25th May 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A few years ago the government announced plans to change the difficulty and format of GCSEs and A Levels. It was felt that over the last 20 years there had been a race to the bottom by exam boards; making exams easier and more modular was attractive and increased the number of students studying that particular syllabus. This led to year on year of increased grades and eventually it was decided to revert to harder less modular exams which provide more rigour and place more emphasis on the final exam.
For everyone who began tutoring in the last 20 years this is quite a big change. Our young tutors have only ever known the old style of exams, both when they were studying and since they began tutoring, so understanding the pressures on students is suddenly a more difficult proposition. Obviously tutors’ basic goal hasn’t changed at all; helping students to understand a subject will always be the most important, but identifying on which areas to focus and giving advice on time management during exams has become more difficult.
Some students ask for older more experienced tutors because of the feeling that experience leads to more skill, but others ask for recent graduates because of their understanding of the current exam system and ability to empathise with students having gone through the same system recently. Now the only tutors having gone through a similar system will be over 40!
Of course, the positive is that at Oxford and Cambridge our tutors had to study so much material for exams at the end of each year. Exams which aren’t modular and our tutors only had one shot at them. This means that if you’re looking for a tutor to relate to a GCSE or A Level student then you’re still better off asking for a recent graduate, and our tutors just have to get to grips with the new exam system as quickly as possible.