For all those despising Maths, it's getting easier!

lord filbuster said:
They are getting slightly easier, i have an a-level equivalent maths book from 1960s or 70s and it includes stuff that wasnt even in the C4 maths exam that i did 2 years ago. Like imaginary numbers and matrices. Lol at the second joke :)
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If that is all that has changed in 40 years then it shows that A Levels have gotten easier but not by much. Matrices are a piece of **** tbh and complex numbers are also quite simple at the introductory level. They were the first two topics in my first module of Further Maths A Level from 2 years ago. All the topics in C4 are more difficult.


Now, I am no fan of dumbing down but just a thought:

More people are taking A Levels now than back in the days when it was just the top few percent therefore the average ability will of course go down. A Levels grades are supposed to be a means of differentiating between students so maybe they needed to be dumbed down slightly to take that into account? A system where the students are spread out evenly amongst the grades should be better at this than one where the vast majority get a D or below and just the top 3% get an A. (See, i'm under 30 and I can do percentages aswell :D)

Of course, 20% of people getting an A is going to be difficult for elite universities who are looking for who is in the top 3% but that is why they will interview students and give any necessary extra tests instead of just relying on A Level results. Why is it such a terrible thing that they set extra tests? No employer would rely solely on exam results when deciding who to employ. Even the supermarkets have special tests for people applying to be shelf-stackers so why is it a surprise to see Oxford University going down a similar route?
 
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escape sanity said:
Of course, 20% of people getting an A is going to be difficult for elite universities who are looking for who is in the top 3% but that is why they will interview students and give any necessary extra tests instead of just relying on A Level results. Why is it such a terrible thing that they set extra tests? No employer would rely solely on exam results when deciding who to employ. Even the supermarkets have special tests for people applying to be shelf-stackers so why is it a surprise to see Oxford University going down a similar route?
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It isn't such a terrible thing, it's just that A-levels should be a standard that lets you see who those top few % of people are, and not as the case seems to be at the moment where everyone's scoring so highly that you can't differentiate between them academically.

At the moment we have a situation where grades at A-level have never been higher, yet universities are complaining that they're having to drop several of the more complex topics into the second year since the students can't keep up. It doesn't add up. If we carry on the way we're going you'll soon need 6As at A-level and 2 degrees to be qualified to stack shelves at the supermarket :)
 
I am strongly of the opinion that A Levels have been dumbed down massively. Other than the fact that I found the exams insulting I have three main reasons for thinking this:

1. When I did Physics A Level in 2002-2004 Edexcel said explicitly in the syllabus that no knowledge of any mathematics was required on this course. This is a complete joke as you can't study physics without integration! I say calculus should be done in maths gcse, that would open up a hell of a lot of options in the 6th form.

2. Again with physics, our teacher gave us old o-level questions when we were preparing for our A2 exams. The material covered was exactly the same, but instead of being guided through the question as you are at A Level you had to think about what to do yourself. I found A Levels gave me no scope to use my understanding of the subject, just apply the parrot fashion solutions I had learnt.

3. It should not be possible to score 600/600 in further maths A Level, but it is! And when you manage to do this you still get the same grade as someone who got 480/600.

The difference between old papers and new papers is not just material, which will obviously change over time, but is more significantly down to the style of questioning used. In a levels now you are guided through a question to your answer. Those of you who say above that the teaching is to blame for students being unable to answer old questions are obviously right as you are stating the obvious really. But it is because of the changes in style of exam questions, and the dumbing down of syllabuses, that have lead to teaching suffering.

IMO you cannot deny that A Level exams (certainly maths & physics) have not been dumbed down.
 
Just found this as well:

http://www.cre.org.uk/docs/maths1.pdf

which is worth reading if you intend to argue that a levels haven't been dumbed down.

The Chief Executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) agreed that there
had been a “backsliding” of standards during the 1990s and that they would now be
“reasserting earlier standards”.
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Since 1991, D. A. Lawson
2
has performed a diagnostic test on first year students on degree
courses with significant mathematical content. He found that a student with a grade B in ‘A’
level mathematics in 1999 scored similarly to a student with grade N (a fail grade) in 1991.
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On comparing the current ‘A’ level mathematics with the earlier, pre-modular examination,
one observes several other worrying trends in the new examination. Its modular nature
severely limits the variety and difficulty of questions, which are shorter and more predictable,
less algebraically demanding and are often no more than a series of easy drill-type exercises.
The examination routinely guides students through the questions with the liberal use of
diagrams and splitting the questions into several ordered steps.
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I found this while looking for confirmation that Calculus used to be studied at O-level.
 
AndyS_UK said:
Since 1991, D. A. Lawson
2
has performed a diagnostic test on first year students on degree
courses with significant mathematical content. He found that a student with a grade B in ‘A’
level mathematics in 1999 scored similarly to a student with grade N (a fail grade) in 1991.
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How the hell did they let a student with an ungraded maths A-Level get into a degree course?! :p
 
AndyS_UK said:
I am strongly of the opinion that A Levels have been dumbed down massively. Other than the fact that I found the exams insulting I have three main reasons for thinking this:

1. When I did Physics A Level in 2002-2004 Edexcel said explicitly in the syllabus that no knowledge of any mathematics was required on this course. This is a complete joke as you can't study physics without integration! I say calculus should be done in maths gcse, that would open up a hell of a lot of options in the 6th form.

