benaj
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Post by benaj on Aug 20, 2020 11:45:15 GMT
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Aug 20, 2020 14:54:33 GMT
I don't understand why the exams were cancelled. Its surely easier to space kids out in an exam scenario than general teaching. Schools tend to have quite a few halls/gyms etc they can use. THe exam boards could also have extended the exam season to reduce clashes and thus the numbers taking an exam at any given point.
Even if there was still some risk of transmission, that would be mitigated IMO by not ending up in the mess we're in now.
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IFISAcava
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Post by IFISAcava on Aug 20, 2020 15:37:04 GMT
I don't understand why the exams were cancelled. Its surely easier to space kids out in an exam scenario than general teaching. Schools tend to have quite a few halls/gyms etc they can use. THe exam boards could also have extended the exam season to reduce clashes and thus the numbers taking an exam at any given point. Even if there was still some risk of transmission, that would be mitigated IMO by not ending up in the mess we're in now. You obviously haven't been hanging out much with anxious and/or angry parents. Continuing with the exams would have been even worse, hard though that may be to believe, and drawn out over several months.
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benaj
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Post by benaj on Aug 20, 2020 15:51:55 GMT
BBCÂ reporting on GCSE results, again showing noticeable grade inflation
"Official results show that 78.8% of GCSEs in England were graded 4 or better – the pass rate under the grading system introduced in 2017. It's an increase of nine percentage points on last year, when 69.9% of pupils achieved the passing grade. At the top grades, there was also an increase, with 27.6% of entries being awarded a 7 or above – equivalent to an A or A* under the old grading system. In 2019, only 21.9% of entries achieved these grades, resulting in an increase of 5.7 percentage points."
www.ocr.org.uk/Images/552371-gcse-cambridge-nationals-and-other-level-2-final-exam-statistics-june-2019.pdfwww.ocr.org.uk/Images/592037-gcse-provisional-exam-statistics-june-2020.pdfGCSE RESULTS Comparison: 2019 vs 2020 Latin J282 2019. Grade 9 37.28% 2020 Grade 9 48.32% Biology J247 2019 Grade 9 12.84% 2020 Grade 9 16.48% Maths J560 2019 Grade 9 3.61% 2020 Grade 9 4.43% English language J351 2019 Grad 9 6.63% 2020 grade 9 10.59% It's surprising to see a useless language like Latin is such a popular subject with OCR and so many grade 9 achievers this year. 😄it’s certainly not a popular A level subject
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cb25
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Post by cb25 on Aug 20, 2020 16:04:19 GMT
BBC reporting on GCSE results, again showing noticeable grade inflation
"Official results show that 78.8% of GCSEs in England were graded 4 or better – the pass rate under the grading system introduced in 2017. It's an increase of nine percentage points on last year, when 69.9% of pupils achieved the passing grade. At the top grades, there was also an increase, with 27.6% of entries being awarded a 7 or above – equivalent to an A or A* under the old grading system. In 2019, only 21.9% of entries achieved these grades, resulting in an increase of 5.7 percentage points."
www.ocr.org.uk/Images/552371-gcse-cambridge-nationals-and-other-level-2-final-exam-statistics-june-2019.pdfwww.ocr.org.uk/Images/592037-gcse-provisional-exam-statistics-june-2020.pdfGCSE RESULTS Comparison: 2019 vs 2020 Latin J282 2019. Grade 9 37.28% 2020 Grade 9 48.32% Biology J247 2019 Grade 9 12.84% 2020 Grade 9 16.48% Maths J560 2019 Grade 9 3.61% 2020 Grade 9 4.43% English language J351 2019 Grad 9 6.63% 2020 grade 9 10.59% It's surprising to see a useless language like Latin is such a popular subject with OCR and so many grade 9 achievers this year. 😄it’s certainly not a popular A level subject "The subject with the highest proportion of pupils gaining a 7 to 9 grade was classics at 74.6 per cent, followed by modern languages other than French, German and Spanish, and triple science (biology, chemistry and physics) at 53 per cent" "Other modern languages have the highest rate of A/A& grades at 73.8 per cent, followed by further maths at 71.1 per cent, German at 58.3 per cent and Spanish at 54.5 per cent"
Telegraph has a chart suggesting there is more grade inflation in less popular subjects "Among Performing and Expressive Arts 38.5 per cent of all entries achieved a pass mark from only 2,500 entries. Among the fewer than 3,000 Engineering students, the top grades also rose by 15.1 percentage points to 26.4 per cent achieving at least a 7."
"Indeed the top ten subjects for inflation in top grades had an average of 44,374 students entering exams in England, in contrast to the bottom ten, which has an average of 305,350 students entering" "In particular, top grades in English and Maths - compulsory for all GCSE students - saw relatively smaller rises, with 4.8pp and 3.1pp respectively."
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james100
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Post by james100 on Aug 20, 2020 17:18:42 GMT
BBC reporting on GCSE results, again showing noticeable grade inflation
"Official results show that 78.8% of GCSEs in England were graded 4 or better – the pass rate under the grading system introduced in 2017. It's an increase of nine percentage points on last year, when 69.9% of pupils achieved the passing grade. At the top grades, there was also an increase, with 27.6% of entries being awarded a 7 or above – equivalent to an A or A* under the old grading system. In 2019, only 21.9% of entries achieved these grades, resulting in an increase of 5.7 percentage points."
