It really is that bad

[moggie]

Every summer, the media speculates about whether school exam standards are dropping, since the GCSE and A-level results seem to get ever better. There's an article entitled "It really is that bad" by an anonymous GCSE marker in today's Guardian, which paints a dire picture, if accurate. S/he's not impressed by the students' abilities:

In relation to the GCSE candidates' general standard of writing, as a part-time lecturer at a university, I had already become aware that many undergraduate students had abysmal reading and writing skills. However, even that did not prepare me for the written skills of your average GCSE candidate. The handwriting, most of the time, resembled that of a five-year-old toddler or a drunk (grotesquely simple or an illegible scrawl). A lack of basic punctuation, such as full stops, commas, capital letters etc, was commonplace. There were countless inarticulate, immature sentences, which did not make any sense to the reader.

Read the article for more detail of the marking scheme (which seems to erode the difference between good and bad answers) and the slapdash attitude of some of the markers.

[LeftishBrit]

1. Well, perhaps...

this has been happening in some places for a long time.

'In practice, this meant that a student could write a whole A4 page of inarticulate nonsense or incorrect statements and yet, if there was a couple of sentences in that response which were correct, the student would be awarded the full mark for that particular question.'


This MUST be how Tony Blair was educated!!! It would explain so much about him!

[Kicked in the Taco]

6. lol...or perhaps they've begun modelling GCSE exams...

on the Yale entrance exam (familes of rich alumni edition), c.1964....

[Guy_Montag]

11. This is a very common complaint at my university

people just braindump. Everything spills out of their head onto the page & they expect to get positive marks for everything that's right even when there are contracdictory statements elsewhere in the "essay".

[Neocondriac]

2. And of course...

"I know how hard it is to put food on your family"......I find capers and grapes the hardest!

[oneold1-4u]

3. The greater loss

As we lose our abilities to read, write, cypher, we lose intelligent thought and the ability to understand and utilize any learning! When this happens to a nation then that nation no longer exists. Thousands of abilities and cultures have been lost in the thousands of years since humans found a stone for many uses.
As an example, hundreds of pyramids still stand but not the Trade Center of 9/11, so what was the loss in understanding simple structural design? When we choose NOTHING, the loss is EVERYTHING!

[whatever4]

5. And it's not just that, it's losing communication sharing ability nm

[Nihil]

4. Interesting ...

My son just got a "B" for his GCSE Biology. He's slightly disappointed
(wanted an A or A*) but I'm proud of him ... particularly as he's only
fourteen (i.e., was part of the group at his school that took the exam
*two* years early). The school is a standard mixed sex, all-ability
town school (a comprehensive with a bias towards technology) so we're
not simply exhibiting the cherry-picking that some schools higher in
the "league tables" indulge in.

Is this due to
1) Easier exams than in earlier years
2) Better teachers than in earlier years
3) Harder working teenage boys than in earlier years
4) Two or more of the above
5) Something else

He's also promised to cook dinner for me tonight so I'm off home now!

[mr blur]

7. My son got his CSE results today.

9 exams; 3 A's, a C and the rest B's. I'm proud of him because he worked hard, and he's proud of himself, but I know that there has been a "dumbing down" of exams, certainly since my teaching days 20 years ago. Less seems to be expected of kids these days and I'm sure this goes some way to explain exam successes in the all-important league tables that seems to be regarded as the way of evaluating individual schools. I dunno, when I was in the sixth form we seemed to be encouraged to discuss ways of changing the system - now they seem to be training kids to do its accounts.

[moggie]

10. There's more emphasis on exams today

There's another article in today's Guardian, which looks at how schools focus on preparing pupils for exams:

An English teacher who has been teaching for two decades, and who has been responsible for a sharp rise in exam passes since she joined her comprehensive four years ago, says the problem is that teachers have done just what the government wanted them to do: made teaching more efficient. They have devoted enormous effort to learning how to get children through exams.

Twenty years ago, teachers taught to a syllabus without knowing how it would be marked. Now the exam boards issue precise mark schemes, with points awarded for the use of this word or that point. It's the teachers' task to drill that incessantly into their pupils. By doing so they achieve the pinball effect: as long as the ball hits enough points on the way down, students will pick up the marks. But there is almost no scope, either in the exam or the classroom, for children to explore their own thoughts or responses. "At GCSE our children go into exams incredibly well-prepared," she says, "but by God are they bored."

