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

If anyone remembers the change of the maths syllabus from the P1-3 to C1-4??

That is the clearest example I saw of padding out 3 modules into 4. hence doing 1 entire module less.

How is that not making it easier????
 
GCSE maths in no way prepared me in maths for engineering when I went to do Electrical & Electronic engineering :( Calculus - ugh!
 
Haircut said:
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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The type of people who can get 400/400 on the first 4 modules aren't very likely to slack off on the last two just because they don't need many marks for an A. They'll be after bragging rights for the top score.

And in practice, nearly everyone in this situation is also working at much harder exams (STEP, BMO/IMO etc) so they'd be pretty much on top of their game even if they weren't spending much effort on the FP exam itself.
 
sid said:
If anyone remembers the change of the maths syllabus from the P1-3 to C1-4??

That is the clearest example I saw of padding out 3 modules into 4. hence doing 1 entire module less.

How is that not making it easier????
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Yes, the a-level syllabus in maths has deliberately been made easier, as people were finding it too hard.

Essentially the problem was that the % of ppl doing a-levels is increasing. Maths was remaining still unaccessible to a lot of those people while the other subjects were not. Hence they had to make it easier.
 
sr4470 said:
Yes, but there weren't actually any formal entry requirements other than the standard of "basic" numeracy and literacy.
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Without knowing the reason why this is you can't really use it as a reason for either arguement. It could well mean that the university thinks that GCSEs/Alevels are now so totally worthless they just don't care about them. Or it could mean that they don't feel that these subjects no longer teach the areas of numeracy etc that they require so they set there own test try and weed out those who don't have the skills.
 
DaveF said:
The type of people who can get 400/400 on the first 4 modules aren't very likely to slack off on the last two just because they don't need many marks for an A. They'll be after bragging rights for the top score.

And in practice, nearly everyone in this situation is also working at much harder exams (STEP, BMO/IMO etc) so they'd be pretty much on top of their game even if they weren't spending much effort on the FP exam itself.
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Yep, no one really cares about bragging rights. There are other a-levels and step to worry about.
 
Solari said:
GCSE maths in no way prepared me in maths for engineering when I went to do Electrical & Electronic engineering :( Calculus - ugh!
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You didn't do a-level maths? I would have thought that would be a necessary for electronic engineering. Must have been a steep learning curve :)
 
yak.h'cir said:
Without knowing the reason why this is you can't really use it as a reason for either arguement. It could well mean that the university thinks that GCSEs/Alevels are now so totally worthless they just don't care about them. Or it could mean that they don't feel that these subjects no longer teach the areas of numeracy etc that they require so they set there own test try and weed out those who don't have the skills.
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Its a Diploma level course - aimed at those without A-levels. IIRC my friend was going to have to do the access year before starting the actual course itself due to having nothing beyond a few O levels.
 
DaveF said:
The type of people who can get 400/400 on the first 4 modules aren't very likely to slack off on the last two just because they don't need many marks for an A. They'll be after bragging rights for the top score.

And in practice, nearly everyone in this situation is also working at much harder exams (STEP, BMO/IMO etc) so they'd be pretty much on top of their game even if they weren't spending much effort on the FP exam itself.
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I was just basing it on what I did at A-levels!
I think I was on something like 392/400 from the first 4 modules, so I kind of stopped going to most of the lessons after that as I knew I could get an A by scoring 44% on the last two modules :o

That combined with getting lost in Cambridge when I was due for a maths test as part of my interview probably scuppered any chance of getting in there.
Ah well!!
 
therealnerd2 said:
You didn't do a-level maths? I would have thought that would be a necessary for electronic engineering. Must have been a steep learning curve :)
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Didn't do a degree, just BTEC. It was still damn hard going though and definitely a steep curve. The maths lecturer being a real egg head ex-uni lecturer didn't make it easy either - most of the time we'd have to transpose a formula the size of your arm to get to where you wanted to start from :(

I'd probably fare better if I were to do it now though to be honest. I'd be a bit more interested as you can work out some really complicated stuff in a matter of minutes from what I remember. I remember sod all of what I learnt in MFE, I still remember a fair bit of the electronics applied maths though. :D
 
yak.h'cir said:
Afraid not, the exams are getting much easier.

As an aside, the BBC did an interesting experiment/show a few years where 16 year olds were given exam papers dating a few decades old. They were lead to believe that they were the equivalent O-level. Pretty much all the students failed the exams. The old exam papers were actually originally sat by 11 year olds and were just basic maths such as the profit/loss style in the OP. None of the students on the show had a grasp of basic multiplication/division or fractions and when you think about it these are the skills that are so helpful/often essential in everyday life! It's quite scary.
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Yes, but the kids on shows like that are always retarded.

