It's Exam Season
I'm convinced that the media wrote a story about failing standards in exams twenty years ago, and all they do is change the numbers every August. During the A-Level and GCSE result days, you might get a little glimpse of happy students, but for the most part, it's reports about how the country is getting dumber with every passing year. And then they forget about it for the most part until next August.
(Of course, if the pass rate had the audacity to fall in one year, then the sky would still be falling, I imagine)
I saw a lot of happy faces today, so congratulations to them, now that they're probably firmly ensconced in the pubs of Oxford…
Posted by Ian at August 17, 2006 02:41 PM
it's reports about how the country is getting dumber with every passing year
So far as I'm concerned it's incontrovertible. When I resat my A-Levels in Rochester, we were prepared for our Cambridge Maths P3 and M3 papers by doing O-Level past papers from the 70s, (and were told not to panic when we found we couldn't do all of it, as we didn't need to know all of it). I recently read through the 2004 EdExcel (formerly London) Physics PH6 (synoptic) paper. Most of it was qualitative; anything quantitative was far too easy for someone who stopped studying physics the day he got to university nine years ago. ;)
Audrey Hepburn � Wouldn't It Be Loverly
Hmmph, wasn't she dubbed by some total unknown?
I had no posts from you in my RSS for weeks, btw, then I got your last 15 all at once last night.
Posted by: R on August 17, 2006 04:17 PM
Hmm, I'll check into the RSS issue…
I know the O-Level maths papers did get made easier in the 1980s when calculus was punted up to A-level. But I had a look at the Further Maths A-Level papers the other day, and to be honest, they didn't look all that different to the ones I took nine years ago.
(I'm actually not against an indepth re-examination of the A-lvel model. I just get annoyed that evey year, in the next two weeks, the story is ALWAYS the same.)
She was dubbed, yes, by MArti Noxon, but she also recorded on set, and the DVD of My Fair Lady included her version of this and, I think Show Me.
Posted by: Ian on August 17, 2006 04:25 PM
During those halcyon A-Level years, I used to think that the older papers were a little harder, but I was never sure whether it was down to differences in the way the questions were written (and thus the style of question we were used to answering) though, rather than a different inherent level of difficulty.
I can't quite understand why a national paper hasn't taken on the challenge and funded a well-designed trial of different eras' examination papers.
It might slip nicely into the TES...
Posted by: T on August 17, 2006 04:59 PM