13th September 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
On the surface the recent GCSE results seem unremarkable. The pass rate and the proportion of students receiving top grades changed very little compared to 2018. This is despite apparently much tougher exams which were supposed to challenge students more. Should we assume that talk of more difficult exams was a lot of hot air?
The answer is no. The examining boards published the percentages needed for each grade and we saw that for many GCSE subjects the pass mark was as low as 20-25% which is a huge difference compared to recent years. It’s something our education system has been crying out for for years; a way to better differentiate between students at the highest levels.
What Ofqual have done is ensure that there isn’t a significant difference in the number of grades awarded over time, which seems to make sense; a big drop or increase in grades would suggest that one year of our population is dramatically more or less intelligent that the previous year, which seems silly. This regulation means that we can compare students in different school years by using their GCSE grades.
One downside to this is we can’t see our education system improving over time, which one hopes it does. Maybe this isn’t important for everyone but it’s something for which the department for education might want to pat themselves on the back, and obviously teachers want to feel like they are making a difference. Likewise, the tuition industry has boomed in the last 20 years, and a result of that should be a real terms increase in grades.
Maybe a bigger worry with the new system is for students struggling to do well with the new exams. When they receive their GCSE results the feeling of a “pass” might be the same as before, but a student who would previously pass with 50-60% is now passing with 20-25% and it is demoralising to find a paper so difficult. Obviously students should feel challenged, but could there be a danger of turning students off their studies when every paper is so difficult?