I do agree that A level exams nowadays are easy. It's too step by step. Also they give you a lot of specific knowledge to guide you. Things that are on the syllabus that you need to learn are often given to you in the question, just because you are being asked about something else closely related. It's more of a true test if you are not given that information, and have to use your knowledge for everything. I noticed this a lot in the 3 exams which I finished an hour ago.
 
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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).
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I think you missed my point. My point was not necessarily concerning overlap of current a-levels and old o-levels but actually concerning the style of questioning found in exams now compared with those found in exams 30 years or so ago.

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?
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The exams should contain questions that trouble every candidate and hence every candidate should drop marks in some place or another. I found at A level that if you did the revision then nothing in the exam was at all challenging.
 
D.P. said:
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.
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Thats how it was for me, I was so bored of school I hated it with avengance. In middle school we actually had competant teachers, and a decade ago there wasn't all that much focus on what you had to do before you got to high school so they gave me lots of extra work without much issue. That was great, a bored student who wanted harder work, gave me harder work. High school though , because teachers are so ingrained with teaching to pass exams seemed almost completely incapable of offering extra work as they simply planned from day one how to pass the exams and nothing more. The first few months of extra work was simply, next few months work, which meant even more boredom when we got there and i didn't have little to do, I had nothing, literally nothing to do.

I learnt up to and beyond GCSE maths before I left middle school. This country sucks as there needs to be higher tier fast tracked schools for the people who can handle it, that way Uni's would easily be able to tell who the best students were and offer degree's at a younger age, or much higher level degree's to the same students.

THe main thing to bear in mind is the examination and teaching methods have changed. These days you simply get tested on EVERYTHING you learn, basically. 20-30 years ago this wasn't the case, you could learn a heck of a lot of other subjects, not be tested on them in final exams but simply end up with more knowledge in the end. even if the exams had the same exact questions today as 50 years ago, that doesn't mean the kid taking them was taught the exact same way. Exams used to be, learn say 15 modules, we'll test on say 5 modules but we won't tell you which ones. Even if infact they always chose the same 5 modules they didn't tell you that so you learned all 15. Now you simply get tested on 5 modules still, but because governments lay targets, and want higher pass rates to campaign on they make teachers basically ONLY teach these 5 modules, so yes the exam might be the same, the pass rate might be higher, they might be better in those 5 areas, but they still completely lack the knowledge of the other 10 modules.

THis is the reason why degree's are now also becoming worthless in most area's. AS instead of having everyone knowing the 15 modules and starting from there, now everyone knows 5 modules of the 15, and you spend the 1st year at uni simply getting everyone up to where they should have been.

With a large gap between gcse and uni, didn't finish a-levels, the maths on the first year of the course was a complete joke and stupidly easy, despite the fact I'd only done GCSE and basically learnt that almost a decade before uni.


People think just because exams are still hard, that they couldn't have been harder before. The problem is, when you learn a heck of a lot more every single year from a young age, you simply become able to learn more every year, you get used to processing and storing that much knowledge. People aren't being forced to work hard when young, so they can't be taught as widly as they are for gcse/a-level as they wouldn't be used to the workload. The whole education system is screwed and its now way to easy for basically dumb people to do very well in a-levels, while the super inteligent are bored and angry and end up doing very badly. the system is going the wrong direction and hurting the people it should be working best for. ITs also causing way to many overqualified people. In 20 years degree's are going to be so ridiculously easy that binmen will have degree's, and people will have to stay in education even longer still to get a relevant useful degree, which means more years, more debt, more waste.
 
AndyS_UK said:
I think you missed my point. My point was not necessarily concerning overlap of current a-levels and old o-levels but actually concerning the style of questioning found in exams now compared with those found in exams 30 years or so ago.



The exams should contain questions that trouble every candidate and hence every candidate should drop marks in some place or another. I found at A level that if you did the revision then nothing in the exam was at all challenging.
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In my gcse/a-level/degree years the exams are a joke. "revision" papers compared to exam papers were pathetic, its basically all identically worded questions with VERY small changes to numbers. ITs done like this so basically you simply don't need to use your brain, you simply remember the question which one from revision it was and copy out the working and plug in the very slightly different answers. Theres no need to understand the question, or decide exactly what its asking for, how to do it. Its learned behaviour exams now rather than testing if someone can come up with an answer on their own. Exams simply test how many revision questions you can memorise which is simply no indication of how well you know the actual information you are being tested on.

Due to missing, literally, years through gcse's and a-levels i went into some exams having done little work at all and could answer half the papers from simply reading the questions as they are so incredibly leading now. I dare say 30 years ago walking into an exam without doing any work you'd struggle to answer a single question, now, a physics, gcse/a-level, or maths, chem, some of them are simply common sense answers. you should not be able to walk into an exam and be able to work out answers from the question alone, but you can.
 
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