GCSES the ‘hardest ever’
PUPILS have faced the toughest ever GCSES, as education leaders warn that grades risk becoming a “lottery”.
Thousands of “guinea pig” students are expected to be disappointed with their results, as teachers have struggled to predict grades accurately under the new system, experts say.
This summer is the first year that students took revamped exams in a series of subjects. The new courses were part of a package of reforms by Michael Gove when he was education secretary, designed to toughen up syllabuses, make courses more linear and cut down on the number of students getting A*s.
“I think it’s fair to say there is quite a lot of anxiety from young people – they feel as though they are guinea pigs in a new system,” said Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders.
He said that while teachers had been able to build up expertise about how the old GCSE exams and their grades worked, their knowledge of the new system was likely to be more “fragile”. “With the new grading system, there is
a danger of this being a lottery when it used to be an expertise,” Mr Barton said. “They haven’t got the backlog of past papers and mark schemes and all those other things to hone their skills and advise students.”
Students will receive their GCSE results under a system which uses grades nine to one, rather than from A* to G. Last summer, pupils took the new GCSES in English literature, English language and maths only. This year, a further 17 subjects have been added, including biology, chemistry, physics, history and geography.
The new computer science GCSE, which was brought in to replace information and communication technology, is so hard that girls are being put off from taking up the subject, a report has warned. The Roehampton Annual Computing Education report, published yesterday, found pupils most likely to take up the subject were male, academically strong, from a relatively affluent family and good at mathematics. Poorer students and those from ethnic minority backgrounds were less likely to take up computer science, the report found, making it a more “exclusive” subject.
Mr Barton said that parents had told him of their worries about their children’s wellbeing. “I think a lot of parents have been taken by surprise about stories of how much harder the content is and the sheer number of examinations,” he said.
Prof Alan Smithers, director of the centre of education and employment at Buckingham University, said many teachers would “be playing catch up”. “Teachers are not really in a position to accurately predict grades this year and to a large extent will be guessing.”
Ofqual, the exams watchdog, said the reforms were designed to raise standards in schools and keep up with universities’ and employers’ demands.