much PRESSURE to improve. If pupils didn’t perform well, that was their problem. I think it’s good there is that pressure now. Whether it’s being used in the correct ways is something else.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand your point.”
Yeah, to be honest I wasn’t really directing that at you, I was just following on to make a different point.
“I’m saying that it is inevitable that some teaching to the test will happen, and this will continue to happen as experience accumulates over time – a good example is the familiarity and past questions that Public schools had with the Oxford entrance exam.”
Well, I take your point, but to be honest, while those schools DID have additional experience over other schools, it came from a different source.
I said earlier, that all the Oxbridge teachers didn’t have to do all that much at the top Public Schools. In the context of the A levels that was fair, but I thought about it some more and remembered it was very different when it came to Oxbridge.
Because they were at that level and were very familiar with the system, having been there, they could do quite a lot to help in that regard. In my day, Oxbridge exams were usually seventh term, so the goal was to get past the A level syllabus and onto Oxbridge as quick as possible. Also, they had more to give in terms of which College to go for, and which courses.
This was all very handy stuff, and it came from having been to Oxford and Cambridge, rather than improving the teaching. Teachers rarely sought to improve their teaching back then. Mostly, they would just work through a textbook. Certainly SOME tried. But there was no global pressure to improve. So it didn’t happen.
RS said,
August 30, 2007 at 3:21 pm
“Not necessarily. You can spot and account for longer-term trends in the data, adjusting locally for blips up and down each year. In practice, there doesn’t appear to be evidence there was this gradual improvement”
How could you tell if only a fixed proportion got each grade? Are you saying there is additional data available?
Because the evidence that in the 1980s there was concern that grade boundaries were becoming too close together would tend to argue for a change in performance distribution (if we assume similar difficulty between papers) although not in what direction.
plasecaha said,
August 30, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Just to be clear, obviously, they were more experienced at Oxbridge exams than other schools, but I didn’t see much evidence of an effort to improve, or pressure to. About a quarter got in every year. Around another quarter were good enough to try, but didn’t get in. A good number of the rest didn’t really have that as their chosen course. They had other plans. The proportion getting into Oxbridge stayed pretty stable, year-on-year. I actually remember checking this at the time, because I was interested to know how good our year was in comparison to others.
If anything, I imagine the number attending in future years may have fallen, because of the increasing pressure on Oxford and Cambridge to admit more from the state sector, something which was already quite a factor at the time. In my college, there were four of us in my year on the same course. The other three were state-educated.
There were OTHER ways to skin the cat, anyway, without necessarily improving the teaching.
The College I went to had no link with my House at school. No one from my house had ever been there in recent times. Once I was in the College though, others from my house also got places in subsequent years.
Coulda been a coincidence though…
plasecaha said,
August 30, 2007 at 3:32 pm
RS
“How could you tell if only a fixed proportion got each grade? Are you saying there is additional data available?”
The grades were applied retrospectively, of course. Each year, there would be a different curve from the raw exam performances. You could track that data over time.
“Because the evidence that in the 1980s there was concern that grade boundaries were becoming too close together would tend to argue for a change in performance distribution (if we assume similar difficulty between papers) although not in what direction.”
Exactly, there can be evidence of a change in the distribution. You could respond to that if you had to. If it got extreme, you could introduce a new grade, as nowadays…
RS said,
August 30, 2007 at 4:45 pm
But do we know whether there is any evidence for or against changes in standards? Or could true increases in performance have been cancelled out by widening participation? I suppose the grades in Public Schools might serve as a proxy since their students presumably always did A Levels and had no widening participation issues.
JQH said,
August 30, 2007 at 5:14 pm
Ben, re your request early on, I emailed you some questions from am old CSE physics text book. Closer examination suggests they were taken from past CSE papers
Nobody’s left the recent GCSE physics paper lying around so I can’t send that for the mo. Mind you it should be available on the net.
