26th August 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
There’s been a lot in the news recently about changes to GCSEs and A-levels in England and Wales. The changes appear to moving away from modular based qualifications, and moving closer to the traditional format that most people in the country have experienced – the dreaded end of year, all or nothing, exams.
It seems that there is a clear benefit to tutors if qualifications revert to the more traditional format, and that’s that it’s easier to help the students make decisions about what to focus on, as the example below describes.
There was a student in North London studying A-level Maths, and requested a tutor a couple of weeks before his AS-level exams at the end of year 12. On the face of it, this was a very common request, and there would be nothing unusual about the situation. However, it quickly became clear to the tutor that the student, despite achieving an A* in GCSE Maths, was finding A-levels much more difficult. The reasons for this weren’t clear, maybe he hadn’t worked very hard throughout the year, or he could have been finding the step up in conceptual difficulty too hard to manage. Whatever the reasons, the tutor was presented with a difficult situation in terms of advice to give.
The student was taking C1, C2 (Core Mathematics modules) and M1 (a Mechanics Mathematics module), but it was obvious that tutoring the student to the level he wanted to be at (Bs and Cs) for each of the modules was an impossible task. The tutor had to make a decision, and advised the student that concentrating on C1 alone might be the best way forward; it would potentially mean a good grade for C1, and not having to retake that module, which would take the pressure off for other Maths modules, and also for his other subjects. The downside would be that the universities the student applies to would see his results for C2 and M1, which were likely to be poor.
Why was this such a difficult decision? Well even though the student thought the tutor’s advice was good, but unfortunately his parents didn’t, and wanted, even expected, the student to get good grades for each module he took. This wasn’t really the parents’ fault, they assumed that their son was very good at maths, and he hadn’t been completely honest about how much he was struggling until he asked for a tutor. The tutor was put in a position where the decision, which was difficult enough when objectively thinking about the student’s education, suddenly had connotations for the student’s relationship with his family – not fun.
Obviously this problem wasn’t ‘created’ by the modular nature of the Maths A-level, but it created a difficult situation for the tutor. It could be argued that the modules actually helped the situation, otherwise it may have been the case that the student wouldn’t have asked for a tutor until a couple of weeks before his year 13 A-level exams, and would have been struggling for two years, rather than one. It’s hoped that when reforming our exam system, the government consider these sorts of problems, and ensure that there’s still an effective way for parents, schools, teachers, tutors, and students themselves, to identify when something’s going wrong, and action needs to be taken.