10:10am Friday 24th August 2007
Does the endless debate over whether exams are getting easier help anyone? Education expert James Williams, a lecturer in science education at the University of Sussex, thinks not.
He challenged three celebrities to take a 1970s O-level and a recent GCSE to find out which was harder and came back with some interesting results.
GCSE results are out. Inevitably there will be complaints of slipping standards and easier exams.
So far this year we have had key stage 3 test results that have failed to meet Government targets. The conclusion?
Standards are slipping.
Record A-level results brought complaints that exams are getting easier. The reply? Teaching is better and youngsters are working harder.
Exams, we are told, are as difficult now as they were in previous years, so any improvement is real.
The same teachers prepare children for their KS3 tests, GCSEs, and often A-levels as well. Teachers don't suddenly get worse the younger the pupils are in their class.
Maybe pupils are working harder as they get older, but any parent of a recalcitrant teenager will tell you how difficult it is to get them off the mobile and down to serious work.
Are the exams getting easier?
August always brings comparisons of GCSEs with O-levels.
However, records of how children fared, including samples of their answers, were not kept for the first 30 years of the O-level system and records started with GCSEs in 1989.
The context in which O-levels are set and taken has changed considerably over the years. In 1970 an iPod was just a jumble of letters and talking to people using a mobile handheld device was confined to James T Kirk and the Starship Enterprise.
Our knowledge and understanding in many subjects has also changed over time. In the 1970s scientists were warning of an impending ice age not global warming.
Testing So as a little test I took the comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli, BBC Coast presenter Neil Oliver and nature presenter Ellie Harrison from the BBC's The One Show to a school and set them a 1970 maths O-level and a recent GCSE to find out which was the more difficult exam to do. It turned out that they were equally difficult.
Employers still moan that young people cannot do basic maths and cannot spell. That set me thinking.
Are we actually asking the right question about standards in our examination system? Is the most often asked question - "Are GCSEs easier than O levels?" - the wrong question?
The question should be: "Are the examinations we make our young people sit fit for purpose?
Current exams are no longer a good measurement of the understanding and skills that we want our youngsters to master.
I don't doubt that teachers are better now than they were 30 years ago.
Being involved in teacher training for ten years, I know they are better.
I don't doubt that pupils are working as hard now as I did 30 years ago.
What they study is now far more interesting and varied than the curriculum I was taught.
However, I think we have lost sight of the purpose of our examinations.
The way they are constructed doesn't allow us to find out what children understand, merely what they know. There are more multiple choice questions today, which require just a tick and no explanation.
In some subjects there are more words in the questions than you need to write to get full marks for the answer.
Also, in one practical task, a pupil was required to measure the cooling rate of water in a beaker wrapped in newspaper and plot the results as a graph. The pupil could plot every data point in the graph incorrectly and still get full marks. The task was neither challenging nor rigorous.
To demonstrate understanding, children should be able to use prose - more than just a couple of sentences - to tell us what they know about an idea or concept.
All examinations should give pupils at least one essay type question.
The move towards electronic marking will further erode an exam's ability to be a real test of understanding and not just knowledge. Teachers are the best people to assess children's understanding.
Employing graduates as markers who simply follow a marking script is too limiting.
You need to know how children think and react to judge their exam answers fairly. Finally, we must think why we test children and how often we test them.
There is so much testing going on in schools, to provide data for school managers and, in particular, the Government, it would be of no surprise to me if children are tested more than they are taught. Exams should not be about measuring the performance of teachers and schools for league tables, they should be about measuring the understanding and skills that pupils have.
So we should trust teachers to teach more and test less. We should also employ more teachers as examiners to mark prose, with insight into how pupils think rather than use machines that simply check if the correct box has been ticked.
Are exams getting easier or young people brighter? Share your thoughts below.
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