I don’t know about other schools but where I work only the students who are doing Higher level GCSE can get entered for the three seperate sciences ie the ones who would have been capable of O-Level in the old days.
plasecaha said,
August 30, 2007 at 5:34 pm
RS,
Now that’s an interesting idea. I need to think about that, lol. I’m also thinking about whether we should have seen a change in standards going way back, because the Flynn effect suggests we might have…
scentless_apprentice said,
August 30, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Hi Ben,
I can tell you from personal experience that it’s not the difficulty of content that has changed – it’s the structure of the paper that has changed.
I compared the Mathematics exam papers I took in 1997 to this year’s at the school I teach at in June.
What I found was that whilst the topics were the same and the expected outcomes were similar – what was different was that the answers were broken down into chunks in a way that would clearly help the student to follow a path to the correct answer.
Only at the higher end A/A* questions was it expected that the student would do the complete working without direction or in chunks.
So whilst the subject matter the students have to study isn’t being dumbed down (that said, my exam had matrices and critical path analysis, topics not on the GCSE syllabus these days), the way the questions are asked requires less deduction and planning on the student’s part.
plasecaha said,
August 30, 2007 at 7:31 pm
OK, regarding the whole IQ thing, THIS is interesting…
education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,1693061,00.html
The work of the guy behind it was used to benchmark the National Curriculum, so Richas should approve…
plasecaha said,
August 30, 2007 at 8:01 pm
Flynn disputes the above, apparently, on account of British pupils showing rises on the WISC test (though declining in arithmetic). But he thinks the effect may have peaked, so it should be interesting.
Meanwhile, on the matter of grade inflation, most of the rises in the past five or ten years have been in the private/grammar school sector?
education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2150082,00.html
So it’s been basically static in the state sector? Wow…
NickConnolly said,
August 30, 2007 at 11:39 pm
“That doesn’t make any sense, because I wasn’t missing the point.”
I was saying, in an apparently way, way too subtle way that you were missing the point. I may, of course, be wrong.
NickConnolly said,
August 30, 2007 at 11:50 pm
“I agreed with that. I disagreed that the standard automatically had to be O level.”
Then I haven’t a clue what you are saying. You agree that the in the good-old days A Levels did claim to be able to assess down to O-Level grades and distinguish that from a fail. You also agreed that not all question in the OCR AS paper were at O-Level standard.
“OK, so we have your “awareness” to go on instead. Cool. ”
Erm no. You have actual emprical data which I’ve posted which shows that the test have actually got easier for students. That’s the issue – do we go about looking at this question in a silly woo sort of way (your approach) or do we consider empircal data (my approach).
“There are limits to what can be reasonably expected of grade boundaries, ”
Undoubtedly but your complaint that some questions on the OCR paper were easier than those on the AQA paper wasn’t of the order of magnitude even by your own claims. Two papers can differ substantially in the difficulty of the items but so long as there is enough overlap grade boundaries can be adjusted to compensate OR even render one test easier than the other despite the apparent difficulty.
richas said,
August 31, 2007 at 12:28 am
Oddly, you have overlooked that. I was making the point that we don’t know which way round, but that it is POSSIBLE there is a disparity between boards.
Which would be why we have a regulator to check this and why the Exam Boards have a curriculum board they are all members of. They provide the mechanism to ensure that the exam boards award grades of similar (as close to identical as possible) standard.
Do you think you are the only one who has compared questions on papers? They just do it with full information and statistical analysis and apply their professional experience to the task.
richas said,
August 31, 2007 at 12:43 am
OK, regarding the whole IQ thing, THIS is interesting…
education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,1693061,00.html
The work of the guy behind it was used to benchmark the National Curriculum, so Richas should approve…
Not really Piaget has 4 undefined stages of child development with no clear test for them. In fact they are nowhere fully described and nobody knows the boundaries so it would be startling if different researchers 30 years apart assessed them in the same way – you see they have no mark scheme, they have no definition and they have no transition criteria between the stages.
Entrails I’m afraid.
richas said,
August 31, 2007 at 12:50 am
So it’s been basically static in the state sector? Wow…
No, relatively static in percentage terms. Improved significantly but less than at private schools. In terms of the total A grades awarded more of the extra As have been awarded at state schools. 93% vs 7% is the participation rrate overall but it is closer to 13%/87% at A Level.
