Friday, May 3, 2013

The people know...

No, not about Ukip, that's been pretty much done to death everywhere.
Education and exam results. The ever upwards trend of results (till last year) was bound to have an effect. If only from employers who didn't trust the paper they were written on and tended like many higher education establishments to make candidates sit a seperate exam or offer remedial tuition to actually enable their candidates to do what it said on the tin.
BBC.
Many teachers, heads and parents lack confidence in GCSE grades, research into perceptions of secondary school exams in England suggests.
A detailed survey of 4,686 people for exams regulator Ofqual suggests fewer than two-thirds felt that at least 75% of GCSE students were graded correctly.
Overall faith in GCSE exams appears to have been significantly affected by last year's English GCSE grading row.
Ofqual said it wanted to see confidence in GCSEs return.
The only way you'll see confidence in GCSE's return is if you make them of value, rather than giving the impression that like toilet rolls they are serrated at both ends and serve a similar purpose. Exams should be hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff, there should be no grading all the way back to Z from the ridiculous A*
A, B, and C are passes, everything else is an F, as in F for fail. You can resit the exam, but you can't claim a pass unless you actually do pass. If schools want to do easier exams for the less academically talented, then so be it, but the various exam boards really need to be promoting themselves as the only pass worth having rather than the one even a dunce can pass providing he brought a pencil to the exam.
For too many years the only people fooled by ever increasing pass rates were politicians and the moronic left teaching unions. Everyone else knew or suspected that kids were being betrayed by a system that wasn't fit for purpose. Why else were employers complaining that kids with good exam results were coming to them for jobs, barely literate? Why else were universities having to offer students remedial top up courses to enable the students to actually do a degree course. The kids weren't any thicker than you or I, but had been let down by a system that seemingly was designed to make them feel good, rather than actually be any good.
So, I'm afraid Ofqual is barking up the wrong tree when it says it wants to see confidence in GCSE's returned, politicians and the teaching unions have already stabbed the poor thing in the back far to many times for it ever to recover.

1 annotations:

Leg-iron said...

If schools want to do easier exams for the less academically talented, then so be it

We used to do that. We had O levels and for those who were obviously not going to pass them, CSE's (certificate of secondary education).

They overlapped to the point that a Grade 1 CSE was taken as equivalent to an O level pass grade, and it meant that kids left school with a qualification that employers could differentiate between.

Then came Equality and the only way to achieve it was to make smart kids dumber.