EducationGuardian.co.uk | Schools special reports | Half marks in maths gets you an A-grade
But standards aren’t slipping. Oh no.
Edit to add – does anyone know if it’s possible to get past papers? Barbara? I’d really like to see what a gcse paper is like these days.
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12 responses to “EducationGuardian.co.uk | Schools special reports | Half marks in maths gets you an A-grade”
Yep, I’ve got stacks.
You can also download them from some of the exam board websites, together with mark schemes, I believe. Will see what I can find in my favourites…
But just to add, I don’t think the passmarks on their own show slipping standards, or at least they wouldn’t if the exams were any harder (which they’re not imho). My main issue with the grade boundaries is that they render the qualification as good as meaningless for the vast majority of people. I’ve just coached a very numerically challenged teenager through the intermediate tier and she managed the top grade for that paper (a B) but I doubt she ever did grasp a real understanding of the subject matter. But then she wasn’t paying me to teach her maths, she was paying me to help her get that piece of paper, which she did. There wasn’t any time for much else and that was all she wanted anyway, have only achieved a D last year.
Yep, here are some specimin OCR papers… http://tinyurl.com/62ra7
And here are some AQA ones…
http://www.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/math_a_assess.html
Hmm – can’t find the edexcel ones on-line, but those are the ones I have ‘in the flesh’ here as it were. I used to mark for them. Very scary.
I’m a bit confused here. I’ve just looked at the foundation tier. What age would kids be when they took this? Is it a primary school “test”. We have a different exam system here, and I’ve never looked at the papers, but presumably we will have something broadly equivilent
Estimate the answer to the following.
39.72+83.4
———-
10.1×5.8
Why estimate?
That’s an age 16 paper Joyce, although you could only get grades D – whatever the lowest one is off it, if I’m understanding Barbara. I think your system is very different at the next stage up, but I’ve no idea what your age 16 stuff is like.
Got any “specimin” English papers, Barbara? 🙂
(You know, if they had been better at spelling in the Middle Ages, there wouldn’t have been half as many people burnt at the stake for hearsay)
Oh, they’re obsessed with estimating Tim! I can kind of see the point in a way – it’s important to have some idea of what order of magnitudes things are going to be – but I’m not sure why it has to be taught as a separate skill (I’ve never seen much explanation as to why it could be a good thing).
I suppose if you estimate it first, then if you mistype on your calculator {grin} and got something miles from 120 or 60 (my answers to your questions), you might realise you’d done something wrong?
I hate doing it myself, and so does Poppy. She was doing a KS1 workbook the other day and she had to guess the number of objects in the box – she’d put the correct number, so I asked if she’d counted, not guessed. She said no, she’d just seen that there were 3 groups of 4, so she knew there were 12!
I agree Alison, estimating is useful. Probably more useful than actually being able to get the exact answer in most real life scenarios. So why then, do they test it out of any rl context? And I also agree with Poppy – it totally goes against my obsessive nature not to have the *exact* answer, or at least not to find out how far out my estimate is – in which case why bother with an estimate in the first place (other than to give you an element of confidence in your exact answer being right).
and 😛 to Tim
It would probably have been a useful “checking step” for me – took me a very long time to learn skills that might suggest to me that 1000/50 probably wasn’t 462… but i hate it too even now as a “fake skill” – and it seems to be rife through workbook type things.
I’ve been showing Fran how to add backwards through a subtraction sum as a sort of standard last step, so she does it unquestioningly. She is actually quite accurate about that type of thing but it seems like a sensible notion for back checking to be a natural step. Wish i did it with my typing!
I think 40% is an A* in Science!!!