Plus we have a much wider participation rate now compared to a decade ago – in the state sector. The independent sector has been static in size. This wider participation could reasonably be supposed to have mostly included pupils less likely to achieve an A than those who traditionally took the A levels.
NickConnolly said,
August 31, 2007 at 4:03 am
“Not really Piaget has 4 undefined stages of child development with no clear test for them. ”
I wouldn’t let the Piaget aspect count too much as far as the actual test goes. The Piagetian developmental stages were the underlying concept between the items in the Voulme and Heaviness test. The test itself stayed the same and was analysed using a standard psychometric model.
The interesting issue here is that the test Shayer used was one of practical reasoning about physical objects -essentially the kind of inner working folk model of physics that the children had. Shayer’s result indicate that had declined. That isn’t inconsistent with either Flynn’s results (on an attempted measure of g ) or school test results.
“On the reasons for the decline reported in this article one can only speculate. Piaget
believed that it was the whole everyday environmental experience of the child that
drove cognitive development, with schooling possibly playing only a minor part in the
process – Vygotsky believed that schooling should change to play a major part (Shayer,
2003). Passive exposure to many hours of television a week has increased since the
1960s when 1975 CSMS students entered primary school. Computer games may have
usurped what might have been, for boys, many hours playing outside with friends with
things, tools and mechanisms of various kinds rather than virtual reality. However, it is
possible that a decline in the use of activity methods in the early years of primary
schools, in favour of an increased proportion of the time dedicated to the 3Rs as
instanced by the National Numeracy and Literacy projects, may be partly responsible for
the continuing decline from 2000 to 2003.”
(Michael Shayer British Journal of Educational Psychology (2007), 77, 25–41)
In other words the decline in students ability to reason sensibly about physical objects and improvements in their ability to add, spell etc may have the same fundamental cause: Primary schools are doing more formal teaching of the 3Rs and less experiential learning. Twisted on its head we could also say that in the 1970s primary school would have been more likely to have explictly taught Piagetian concepts (eg conservation of volume) because Piagetian ideas were more in vouge: so the past results may have been because of “teaching to the test”.
I can’t find a free-access version of the paper
plasecaha said,
August 31, 2007 at 10:50 am
Richas,
“No, relatively static in percentage terms. Improved significantly but less than at private schools. In terms of the total A grades awarded more of the extra As have been awarded at state schools. 93% vs 7% is the participation rrate overall but it is closer to 13%/87% at A Level.”
The interesting thing is how static it has been for the secondary moderns, the ones which have had the brighter ones stripped out and sent to the grammars. At 0.1 percent over five years, that’s pretty static.
They haven’t made any gains to speak of, the number getting As is frozen at around 10 percent. The teachers are not seeing more people move up from B grades to A the way they are at other schools.
richas said,
August 31, 2007 at 11:02 am
The interesting thing is how static it has been for the secondary moderns, the ones which have had the brighter ones stripped out and sent to the grammars. At 0.1 percent over five years, that’s pretty static.
They haven’t made any gains to speak of, the number getting As is frozen at around 10 percent. The teachers are not seeing more people move up from B grades to A the way they are at other schools.
It is interesting but hardly surprising the potential A students are going elsewhere. What would be more relevant is their increase in B/C – The O Level equivalents where I am sure they have seen real progress. These are real gains for these pupils.
One of the things that is often missed in the Secondary school type debate is that the best/worst schools make relatively little difference to the outcomes in terms of grades. Prior achievement and social/economic background are far more important. The value add league tables sow that a “good” school manages to imprve average performance by about two GCSE grades so of say 5 GCSEs Two subjects at B rather than C. Some of the “secondary moderns” are matching this value add – not many but some.
plasecaha said,
August 31, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Richas,
“Not really Piaget has 4 undefined stages of child development with no clear test for them. In fact they are nowhere fully described and nobody knows the boundaries so it would be startling if different researchers 30 years apart assessed them in the same way – you see they have no mark scheme, they have no definition and they have no transition criteria between the stages.”
