5 "good" GCSE's HARD?

[elitetrick]

Im a 2nd year uni student and i did some invigilating at my mums school this year for gcse's. and reading the papers imo theyre 100x easier than when i was doing them. granted i got 3 A* 8 A's so i didnt find them hard then but still its an absolute joke.
one of the questions on a lower physics paper was "total stopping distance = thinking distance + braking distance. If a driver has a thinking distance of 10m and a braking distance of 20m what is his stopping distance?" - 5 marks.

now im sorry but if you cant do that, which coupled with other similarly easy questions will get you a C, your family should be neutered immediately.

 

[dowie]

Your parents shouldn't be in "education", then.

My teacher got us to sit practice O-level exam papers in Physics (A-level) class, and we were amazed to see that the stuff tested in the O-level exam was what we were revising for in our A-level.

Same is true with a lot of pure maths stuff. The other complete joke is that the number of As and A* have shot up over the past decade - used to be about 10% now over 20% get them - it just makes the grade worth less and makes it harder to distinguish between the top students - there is no natural reason for year on year grade inflation - the human race doesn't evolve that quickly and even if teaching did improve in the long term you still wouldn't expect see consistent year on year increases but rather would expect some dips too. The sensible thing to do would be to fix the grade boundaries - i.e. top 10% get an A etc... the difficulty of one exam compared to the next is subjective but whether you get a slightly easier or slightly harder paper one year you'd still have to beat 90% of your peers to get an A therefore the grade becomes something meaningful.

 

[Nitefly]

Not true.

Well, yes obviously but without that then you would have to say all papers are of equal difficulty, when they obviously are not. In my eyes the grade bounderies remain the same.

The exams are getting easier (from ten years ago), but the difference is pretty minimal. Although I saw a super hardcore 12 year old's maths paper from 100 years ago recently in a newspaper... blimey!

 

[Nitefly]

Im a 2nd year uni student and i did some invigilating at my mums school this year for gcse's. and reading the papers imo theyre 100x easier than when i was doing them. granted i got 3 A* 8 A's so i didnt find them hard then but still its an absolute joke.

There isn't a huge difference the difficulty as much as you would like to think so. For anyone who has studied an A level or been to University will find the GCSEs very easy. Its all about the relative difficulty, as in, how difficult it is for 15/16 year old.

 

[Sinny]

What always annoyed me was i revised for my GCSE's and managed 6 C's and retook an exam at college and got another C but one of my best mates did no revision at all and yet managed to get quite a few B's.

some people naturally have more talent than others the rest have to put much more effort in to achieve good grades.

 

[Nitefly]

some people naturally have more talent than others the rest have to put much more effort in to achieve good grades.

Indeed, being a good student is mix between being naturally intelligent and being hardworking. Its different for all.

I have met intelligent people who put in no work and fail miserably. I have met some less talented who have worked incredibly hard and have achieved top grades. Its fair to say you need a healthy dose of both later on in education.

 

[Mr Jack]

First day of a new headteacher and as he had walked in had been a fight in the playground outside.. so in assembly he had asked the gentlemen involed to own up... ofc no one did... so one by one he cained every male pupil in the school... and then asked again for the gentlemen in question to own up... no one did.. so they all got a second cain... 3rd time round when he asked a couple of people pointed to the ones involved who then got a 3rd beating.. suffice to say there were no more fights in the school playground

And you're suggesting that's good? That a load of people who'd done absolutely nothing wrong got beaten with a cane? Seriously?

 

[aslco]

Yeah. as for HXC saying it was easy, dude, look at your results. Your a brain box haha. Just be really proud of yourself that you can do that. I did that too but for some like me it means half my Results were B's. A lot of people think o-levels were harder as it was just one big exam. But tbh that also meant you didn't learn as much overall. And c/w can require a lot of effort. Im sure kids back then aged 14-15 weren't expected to hand in 2-3, 26 page projects crammed with reasonably complex maths and graphs.