2. Again with physics, our teacher gave us old o-level questions when we were preparing for our A2 exams. The material covered was exactly the same, but instead of being guided through the question as you are at A Level you had to think about what to do yourself. I found A Levels gave me no scope to use my understanding of the subject, just apply the parrot fashion solutions I had learnt.

3. It should not be possible to score 600/600 in further maths A Level, but it is! And when you manage to do this you still get the same grade as someone who got 480/600.

The difference between old papers and new papers is not just material, which will obviously change over time, but is more significantly down to the style of questioning used. In a levels now you are guided through a question to your answer. Those of you who say above that the teaching is to blame for students being unable to answer old questions are obviously right as you are stating the obvious really. But it is because of the changes in style of exam questions, and the dumbing down of syllabuses, that have lead to teaching suffering.

IMO you cannot deny that A Level exams (certainly maths & physics) have not been dumbed down.
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Agreed, I was also insulted at the simplicity of school exams. Led to extreme boredom and hatred of school.
Some of the papers were just a joke. Why do they give you 2 hours to do something which took 20 minutes. FOr the prelims I got mostly full marks except for the odd mark dropped for loosing sig. figure or incorrect case for a unit etc.


You then go to university and realise that everyone has straight As and had marks of 98% in prelims, and when first year exams come you fit right in the middle of the year.

A complete joke.
 
markyp23 said:
These are totally rubbish though. The BBC will have got the stupidest children they could imagine to do it and compared the results to the cleverst children from back in the day.
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Why would they? And its not rubbish - in our Physics A-level class (5/6 years ago) we sat an O-level paper from ~ two decades previous, and it was really hard. Half of it was the stuff we were doing then, at A-level - the other half was stuff you hadn't even heard of.

And 20 years ago these people were expected to do it at O-level.
 
yak.h'cir said:
:) I'd say an entrance test to study nursing at university was slightly higher then GCSE level but it's good to know they get round to percentages eventually!
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Yes, but there weren't actually any formal entry requirements other than the standard of "basic" numeracy and literacy.
 
I also stumbled accross this on the BBC today: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7431840.stm

Sorry to return so soon with more, but this is something I feel strongly about.

But there was a steep decline in standards from 1990 onwards, once GCSEs were introduced, it says.

The content became broader and shallower, with a more restricted and less demanding syllabus, it claims.

And the difficulty and demand of questions weakened along with their style, it claims, with candidates being required to follow a series of steps rather than work their own way through.
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divide by 10, then divide original number by 100. add the 100 4 times too the 10 number and your done.

that was easy. any one that has learnt percentages should know that
 
My GCSE maths exams this year have been very easy this year - easier than past papers I've done from only a few years back.

As for the different syllabus thing, my Dad (who's nearly 40 years older than me) still knows how to do everything I/my sister (who was doing A level maths) ever struggled with.
 
AndyS_UK said:
I am strongly of the opinion that A Levels have been dumbed down massively.
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Dumbed down, yes, but I'm not sure "massively" is really fair.

1. When I did Physics A Level in 2002-2004 Edexcel said explicitly in the syllabus that no knowledge of any mathematics was required on this course. This is a complete joke as you can't study physics without integration! I say calculus should be done in maths gcse, that would open up a hell of a lot of options in the 6th form.
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I'm pretty sure integration wasn't covered when I did O-level maths back in 83 (although differentiation was).

2. Again with physics, our teacher gave us old o-level questions when we were preparing for our A2 exams. The material covered was exactly the same,
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I think this is misleading - he might have been able to find some questions where that was the case, but looking at the current syllabus, I can tell you there's a huge amount of stuff that I didn't do at O-level. (And conversely, when I did Physics A-level, about a quarter of it wasn't really any different from what I did at O-level).

3. It should not be possible to score 600/600 in further maths A Level, but it is! And when you manage to do this you still get the same grade as someone who got 480/600.
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But it was also perfectly possible (in fact, because of the way the exam was set up, it was actually easier) to get a perfect mark in FM A-level 20 years ago. I don't see the current exams as being that different from the ones I sat back then. Although I agree the UMS factor for FM means you can get an A on quite a low raw score. They've tried to avoid making FM "harder" to get an A in than the other exams, which I think is a mistake personally. FM is supposed to be hard.
 
AndyS_UK said:
3. It should not be possible to score 600/600 in further maths A Level, but it is! And when you manage to do this you still get the same grade as someone who got 480/600.
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I agree that maths exams are getting easier, but why should it not be possible to score 600/600?
Surely if you get all the answers right you will get 600/600?

In the real world it's not likely to happen anyway as most people would realise they were doing well after the first 4 modules and they could get the A with very little effort. Therefore they would not work as hard for the last two modules, so making it less likely to get the full 600 :p
 
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