To add to what Nick said, there is also this:
“He helped to develop two-year intervention programmes for those children who had been identified by the Piagetian model as being below average in year 7. Science and maths were the contexts through which the programmes were taught, but the prime focus was on general developmental skills.
“These programmes [Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education and Cognitive Acceleration through Maths Education] both significantly increased the children’s Piagetian scores and markedly improved their maths and science GCSE grades from those predicted at entry level testing. More important, these children also showed an improvement on predicted grades in other subjects, such as English and history. This showed the programmes had a generic impact, rather than just a specific effect.”
And this…
“VH, which concerns the conservation of liquid and solid materials, internal volume and intuitive density, was chosen partly because it has substantial predictive validity for both science and mathematics achievement and is an effective way of alerting teachers to their students’ range of abilities, but also because it is recognised as a test that measures abilities that are not directly teachable. As such, it was an objective research method, free from any process of adaptation to changing circumstance.”
I’m not the greatest fan of Piaget, but your sweeping condemnation of the approach of someone with good cred. contrasts with the way you blindly urge us to accept the work of the QCA because they are “professionals”, without any assessment of THEIR methods. But yeah, Piaget has a lot to answer for, including a whole bunch of teachers believing that children just learn stuff wen they are “ready” and that they therefore needn’t bother much about the teaching because it is immaterial.
plasecaha said,
August 31, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Richas
“It is interesting but hardly surprising the potential A students are going elsewhere.”
They don’t all go elsewhere. They already have 10 percent A grades. Why are the B-grade students frozen, but not elsewhere? Why can’t the teaching and the wonderful new criterion-based exams lift them, if it does elsewhere?
“One of the things that is often missed in the Secondary school type debate is that the best/worst schools make relatively little difference to the outcomes in terms of grades. Prior achievement and social/economic background are far more important.”
Statistically, that may be true, but we have to be careful. Private schools have had a fair number of people from much less well-to-do backgrounds and much less prior attainment than their peers (because they came from crappier schools) doing as well as or exceeding the performance of their new peers.
richas said,
August 31, 2007 at 2:50 pm
I’m not the greatest fan of Piaget, but your sweeping condemnation of the approach of someone with good cred. contrasts with the way you blindly urge us to accept the work of the QCA because they are “professionals”, without any assessment of THEIR methods. But yeah, Piaget has a lot to answer for, including a whole bunch of teachers believing that children just learn stuff wen they are “ready” and that they therefore needn’t bother much about the teaching because it is immaterial.
I’m sorry if my comments read as a sweeping condemnation of Piaget, they were not intended as such. His focus was on development and stages of development. This is very different to assessment. Twisting his work to create an assessment framework just does not stack up. It would be unclear to Piaget what was being assessed, its relevance and the measures to be used would be unclear even to Piaget.
richas said,
August 31, 2007 at 2:59 pm
They don’t all go elsewhere. They already have 10 percent A grades. Why are the B-grade students frozen, but not elsewhere? Why can’t the teaching and the wonderful new criterion-based exams lift them, if it does elsewhere?
For the last time criterion referencing does not raise grades it is just a mechanism that allows improved performance to be recognised over time.
I suspect a debate on secondary moderns is a bit much on top of the rest, suffice to say, as you would no doubt expect, I am not a fan. Personally I suspect it has to do with lower ambitions within the school, both teachers and pupils plus lower parental support and ambition.
Statistically, that may be true, but we have to be careful. Private schools have had a fair number of people from much less well-to-do backgrounds and much less prior attainment than their peers (because they came from crappier schools) doing as well as or exceeding the performance of their new peers.
Presumably because we know the scholarship exam is all about finding the most deserving not the poor kid with most ability and the highest achievements to date?
Sorry this very select group, often with very education focussed parents, is not representative. Again – the school can make some difference but it is relatively little – even in the independent sector. Their excellent results are a product of excellent teaching, low class sizes, additional resources and the quality of their intake – both in terms of pupils and parents.
