Is It Me?

[Zeespark]

Just been speaking to My sister who is doing her GCSE's. Due to grade boundaries, she has apparently got a Grade B with a score of 19/40. Is it Me or are our education priorities wrong? I am completely miffed by this. :red card X(

Andy Guinness

 

[misssweden]

What subjects is she taking? The British education system confuses me. Why is there an A* grade? Surely A should be the highest. Or is it just me having foreign ideas?

 

[ProDave]

I'm not entirely sure of your point,

but you get LESS than half the questions right and you get a B?

I would have thought that would be a C (40-60% ?), and a B would mean 60-80% with an A being over 80%

 

[Technician]

Andy;  I have picked this up from a website and please find it below.  However you

choose to interpret this, the grade boundaries are never the same from one year

to the next.

Grade boundaries for each component or unit are set by members of the CCEA examining teams for each subject.  A wide range of information is considered, including reports from the examiners who marked the scripts on how candidates answered questions; and how the standard compared with previous years examinations. For each grade boundary, scripts from previous years representing the quality of work associated with various grades are also considered to ensure the standards are the same year on year. The Examining team are then in a position to identify a grade boundary.

 

[Zeespark]

I am just suprised that a Grade B can be achieved with less than half of the total marks for an exam, like you Dave, I thought it would be 70% plus.

Andy Guinness

 

[pewter]

What surprises me more is electrical exams.

the old 2391 or new 2395 which i thought only requires a low percentage to pass ( 50%ish)  . i am pretty sure i didnt get more then  60-70% when i passed mine.

If we can pass exams by only getting 50-70%,  does it mean the work most electricians do is only 50-70% correct..........  

the state of some work out there only 50% done correctly wouldnt surprise me.

I hope doctors & surgeons have a higher success rate    ..........

 

[OnOff]

On the 2382 you either Pass or Fail as I understand it and you need 60% (to pass). When I did mine, I finished first (58 minutes IIRC) and the invigilator came over and said "Well done, pretty much a clean sweep!". I got a print out, bar chart type thing and I think it works out to 98.3%. YET............that only warrants a pass?

If there was  "big headed / smug tw@t" icon I'd have used it!  :lol:

And yes, I know, proves nowt other than I can read a book!

One glimmer of hope in the education system, my daughters school has just REINTRODUCED competitive sports on Sports Day after years of "there are no losers only winners" type games! But of course to be totally pc you don't have to take part if you don't want to!

 

[NozSpark]

The problem is that a score on the test doesn't reflect on how hard the test actually is,,, or how clever the person taking it is either (compared to their peers)

I have been of the opinion that the A's, B's, etc are taken as say the top 15% get an A, the next 20% get a B, the next 30% get a C, etc... (%ages not accurate)

I also dont get this GCSE thing, when it came in, that you u can't have the two tier exam system as in the old O levels and CSE's,,,, personally I didn't see anything wrong with that system for myself (I was one of the last year to take them) or for my daughter now who will have to take these stupid GCSE's in another 3 years.... and no doubt she'll get 20 or 30 of them that kids seem to get nowadays...IIRC I think we were only able to take 8 as we didn't have enough time to fit any more in!

 

[ProDave]

It's all to do with Human Rights you know.

you are not allowed to "fail" and exam now, that would be a breach of your Human Rights.

So ALL grades now are a "pass" 

What happened to grade U (Unclassified) i.e not good enough to get ANY grade, yes you have FAILED.

A system that does not "allow" people to fail, is meaningless.

The start of the downhill spiral was going away from written exams to multiple guess choice exams.

 

[Apache]

Zee - it is just you

 

[Evans Electric]

Andy;  I have picked this up from a website and please find it below.  However you

choose to interpret this, the grade boundaries are never the same from one year

to the next.

Grade boundaries for each component or unit are set by members of the CCEA examining teams for each subject.  A wide range of information is considered, including reports from the examiners who marked the scripts on how candidates answered questions; and how the standard compared with previous years examinations. For each grade boundary, scripts from previous years representing the quality of work associated with various grades are also considered to ensure the standards are the same year on year. The Examining team are then in a position to identify a grade boundary.

:C

I gave up on the system when I learned that girls were automatically marked down in favour of boys .

And that exams appear to be "dumbed down" .

