(no subject)

[caz963]

The A level results came out today amidst the usual accusations that they've been dumbed down and that the qualifications aren't worth the paper they're written on.

Sadly I think this isn't all that far off the mark - although I do feel sorry for all those kids who've worked hard for their exams only to hear all day long that the exams are much easier than they used to be.

Again - I think that's true, but it's not the students' fault, and they should be allowed to feel proud of their achievements.

The trouble is, of course, that universities and employers are now finding it difficult to distinguish between those who are well-educated and those who are well-schooled in the art of passing tests. As one commenter to one of the Times articles says, we need to distinguish between those pupils who work hard and A levels being hard - the kids do work hard, but they're just not expected to reach the same standards.

I don't want to sound like a moany old bag, but A levels today are easier than they were twenty years ago. For example - when I took mine in 1982, A grades were pretty rare. And to get three or more As, you had to be a very exceptional student. And the mark scheme was roughly akin to that used for degrees - to get an A or a first, you'd need about 70% overall, for a B or a 2,i, 60%, for a C or 2,ii about 50% etc.

A couple of years ago, before I went back to work, I decided to do A level English Literature - I love reading "the classics" and had wanted to do English at school, but wasn't able to because of a timetable clash with A level Maths. For me, now, the current "modular" system employed is ideal, because it meant I was able to study as and when I wanted and take the units in more or less whatever order suited me. I took a couple of papers at a time, and have done four of the six required - I don't know if I'll ever get around to completing it! But on the last two papers I took - neither of them incidentally texts with which I was familiar before I studied them (one was a restoration comedy, the other poetry by Philip Larkin) I achieved a mark of well over 90%. I was gobsmacked - so much so that I rang the exam board to check they hadn't made a mistake. Okay, so I was about twenty years older than the majority of the candidates and I can actually write and express myself properly, but "in my day", a mark like that was unheard of.

So on the one hand, we have headlines touting the soaring grades and trumpeting the fact that, for the first time in years, there are more kids taking Maths and Science - and on the other, we have reports telling us that A levels are to get tougher after another year of top results.

Um... if the A levels we have now are 'fit for purpose', as many in the first article claim - why do they need to be made harder?

To me, this looks like just another band-aid in yet another ridiculous attempt to fix something which requires major surgery. Until we get rid of all the unecessary testing we now have in the education system and start teaching kids things they need to know, and - more importantly - how to think for themselves, instead of just teaching them how to pass tests, this situation isn't going to improve. We'll continue to hear about falling standards, and the kids who have worked hard, nonetheless will continue to feel that they're being moaned at unfairly.

Round 2 next week when the GCSE results come out.

Comments

[hooloovoo_42]

On PM they had an item about how often pupils can retake their modules these days. One teacher said that the U6th pupils were so much more mature by the time they got to the second Christmas that they would get up to 20% higher marks if they retook their AS exams. This can bring their grades up from a D to B.

They interviewed a bunch of kids who all said they had retaken various modules 2 or 3 times and upped their grades from E to C or better.

We had one go. At the end of 2 years. Yes, you could go back and do retakes for a year, but it was still a single series of exams at the end, not individual modules. This is the bit that makes me think that although the current students may have put more sustained effort in over a longer period than the mad cramming a lot of us did, they wouldn't stand a chance in one off exams.

So, you can get any number of As at A level, but when you go on to university, or take professional accounting or medical or legal exams, do you have any idea how much effort it takes to pass on the first go? Accounting firms went through a phase of chucking juniors out if they failed exams at the first attempt. I wonder if they still do.

Another comment on PM was that A levels are just so completely different now than they were 10 years ago that it's really not possible to compare them. AFAIC, "It's like when they did that thing with the SAT scores and I got dumber twenty years after I went to college."

[caz963.livejournal.com]

That's a good point, about the one off exams. Even though most Uni courses are modular, they still have "one off" written papers as well as whatever is submitted by way of coursework.

I can only comment on music A level - having done it myself and taught it recently, and there really is no comparison in terms of difficulty. I was reading this (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article4481222.ece) earlier (could you hear me grinding my teeth?) and oddly, the O level exam from 1978 that's mentioned must have been similar to the one I did, because I did AEB music in 1980 (and I probably did it as a practice paper!) And it reminded me of just how much there was in the syllabus back then compared to now. The A level I was teaching really was a similar standard to the O level I took.

It's a mess. Employers are saying so, Universities are saying so. If the govt doesn't start taking some notice of them, God knows where we'll be in another twenty years.