Robert Carnegie said,
September 1, 2007 at 1:06 am
Lower down the school, aggregate performance continues to decline in basic reading and writing, and that’s official. So far the cries of “Pah! It is only because the tests were made harder” have not yet reached my ears.
kim said,
September 3, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Ben, three years ago Jenni Russell wrote an article for The Guardian in which she demonstrated fairly conclusively that standards had fallen in A-levels (ie not necessarily that the questions were getting easier but that the marks required to pass were lower). Definitely worth reading:
www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1287052,00.html
Duck said,
September 4, 2007 at 7:56 pm
In 2000, my secondary school only offered Dual Award Science. We were told at the time that this was not sufficient for taking science A levels – and we were not allowed to do 3 separate sciences. Grrrr. Fortunately I explained this to 6th form, got A*A*, & went on to 3A’s in Science A levels. However, people who might have been able to increase their scientific literacy by doing a Science A-level alongside humanities wouldn’t have been allowed to do so because the GCSE teaching was so dumbed-down. I spent most GCSE Science lessons locked into the chemicals store (mmmmm, fumes & formaldehyde dissected rats), reading 30-year-old copies of Nature by the light of microscope torches, ‘cos that was the only way to avoid getting beaten up by the other kids who were causing a riot. Seriously, I am not exaggerating.
My old secondary school, Bassingbourn Village College, now has some sort of specialist status as a technology college. Hah. Money-grabbing scum.
I took GCSE Maths in 1999 (early), & my Dad who is an Electrical Engineer was actually quite impressed by some of the content, particularly the stats. Apparently I was doing stats as a 13-year-old that he’d not touched ’till uni. It missed quite a lot of things he had covered at O level, but did give a useful grounding in understanding things like probability which are important to understand a lot of news stories & generally navigate life. GCSEs are the last time in the UK that you can *make* anyone learn stuff, so maybe it’s as well to gear them to ‘public understanding of science’, and assume that future scientists, who will make up a very small percentage of those sitting GCSEs, can learn what they need at A level and beyond.
The other bit of GCSE Maths I found particularly good was the coursework – I had to undertake an independent investigation into a mathematical problem – my parents were impressed & hadn’t done anything like that at O level.
richas said,
September 5, 2007 at 11:06 am
There are several points in Jenni Russell’s article that are worth focusing on:
1. The inability of the current A-Level system to discriminate amongst the top 10% of students. This is demonstrably true.
Except of course that only 3% of the cohort get 3 As and in future the universities will have access to the full marks and so would be able to choose the top A level scores. Having said that it is by no means clear that the raw A level scores are the best way to choose who gets the place – motivation, ability, social background and quality of the school the grades were achieved at could all be more relevant.
A levels are not only about allocating a few thousand Oxbridge places a year, nor should the whole system be geared towards this niche.
Squander Two said,
September 5, 2007 at 2:02 pm
I was in the second year ever to take GCSEs, which means that we used O-Level past papers for practise. The drop in difficulty was obvious to me and every one of my peers about ten minutes after walking into the exam room.
Sure, that’s anecdotal, but hey.
NickConnolly said,
September 5, 2007 at 9:16 pm
“Except of course that only 3% of the cohort get 3 As”
Good point. The exams in the IB Diploma aren’t neccesarily harder than A-Levels (Higher Maths is probably overall easier by itself). The reputation the IB has for rigour and for good preperation for Uni is the overall demands it makes on students.
meo100 said,
September 13, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Can i just clear up the Scottish education system thing, as I think there’s confusion on all sides. jcm07, its not true to say that Scottish kids spend an extra year at primary then do 6 years at secondary. Its actually quite complicated to compare the systems for a number of reasons to do with different timings and nomenclature apart from anything. Anyway here goes.
The cut off age for going to primary in England/Wales is to be 5 years old by September. In Scotland, you have to be 5 years old before the following March the 1st, so the ages of children in what is called ‘primary 1’ in Scotland is from 4.5 to 5.5 at the start of the school year (in August). In England, the children will range in age from just turned 5 to just about to turn 6. However, even this comparison is not easy because in England some (or maybe all, I’m not sure) schools have a reception year, followed by 6 years (called years 1 to 6). This makes a total of 7 years at primary school. In Scotland, there is no reception year, they just call it ‘primary 1’ to ‘primary 7’. I think this is where some confusion lies, because English people hear the term ‘primary 7’ and assume that Scottish children have spent an extra year at primary. Scottish children will be aged between 11.5 and 12.5 when they go to secodnary. I think this is on average 6 months older than English children going to secondary, not 12 months older.
