15th July 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
As we reported on earlier in the week, Michael Gove has recently announced A-level reforms which he says are to prepare students better for university, and to encourage the art of “deep thought”. Obviously it would only be fair to wait and see what the details of the reforms are, and how they will be implemented, but on the face of it, the reforms don’t appear to tackle the problems that it’s claimed they are intended to resolve.
Firstly, the art of deep thought. Any tutor will probably agree that this art has been lost. Qualifications in general are becoming easier, and students are required to think less for themselves; there is far more spoon-feeding of ideas than there was as little as 10 years ago. However, this has absolutely nothing to do with qualifications being modular or students taking AS-levels. Obviously if students are to take one big exam at the end of a 2 year course then they will have to remember much more, but it’s doesn’t necessarily follow that the questions will be more difficult, and require “deeper” thought. The government appear to have confused quantity with conceptual difficulty.
On the subject of improving students’ preparation for university, it might be true that developing a student’s memory capacity will help there; there is certainly much more material to be covered and remembered once a student goes into higher education. However, this isn’t the bugbear of universities, it’s actually that students are not ready for the tuition available when they start as first year undergraduates; students cannot deal conceptually with the material to be covered. As Blue Tutors has claimed previously, the issue is with the graduation of conceptual difficulty between GCSEs and A-levels, and then between A-levels and degree level. Students are asked to make ambitious jumps between these qualifications, rather than a gradual increase in conceptual level, so that there’s never a sudden ‘shock’ when beginning a new qualification.
It could be argued that the government have at least listened to those saying that there is a problem, but a cynic might say that the motivation behind a single exam at the end of two years of A-level study is more to reduce costs than increase quality (and difficulty) and actually tackle the problem at hand.