19th June 2015 11:00
By Blue Tutors
In the aftermath of the recent Maths GCSE exams there has been an outcry amongst students using the Edexcel board who felt that the questions were far trickier than the usual standard for GCSE, and in some cases ‘impossible’. Apart from the amusing twitter campaign that has emerged following the exam fuelled by anxious teens, another product of this latest exam debacle is that it has got educators thinking about how to teach, and how what we do relates to exams. By all accounts, the questions weren’t actually impossible (which, due to errors on the part of exam boards, they sometimes have been in the past), but challenging, and phrased in ways with which students were not familiar. Surely a good education in any subject would allow students to approach a broad range of questions?
Most private tutors will agree that the best way to prepare students well for exams is to ensure that they know the material well enough to be able to answer any questions on the subject, regardless of the format. Too many students revise answers to specific questions in specific formats, meaning that a question which requires knowledge of familiar material but is phrased in an unfamiliar way may be a challenge to them. As ever, the key is not to learn question formats but to learn to break questions down into their constituent parts, and apply the subject material required for each part. Tutors should also get their students used to answering questions to which there may be no correct answer, or which are outside the scope of that which they have been taught at school.
Asking the impossible is often an excellent teaching tool, prompting students to think creatively and inuring them to the panic that can follow the realisation that an exam question is tricky or unfamiliar. This is something that tutors should be doing for their students. However, it isn’t necessarily something that exam boards should be doing. The reality is that exams are there so that universities and employers across the country can measure students’ ability, and as such they should be standardised. When students have been prepared for exams in one way by their schools only to find that the exam demands a different way of thinking, this creates inequality. Those students who have private tutors or attend excellent schools with the resources to stretch their thinking and work outside the standards exam boards claim to require will be at a clear advantage under these circumstances. I am wholly in favour of students receiving a varied and interesting education, but it should be teachers setting the impossible questions, not exam boards.