Another source of confusion is the number of years spent at secondary. In the Scottish system, there is no equivalent of what is currently called ‘year 9’ in England (that’s 3rd year in old money). Scottish kids will sit their Standard Grades (GCSE equivalent) at the end of 4 years at secondary (called ‘4th year’), whereas English kids sit GCSEs after 5 years (year 11, or 5th year in old money). Now, having skipped this extraneous year the Scottish kids having done their Standard Grades are, on average, 6 months younger than English kids having done GCSE.
After GCSEs and Standard Grades its time for AS levels (in ‘year 12’ in England) and Highers (in ‘5th year’ in Scotland). Contrary to what’s been said before, the brightest kids in Scotland will get their 5 highers and go off to uni without bothering with 6th year. Most kids in 6th year are either upgrading Highers they didn’t do so well on, or doing more Highers. Its actually quite difficult to muster up enough pupils to even offer 6th year studies (SYS) in most subjects. Teachers are usually really pleased if they have some pupils interested in doing SYS, and they certainly don’t run SYS classes in all subjects every year in most schools. The reason for the low interest in it is because SYS qualifications are no great advantage to getting into uni. Scottish universities want to see your Higher results, SYS isn’t that relevant unless you want to skip first year, which is actually very rarely done. In fact, some teachers advise pupils against doing SYS as its designed to be taught in a lecture and project way (40% of it is project based), a bit more like university teaching than school teaching. Pupils have to be very self motivated, especially as they probably already have the Highers they need to get into uni. If you have great Highers and you bomb out on SYS because you lacked the discipline to push yourself, it looks really bad on your application to uni the next year. Some kids just want to do 6th year because otherwise they feel too young going to uni – at the end of 5th year, Scottish kids are aged between 16.5 and 17.5. The youngest won’t turn 17 till the following February, half way into their first year at uni.
As for the first year of uni being A-level catch up, that’s quite an oversimplification. A2-level teachers have a varied crop of pupils, and have to teach to the middle to make sure the C and D grade students don’t get left behind. Compare this with a first year cohort in a Scottish university – a self selected, much smaller group who all have As or Bs at Higher, and are, by definition, extremely motivated to do that one subject. University teachers expect far more out of their students than school teachers, and generally get it too. The lab equipment is far superior too, and expectations of lab reports bear very little relation to what’s expected at school. You’re also expected to behave like an adult and be responsible for your own learning right from the off, far more so than if you were still at school.
I think each of these systems has its relative merits – I think year 9 is a waste of time for most pupils, but going to uni when you’re only 16 is a bit too young.
There are a couple of regards in which I think science teaching can be better in Scotland though. 1. Science is taught as a practical subject so there is a statutory class size limit of 20 pupils per class. This applies from 1st year at secondary onwards.
2. Teachers must be qualified to university level to teach a science subject beyond 2nd year at secondary, so e.g. physics teachers must have a degree in physics to teach from Standard Grade upwards. (Or some related degree such as engineering which had enough physics in it to satisfy the stringent demands of the Scottish General Teaching Council)
3. Teachers in Scotland have a quite generous statutorily protected minimum number of non-contact periods every week. These are invaluable for preparing for practical lessons. In England, although teachers’ timetables included non-contact periods, they are not protected and you can be given cover lessons if other teachers are off and they can’t get in enough supply teachers. In my experience of teaching in England, this happens a lot, and you can be taken off to cover just when you had earmarked a free period for setting up practicals. In the end, you just end up demonstrating the experiment, and bang goes another chance for the kids to do something hands on.
Having said all that, the decline in kids doing A level science subjects is mirrored in Scotland with a decline in kids opting for Higher sciences, so maybe it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference.
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