Somewhere I have a copy of " O levels  from the 1960,s"  and although I did actually pass some ,  this book now looks scarey!

 

[Technician]

When I picked up this quote yesterday my mind was confronted by a

spectral vision of committees of men and women manipulating grade

boundaries in order to tell anxious parents and fraught children what

they wanted them to read or hear, even if this had NOTHING at all to

do with the truth.

There was, when I was younger, a benchmark was writ if not carven into

stone.  I sometimes wonder if the manipulation of these boundaries is

a method of making the education system look like it is providing the

raw material for industry, commerce and the universities when in fact

the converse might be true.

The decline in concentration span from 45 to 10 minutes and less in

children is an alarming indication of the challenges faced by school

teachers and others.

Increasingly, recruiters are discovering that university graduates are

demonstrating diminishing capacities to communicate correctly in a

variety of methods and this is at a time when more than 50% of the

companies trading in this country have a company strength of less

than 100.  An employee, set on either after leaving school or Uni will

be expected to face customers who judge those organisations by

what they see and hear and market share (horror of horrors) may

be adversely affected.

This might look like a rant but I hope it is a constructive contribution

to the thread.

 

[husky2013]

when i sat my GCSE's a few years ago ( 10 years ago to be precise)  they where remarkably different to what they are now!

i sat 19 GCSE's in total, whereas now they are now allowed to sit anymore then 12 in total.

when i sat mine the grading used to be

A,B, C, D, E, F,   and Ungraded.

they where alot harder   take for instance my French & German GCSE exams used to consist of Verbal where i had to  have a full conversation on French/German with my examiner with an invigilator in the room and to even warrant anything above a D i had to complete at least 65% of the checklisted words/sentances.

the written exams used to be full written exams, not this multiple choice option like it is now.

but yet when my sister sat hers just 5 years ago.... completely different all over again, everything multiple choice, alot of it dumbed down and  even by not completing an exam she somehow still passed with a C which if that had happend when i sat mine then it would have been classed as ungraded!

the exam boards have had to dumb them down basically to conform with  things like Ofstead Reports etc  as it was recognised a few years ago that exam results where declining and they needed a way to improve these scores, hence why most schools have banners after the release of results saying Best GSCE Results ever etc!  

 

[Apache]

I did my GCSEs in 1999 so 14 years ago. Most people did 11, I was a smart arse and did 13.

The tiered papers existed then. I couldn't have got less than a C grade on my maths or science papers. Things like English everyone did the same. The argument (as was given to me at the time) was that to test all abilities on a maths paper it would have to be twice as long to test all abilities.

I did think it was a reasonably sensible way of doing things, you didn't need to get many right to get a C grade!

The crazy part is grade boundaries are adjusted against a curve, so more people only pass if they change the boundaries in the students favour.

 

[kerching]

Well I took my GCEs in 1972.......and do you know what?.....I can't remember what I had for my lunch today, so as to the content of the exams I have not got a clue. I passed 7 of them and I remember them being F hard

Just being old

 

[steptoe]

I didnt do me O levels, :Blushing

I left school at Easter ['cause I could] and started work.

 

[misssweden]

I didnt do me O levels, :Blushing

I left school at Easter ['cause I could] and started work.

I didn't do any levels! When I went to high school we got grades at the end of every term for the last four terms. Then the last set of grades wad converted to points and you used them to apply for the college course you wanted. Easy!

Before I moved to Britain I honestly thought (and most of the Swedish populations still thinks) that a funny letter combination followed by the word "exam" was something that J.K. Rowling made up when she wrote the Harry Potter books. :coat

 

[steptoe]

I didn't do any levels! When I went to high school we got grades at the end of every term for the last four terms. Then the last set of grades wad converted to points and you used them to apply for the college course you wanted. Easy!

Before I moved to Britain I honestly thought (and most of the Swedish populations still thinks) that a funny letter combination followed by the word "exam" was something that J.K. Rowling made up when she wrote the Harry Potter books. :coat

well, someone with an imagination thought it up  :slap

 

[Apache]

So can you convert your grades from Sweeden to OWLs and NEWTs?

 

[SPECIAL LOCATION]

Back in the old days of Dekington & co..

when GCE's & CSE's were separate exams..

the GCE's were graded  A,B,C,E etc...

and the CSE's were graded 1,2,3,4 etc...

if me old grey matters serves me right!