 

[UKTopGun]

Have you actually seen an O-level paper? You do realise that (for example, on the Physics paper) that the stuff we cover at A-Level now is what was covered at O-level back then?

How anyone can say GCSEs aren't getting easier is beyond me. You just need to look back a decade, and see that they clearly are.

Poor spelling is no longer marked harshly in English papers. You do not need to be able to read music for a music GCSE. I only took my GCSEs 5/6 years ago, and comparing then with now they are getting easier.

You do realise when you do GCSE's you do stuff that you also do in A Levels?

I also hate this 'everythings getting easier... im so old and mature.' I'm pretty lucky, I don't have to work too hard to get fairly good grades and I go to a pretty decent school, but I have friends that work their ass off all year to get C's and D's! Exams are different every year, I've done GCSE papers 5-6 years ago and some of them were **** easy... Hell especially in A-Level Computing exams from 5-6 years ago were REALLY easy and they've just got harder ever since (obviously some exceptions but the older the paper, the easier its been so far in A-Level, probably due to them being fairly new syllabuses back then).

I don't see how people can compare the papers anyway, oh yeah 'Look at this GCSE paper, its so easy' - Have you ever thought youre now more clever than when you took your GCSEs and back then whats in may have been harder for you to grasp? I reckon there's some stuff on OLevels that young people today wont understand but there's also loads of stuff older people wouldnt have understood that's on GCSE's when they were younger

You have to also include that people can now do subjects such as Travel and Leisure etc. which pushes up A-C as back when my brother and sister did them they had to choose one language (which obviously is harder to get a grade in that Leisure studies).

Edit: And people saying you didnt have to revise etc. to get your grades, good for you! But youre obviously much more clever than the average person in the UK so youre obviously going to find them easy.

 

[FluffySheep]

I'm a teacher and I have a few points to raise.

Firstly, on the pass scores increasing year on year, if I asked any of you to do the same job for many years you would get better. I now know the examiner's style, and I can guess what questions will come up next year (and before anybody says, I don't see the papers until the day the pupils do the exam). With this, why should I concentrate my limited class time on stuff that will not appear (read, stuff that was covered in depth this year and items that are out of fashion, such as the order of the planets, as the syllabus was written before pluto was relegated). That is one reason why the pass % is increasing.

Secondly, CVA (it stands for contectually value added). We don't have it in Wales for Estyn (read Welsh ofsted), but it is still true. When we get pupils they get given a score based upon a list of bits. Deprivation where they live, male, born in August, special education needs (dyslexia, colour blindness, etc), how often/when they have moved schools and a few other bits and pieces will lower scores (not all by the same amount). We have pupils that (based upon CVA) will get LESS than zero grades ( ), yet we are still seen in the same light as schools near by (next town) that have pupils who have higher CVA expectations. How is that correct? (although, I do believe league tables are nearly the best of a bad situation)

Thirdly, parents. Although I have never been assaulted by a parent, I have been threatened and they inshrine into their kids that school is **** and don't worry about the teachers, the parent will sort them out, etc. We need a shift in society back to respect for those in responsible positions (poilice, doctors, teachers, etc when appropriate) but until that happens, the children will not progress.

As for the OP, 5 'good' GCSEs hard, for some pupils, yeah, for others a piece of cake but the important issue is who has got them and what chances have they got/taken to get where they are.

Fluffy

 

[stigggeh]

I only got 1 C

 

[p4radox]

Exams are getting easier because they're taking stuff out of the syllabus and moving it to A levels. Then they're taking it out of the A levels too.

This is undisputable.

 

[Tefal]

Exams are getting easier because they're taking stuff out of the syllabus and moving it to A levels. Then they're taking it out of the A levels too.

This is undisputable.

Really?

I don't rember seeing nuclear physics on the A level syllabus or the GCSE one from these "harder times"