29th August 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The new GCSE exam results were released on Thursday last week, and many people have expressed surprise that the pass rate has increased, despite the intention to make the exams harder. Reported on the BBC, 66.9% of entries received a grade 4 or better, which is 0.5% more than received a grade C last year. Boys narrowed the gender gap with 17.2% of their entries scoring a 4 or above, while girls’ entries remained at 23.7%. 90% of the GCSEs taken were in the new format (1-9 grades) which places more focus on the final exam and less on coursework.
The change in GCSE format is intended to pitch the exams at the same level as the highest achieving education systems in the world like Singapore and Finland, and some people have questioned the changes because the pass rate has increased. However, exam regulators have said that they do not want to treat the early years of the new system like ‘guinea pig’ students, which is the reason for the broadly similar pass rate.
Something which has changed significantly is the proportion of entries receiving the highest grade, 9. The grades A and A* have been split into grades 7, 8 and 9, and only 4% of entries received a grade 9. In total, only 732 students from more than half a million achieved a 9 in every subject. The National Education Union said that success is now being rationed; it is easier to differentiate between high achieving students.
Of course, the difficulty of exams cannot be measured by the proportion of top grades and passing grades. In fact, due to the increase in difficulty of exams, many pass marks are extremely low compared to the previous exam format. The pass marks for maths, chemistry and biology were 21%, 26% and 27% respectively. This has created a worry that the new papers are inaccessible to lower achieving students and serve only to differentiate between the more capable students. The particular concern is for students who have to retake their maths and English GCSEs to achieve a grade 4 which is a national requirement while someone is still in full time education.