[hooloovoo_42]

Yeah, this is the thing I heard them talking about last week.

This comment just about sums it up:
Music education in this country is pathetic.
Syllabus is designed for pupils who are not doing well in sciences and consequently signed up for Music to make up the numbers of their GCSE's.

[caz963.livejournal.com]

Sadly, yes. I remember when I was training, there was a boy in Year 9 I heard had "opted" to do music in Year 10 - we all knew damn well he was only doing it because nobody else wanted him.

[allie83.livejournal.com]

Hey. How the hell did you get told your percentage? Because I honestly thought you just got given a grade letter in your results?

[caz963.livejournal.com]

You know, I can't actually remember without going to look at the bit of paper, but I do remember it being pretty confusing and there being an actual mark given in numbers as well as a grade.

Also, these things are marked exponentially, so as well as being given a mark out of a possible whatever, I was also given a mark on the "graph" - see, I told you it was confusing! - which was where I got the percentage from.

[(Anonymous)]

I am so confused.

The British educational/grading system just flummoxes me.

But on the last two papers I took - neither of them incidentally texts with which I was familiar (one was a restoration comedy, the other poetry by Philip Larkin) I achieved a mark of well over 90%. I was gobsmacked - so much so that I rang the exam board to check they hadn't made a mistake. Okay, so I was about twenty years older than the majority of the candidates and I can actually write and express myself properly, but "in my day", a mark like that was unheard of.

These are essentially term papers? Essays on the books you read? (Not 'book reports', obviously, but true essays?)

I majored in English Lit, and I never had a problem earning grades in the 90's. Other students did, sure, but then....I know how to spell. :-P But seriously---it's not that it was 'easy', but it certainly wasn't so difficult as to be 'unheard of'. I'm trying to figure out if your system is (or was) more difficult than what I went through, or not.

[flippet.livejournal.com]

Whups. That was me.

[caz963.livejournal.com]

I don't know what term papers are, but what I took were the actual examination papers - three questions on each of the texts, three hours per paper. And yes, true essays, for example, discussion the treatment of marriage and relationships in restoration comedy, that sort of thing.
Oh, and I should clarify, I didn't mean that I wasn't familiar with those texts - I should have said (and will edit) that I hadn't been familiar with them before I read and studied them for the exam.

It wasn't that I didn't expect to get a good grade - I know I write well and I have a good understanding of the subject; it's just that when I did my A levels back when I was 18, (in 1982) getting a mark that high was practically unheard of. Seriously, getting an A was a real achievement back then (I got one in music, but not in the other subjects I took!)

I don't know how our two systems would compare, but it definitely seems as though the exams here are easier now than they were twenty, thirty years ago. I can only go on my own experience - having taken and taught Music A level, and listening to the experiences of friends and colleagues.

[flippet.livejournal.com]

It sounds about the same--basically, that final paper is the final test in the class, right? Majority of your class grade, yadda yadda?

I can't imagine something like that being so difficult that getting over 90% would be nearly impossible. Not all my classes had that, but a few did, and as long as I studied, I probably regularly got within 92-98%. Less if I didn't study/didn't thoroughly understand the text.

However, this was my major, and what I'm good at. Majors did well, non-majors, not quite so well, obviously. If I'd had to do something like that outside my major, in the sciences, say, then I may have only scored in the high 80's.

I'm a good student/test-taker, however. I've never understood the personality that freezes up at exams, even when they know the material. (And like you mentioned, being a good tester doesn't mean you're well-educated...I can guarantee that most of the information in my head got cache-dumped shortly after the exam!)

[zommbie1.livejournal.com]

In the UK grades on papers and exams at uni over 75% were pretty exceptional BUT since an A was 70% that wasn't really a problem. I think it is just a difference in the system that's all.

[flippet.livejournal.com]

BUT since an A was 70%

Ah, that helps a bit!

I wonder what they'd consider 100%, you know? To my way of thinking, asking the impossible ought to be 120%, or 150%, not 100%. Like, let's say swimming records---Michael Phelps breaks the world record for something or other at 2.00 minutes....but that's only 80%. Now, if someone were to go 1.15, THAT would be 100%!

Coming from the (apparently wimpy!) US system, that's sort of what it sounds like! ;-)

(Apples and oranges, I know....it's like comparing Farenheit to Celcius...it doesn't matter what you call it, hot is still hot.)

