Posts Tagged exams
How to avoid another exam board scandal
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 15/12/2011
By David Green
The Telegraph’s brilliant exposure of the behaviour of some exam boards should not be dismissed with a couple of sacrificial sackings. It revealed profound flaws, not just in our school system, but also in the way our democracy is currently functioning. The attitudes behind the scandal are closely allied to the self-serving atmosphere in Parliament that led some MPs to fiddle their expenses. Deception of the people had became the norm, whether it was creative use of second homes, or manipulating exam results. The rot always starts at the top, and getting rid of the hapless examiners who got caught will make little difference unless we go much further.
GCSEs – or the poor-man’s equivalent
Posted by Claire Daley in Education on 21/08/2008
Poor quality ‘vocational’ or ‘vocationally related’ qualifications at GCSE are locking both low-income pupils and vocational education into second-class status.
-
Pseudo ‘vocational’ qualifications being used to artificially reach A*-C GCSE targets
-
Poorer pupils more likely to be pushed into vocational qualifications
Out of the thousands of pupils getting their GCSE results today, many will have been sold short with sub-standard vocational qualifications.
A new report from independent think-tank Civitas, School Improvement – or the ‘Equivalent’, shows how a blind focus on the A*-C benchmark, together with a failure to truly improve schools, has led to a scenario in which pupils are being encouraged to opt out of academic courses and into irrelevant so-called ‘vocational’ qualifications to boost national GCSE results.
A new consensus: A levels ARE less valuable
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 19/07/2007
When the Civitas report on Blair’s failure to improve education over the last decades was released, Jim Knight MP squared off against Robert Coe, whose work we have cited, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (approximately 12 minutes in from the beginning). To the whole nation, he denied that exams had got any easier during Labour’s time in government and that an A level today had exactly the same value as a decade earlier. Perhaps he had no other choice but to take this line. The dramatic rise in exam results had to be due to the prudent stewardship of New Labour’s education reforms. What a difference a couple of weeks make! Now a new government adviser acknowledges that A levels have lost value at least in his area of Physics and Maths.
A physics teacher begs for his subject back
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 13/06/2007
Echoing many of the problems our latest report The Corruption of the Curriculum has examined, Wellington Grey writes in an open letter to AQA and the Department for Education:
I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be. My subject is still called physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn’t cover anything I recognize as physics. Over the past year the UK Department for Education and the AQA board changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced it with… something else, something nebulous and ill defined. I worry about this change. I worry about my pupils, I worry about the state of science education in this country, and I worry about the future physics teachers — if there will be any.
I graduated from a prestigious university with a degree in physics and pursued a lucrative career in economics which I eventually abandoned to teach. Economics and business, though vastly easier than my subject, and more financially rewarding, bored me. I went into teaching to return to the world of science and to, in what extent I could, convey to pupils why one would love a subject so difficult.
For a time I did. For a time, I was happy.