The most interesting part of the article is the description of the "Opening Minds" project, which aims to develop skills other than answering the expected exam questions. The results sound impressive:

Yet the results have been striking. Every school has seen marked improvements in behaviour, attendance, attitudes and achievement in the Opening Minds pupils, particularly among those at the top and bottom of the range. In many cases the statistics are striking: truancy halved; exclusions down by 90%; detentions down by 60%; Opening Minds children scoring 15% higher than their peers in tests.

However, when criticising current schooling, it's easy to fall into the trap of being unreasonably nostalgic about the educational methods of the past. I went to grammar school mumble years ago (back in the days of the 11-plus and O-levels), and, looking back, I recognise that the quality of most of the teaching was pretty mediocre. In my final year, I went to extra classes aimed at pupils who were considering Oxbridge: what an admission of failure that was, that such classes were considered necessary! Those extra classes were a revelation, and highly enjoyable, because they felt like the first time we'd been encouraged to think outside the box. If only the rest of our school time had been like that!

[ikri]

13. That's the biggest problem

Even when I was doing my GCSE's over a decade ago (we had the exact same standards debate that day too I believe).

The exams themselves are very well structured and the content, if not the specific wording of the questions, is known for years before the exams are actually sat. As a result, there is little teaching about a specific subject. A good example would be History, you can teach kids about everything that happened between 1066 and today but it is a lot easier to teach them about three or four specific incidents within that time frame because that's all that will appear on the exam.

The teachers aren't to blame for this and the exams aren't getting easier per se, the teachers just know exactly what areas are necessary for them to teach to ensure their pupils get the top grades.

[fedsron2us]

8. O tempores. O mores

The annual fuss over exam results is a hardy perennial that the media likes to trot out to fill the news pages while Parliament is on holiday. Whenever the story crops up on TV I am forced to run from the room screaming before I die of boredom. The relationship between exam success rates and the quality of education in this country has always been tenuous since the purpose of the various certificates was always to act as a means of deciding who got a particular job or entry to university. Now that virtually everone passes even the role of exams as a crude measure of educational value has been eroded since grade inflation like its monetary counterpart has rendered the currency worthless.

[non sociopath skin]

9. O Fedii! ... O Lingua latina tua!

- O TEMPORA! O mores! - tibi gratias ago!
http://www.confusedkid.com/primer/archives/2004/07/o_tempora_o_mor.php

But otherwise, I agree with you. One of the many reasons I got out of teaching was that sinking feeling every August when, having bust a gut to get kids through the hoops, I watched the Parade of Suits and Clunky Signet Rings informing me that we'd once more got it wrong and that the Dishwashers and Burger Bearers on minimum wage didn't have the requisite literacy and numeracy skills.

Mehercule! O me miserum!

Cutis Non Periculosus

[fedsron2us]

17. You can see why I was a duffer at school

Despite five years studying Latin in the 1970's I can still not decline nouns properly and clearly have no grasp of the vocative. I can not even crib quotations accurately from the internet. No wonder my teachers despaired. There is no hope for me passing GCSE Latin even under todays benign marking regime.

[Kipling]

16. Greed-ay. Is-thay is it-shay eampt-dray up or-fay the illy-say eason-say.

[tjwmason]

12. The problem is that folk are speaking past each other

The two sides range up - one attacks decline standards. The other responds that they're attacking the pupils' hard work.

By referring to declining standards it is implied that the level of attainment is getting lower - the problem is that there is no level against which measurement can be made.

The purpose of exams is not to 'affirm' a pupil, but to provide an obective measure of the child's attainments. Just as monetary inflation removes the characteristic of money as being a measure of value; grade inflation removes the objective measure of attainment.

Until there is a trusted method of measurement (and whatever anybody says - G.C.S.E.s and A Levels are not that anymore), we cannot tell whether things are improving or not.

[Greeby]

14. I don't need an exam to prove

That my generation, and the ones coming after me (I'm only 22) are dumbshits, I see it while I'm out and about every day.

[Kipling]

15. Inarticulate, immature, frequently nonsensical. But enough about Prescott.