[caz963.livejournal.com]

When I took my A levels back in 1982, we didn't get given percentages anyway - that's a fairly recent thing. We just knew the basic mark ranges that I outlined above. 70% was an A because it was hard to get70%. Most pupils took 3 or 4 A levels - I started by taking 4 subjects, but it proved too much for me and I had to drop one. A friend of mine achieved 3 As at A level, and he was an exceptional student. He won a scholarship to Oxford, then to McGill in Canada and was a "high-flyer" at the Foreign Office when he left university. To get 4 As, you'd pretty much have to have been a genius.
Now, because of the modular nature of the exams, it's possible for kids to take 5 A levels and get something like 2 As and 3 Bs. I'm not saying the kids haven't worked hard - they probably have; the problem is that the bar has been set lower and employers and universities know it.

[caz963.livejournal.com]

Well, not quite, I think. We have national exams here, where all kids who take, for example, an A level in English will take the same exam. (More or less - there are three exam boards in England, and schools will choose to follow the syllabus from one of them, so a proportion of kids will take 1, some will take 2 and some will take 3, depending on the preference of the school they attend.)

So they're not class tests which are set by individual schools - they're set and marked by central examinations boards, and then the results for each school are published so that people can see which schools are performing better academically. Which is where a lot of the problems with our education system stem from. Schools need pupils in order to get funding to survive. If you can show you have a good academic record, you're more likely to a) attract pupils and b) attract the right sort of pupils (i.e, those from better backgrounds who are likely to take their education seriously). As a result, teachers are teaching kids how to pass tests, to keep the school's "numbers" up - hence the comment I pointed out about it being difficult to distinguish between those pupils who are "well educated" and those who are "well drilled in passing tests." This in turn is leading to "grade inflation" - meaning that some pupils are attaining results which don't accurately reflect their ability.

Yeah. It's ridiculously complicated, I know. Like you, I'm good at exams - but also like you, I suspect I'm also fairly well educated. But definitely, twenty, thirty years ago, getting marks in the 80-90% range was incredibly rare here.

[flippet.livejournal.com]

Ah...I think I'm starting to get it....so the A level exams are something like the SAT...kind of? Except yearly, and by subject, with results assigned to both the student and the school?

Yeah, that would be more difficult to get a high score, I would bet. As it ought to be.

I'd be upset too if the tests were suddenly dumbed down so much that everyone was getting wonderful scores...let's not damage the poor babies' self-esteem! Not to mention artificially inflating the 'quality' of the school.

Grr. The educational system is a racket, any more. It's all about raking in the cash, and if someone happens to scrape up a decent education in the process, well, bonus! :-P

[foreverdreaming.livejournal.com]

As someone who did her A levels 4 years ago, I think, to my recollection, that 100% isn't actually 100%. It's all relative to whoever got the highest mark in the country.

So if the best student nation-wide got 85 out of 120, then a mark of 85 becomes the 100% benchmark... Kind of ridiculous, but there you go.

I definitely think people are taught how to pass exams these days as well, and that must play a huge part in the increase in A grades. We were given so many practice papers and tips on HOW to answer a question, that by the time we got to the real thing we were familiar with almost all of the questions. I went to a damn good school too, it's not like they were in the habit of lazy teaching or something.

University was something a of a shock at first, being left to just figure out how to write an essay completely by ourselves. How absurd is that? We all got into a top 20 university, all were smart enough to graduate with really good degrees at the end of it all, and yet we totally flipped out for the first semester. Fish out of water would be an understatement.

That really shouldn't be the case. What the heck is the state of our education system going to be by the time I have kids to out through it??

[caz963.livejournal.com]

I think, to my recollection, that 100% isn't actually 100%. It's all relative to whoever got the highest mark in the country.


Yes - that's what I was trying to explain to flippet, that the marks are exponential - but you said it better :)

Teaching at KS3 as I principally do, it's frightening to see the number of kids who have no idea how to write an essay, or put together a project or presentation - and who have no idea what "research" means. Okay, I can understand that eleven year olds might not have those skills straight away, but we don't, as far as I can see, seem to be teaching them at all.

The Universities have been saying for years that the gap between A level standards and first year undergrad is widening all the time.

What the heck is the state of our education system going to be by the time I have kids to out through it??

This is what scares the crap outta me.

[foreverdreaming.livejournal.com]

I quite often joke that I would move abroad to have kids, but sometimes I really do think that's something I would seriously consider if I were logistically able to do it.

I was fortunate to live in Buckinghamshire and go to a good grammar school (yes, I am very much pro grammar schools...), but the nightmares parents have to go through to get their kids into decent secondary schools these days is terrifying. Your eldest must be what, 3 years away from that now? Is that right?

Maybe some kind of miracle school reform will have happened by then?!