Fortnight round-up:
- A thousand parents make a thousand unfunny jokes about teachers
- The unfunny jokes relate to a child who ran away with her teacher
- They were both from a town covered by the same local news as the town I am in, hence knowing every single detail of the story
- Gove stops the GCSEs
- Canadian cheese smuggling rings are broken
- *Topless* photos of Kate where published everywhere
- Apple are useless
- My school promptly ban the ability to use time wisely, to the downfall of my BTEC
Today I talk of Gove.
No wait, I don't talk of him, I will talk about him and his hair-brained ideas.
As I've been in a bad mood all day (Apparently, you can drop a GCSE at my school, but not the IT you must take with Triple Science. I digress), I'll start with his good ideas.
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Okay, so that was mean. He does have one good point. The multiple exam boards. They were never going to work out, and it also makes it as hard as hell to buy second-hand revision guides (Oh brilliant! A cheap maths guide! Oh no wait, it's on AQA. Wait, which exam board am I on?*). However, the old system it does make quality control easier. If Edexcel reported an 80% pass rate in the English Language exam, whilst OCR only recorded a 30% pass, something is wrong. But of course, there would be no need for quality control with multiple exam boards, they would just do great exams. To attempt to conclude a minor-half argument so terrible it would reduce my Critical Thinking teacher to tears of pain, a rare glimmer of good idea sometimes crosses his mind.
I'm not denying that GCSE's have their faults. My Chemistry exam, taken in January of this year, was insane to learn. I was given four months to learn the first three units (Of which there seven, one is the equivalent of three units), which wasn't enough so it was all crammed in at once. I didn't revise, so on the day I was bullshitting it. Chemistry is not my strongest science, and yet I managed to get 86/100 UMS points, or an A. Yet in Physics, I had a year before taking the equivalent exam. I got a B. Admittedly, I'm even worse at Physics than I am Chemistry, but had the exams be switched around I'm fairly sure that the grades would too. Whilst I don't agree with the all-exams-at-the-end idea**, I do think they shouldn't be taken in the first January of the course.
And as far as I can see, there are academic-only subjects in the Ebacc. Yes, there may be an idea to introduce more "creative" subjects later (music/art/drama/dance), but I see nothing of vocational subjects. Gove forgets that not everybody is destined for Oxford. There are students, and I do know a couple of them, who will never get a decent GCSE. Instead, they take a vocational course in health and social care, or hair and beauty. Admittedly, they're not as great as 5 A*'s, but it'll get them a job. The English Baccalaureate will run their abilities into the ground, passing them through with bad qualifications and no life skills.
The GCSEs/BTECs have faults, no doubt. But they did encompass the range of students, and that's all that really matters.
*Edexcel
**Over the two years, I have to take more than 17 exams. Imagine having them all in one month. And all the revision.
- A thousand parents make a thousand unfunny jokes about teachers
- The unfunny jokes relate to a child who ran away with her teacher
- They were both from a town covered by the same local news as the town I am in, hence knowing every single detail of the story
- Gove stops the GCSEs
- Canadian cheese smuggling rings are broken
- *Topless* photos of Kate where published everywhere
- Apple are useless
- My school promptly ban the ability to use time wisely, to the downfall of my BTEC
Today I talk of Gove.
No wait, I don't talk of him, I will talk about him and his hair-brained ideas.
As I've been in a bad mood all day (Apparently, you can drop a GCSE at my school, but not the IT you must take with Triple Science. I digress), I'll start with his good ideas.
-
-
-
Okay, so that was mean. He does have one good point. The multiple exam boards. They were never going to work out, and it also makes it as hard as hell to buy second-hand revision guides (Oh brilliant! A cheap maths guide! Oh no wait, it's on AQA. Wait, which exam board am I on?*). However, the old system it does make quality control easier. If Edexcel reported an 80% pass rate in the English Language exam, whilst OCR only recorded a 30% pass, something is wrong. But of course, there would be no need for quality control with multiple exam boards, they would just do great exams. To attempt to conclude a minor-half argument so terrible it would reduce my Critical Thinking teacher to tears of pain, a rare glimmer of good idea sometimes crosses his mind.
I'm not denying that GCSE's have their faults. My Chemistry exam, taken in January of this year, was insane to learn. I was given four months to learn the first three units (Of which there seven, one is the equivalent of three units), which wasn't enough so it was all crammed in at once. I didn't revise, so on the day I was bullshitting it. Chemistry is not my strongest science, and yet I managed to get 86/100 UMS points, or an A. Yet in Physics, I had a year before taking the equivalent exam. I got a B. Admittedly, I'm even worse at Physics than I am Chemistry, but had the exams be switched around I'm fairly sure that the grades would too. Whilst I don't agree with the all-exams-at-the-end idea**, I do think they shouldn't be taken in the first January of the course.
And as far as I can see, there are academic-only subjects in the Ebacc. Yes, there may be an idea to introduce more "creative" subjects later (music/art/drama/dance), but I see nothing of vocational subjects. Gove forgets that not everybody is destined for Oxford. There are students, and I do know a couple of them, who will never get a decent GCSE. Instead, they take a vocational course in health and social care, or hair and beauty. Admittedly, they're not as great as 5 A*'s, but it'll get them a job. The English Baccalaureate will run their abilities into the ground, passing them through with bad qualifications and no life skills.
The GCSEs/BTECs have faults, no doubt. But they did encompass the range of students, and that's all that really matters.
*Edexcel
**Over the two years, I have to take more than 17 exams. Imagine having them all in one month. And all the revision.
3 comments:
I agree with this entirely. I'm currently doing my A2s, but I know I couldn't have done my GCSEs all in one go. I definitely agree with the change in exam boards - right now AQA seem to be the most generous markers and the exam board that tend to mess up most, OCR are probably the harshest markers and I like Edexcel, who are somewhere in the middle (and I have never had any problems with them). Though I do have to admit that I wasn't aware that they were pushing EBaccs so much.
They're doing a similar thing for a-levels - they want to bring back O-levels and at the very least are saying that they want all examinations at the end of the two years with no potential for retakes, which is absolutely ridiculous. I'd like someone to sit Michael Gove down with the AS and A2 papers for a subject and tell him to try doing that, quite frankly.
I'd heard about the A-levels saga, which irritated me no end.
The Independent actually featured a piece on A-levels, which voiced your final thought perfectly: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/viv-groskop-dont-bash-alevels-until-youve-sat-one-again-7866529.html
I hadn't seen that article, thank-you :).
I have to say that when they were reshuffling the cabinet I was hoping Michael Gove would be taken away from Education, but alas it apparently wasn't to be.
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