<snip> It's surprising to see a useless language like Latin is such a popular subject with OCR and so many grade 9 achievers this year. 😄it’s certainly not a popular A level subject AIUI OCR is the only board serving up GCSE Latin (at least that was the case when I did it back in 1988) which might go to explaining it. I wouldn't say it was a useless subject by the way, but in any case a link between popularity and usefulness seems to be shaky when I see 5 times the number of A-level entries for psychology and sociology (combined) versus French/German/Spanish (combined)...
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benaj
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Post by benaj on Aug 20, 2020 17:23:28 GMT
<snip> It's surprising to see a useless language like Latin is such a popular subject with OCR and so many grade 9 achievers this year. 😄it’s certainly not a popular A level subject AIUI OCR is the only board serving up GCSE Latin (at least that was the case when I did it back in 1988) which might go to explaining it. I wouldn't say it was a useless subject by the way, but in any case a link between popularity and usefulness seems to be shaky when I see 5 times the number of A-level entries for psychology and sociology (combined) versus French/German/Spanish (combined)... Psychology and Sociology are highly popular subjects with AQA, I wonder why. They are certainly not the most popular subjects combination according to this study from University of Cambridge, Biology, Chemistry and Maths www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/140668-popularity-of-a-level-subjects-among-uk-university-students.pdf
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james100
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Post by james100 on Aug 20, 2020 17:35:35 GMT
AIUI OCR is the only board serving up GCSE Latin (at least that was the case when I did it back in 1988) which might go to explaining it. I wouldn't say it was a useless subject by the way, but in any case a link between popularity and usefulness seems to be shaky when I see 5 times the number of A-level entries for psychology and sociology (combined) versus French/German/Spanish (combined)... Psychology and Sociology are highly popular subjects with AQA, I wonder why. They are certainly not the most popular subjects combination according to this study from University of Cambridge, Biology, Chemistry and Maths www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/140668-popularity-of-a-level-subjects-among-uk-university-students.pdfThe link you posted is a report from 2013, though. I was referring to 2020 data which came out last week in schoolsweek - England only ( link here).
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benaj
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Post by benaj on Aug 20, 2020 18:03:31 GMT
What I am trying to say, those secondary school with russell group uni leavers don’t offer psychology and sociology at sixth forms.
Where do schools offering those subjects find the teachers anyway? why the popularity?
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benaj
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Post by benaj on Aug 20, 2020 18:12:14 GMT
UK needs a serious rethink about education. The last Chinese leaders have studied engineering at top university in China.
we certainly can’t afford of have decades with leaders who just read Classics
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IFISAcava
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Post by IFISAcava on Aug 20, 2020 22:43:22 GMT
You obviously haven't been hanging out much with anxious and/or angry parents. Continuing with the exams would have been even worse, hard though that may be to believe, and drawn out over several months. I can’t fathom why external exams were cancelled. The final term in exam year is typically roughly first 1/4 school lessons, second 1/4 mostly work from home revising on exam leave, third 1/4 exams, last quarter demob happy. I can’t speak for all parents but were I to have been in that situation I’d have preferred my child to sit the exams even if it meant no school in the last term other than exams. I think that’s the biggest blunder; not treating Y11 and Y13 as the only years that would soldier on largely as normal when normal is annually studying from home and socially distant exam sitting. A savvy government could have easily sold that strategy to the nation. In the face of heavy resistance a partial cave-in to cancel GCSEs would have been a reasonable trade off and a manageable sacrifice. A levels should never have been cancelled. As it is I’m only aware of one faculty within one university that had the foresight to refuse to get caught up in the no-exams blunder. The STEP papers two and three WEREN’T cancelled by Cambridge and as a result Cambridge Maths 2020 cohort will have been as rigorously selected as per previous years. Good to see that a 500 year tradition of continuous rigorous thinking at all times without exception wasn’t sacrificed on the altar of half-baked COVID hysteria. You're taking a rational approach, when emotionality rules. Half the parents would not have let their children attend the exams because of fears for the kids/their families getting COVID, and would have raised hell until the exams were cancelled. I am a parent of school age kids and was frankly astounded at the levels of fear, anxiety and dare I say hysteria that many other parents showed.
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carolus
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Post by carolus on Aug 21, 2020 8:19:05 GMT
You obviously haven't been hanging out much with anxious and/or angry parents. Continuing with the exams would have been even worse, hard though that may be to believe, and drawn out over several months. I can’t fathom why external exams were cancelled. The final term in exam year is typically roughly first 1/4 school lessons, second 1/4 mostly work from home revising on exam leave, third 1/4 exams, last quarter demob happy. I can’t speak for all parents but were I to have been in that situation I’d have preferred my child to sit the exams even if it meant no school in the last term other than exams. I think that’s the biggest blunder; not treating Y11 and Y13 as the only years that would soldier on largely as normal when normal is annually studying from home and socially distant exam sitting. A savvy government could have easily sold that strategy to the nation. In the face of heavy resistance a partial cave-in to cancel GCSEs would have been a reasonable trade off and a manageable sacrifice. A levels should never have been cancelled. As it is I’m only aware of one faculty within one university that had the foresight to refuse to get caught up in the no-exams blunder. The STEP papers two and three WEREN’T cancelled by Cambridge and as a result Cambridge Maths 2020 cohort will have been as rigorously selected as per previous years. Good to see that a 500 year tradition of continuous rigorous thinking at all times without exception wasn’t sacrificed on the altar of half-baked COVID hysteria. For what it's worth, STEP is a private exam, so wasn't caught by the cancellation of public exams. That said, it was still impacted. The papers that went ahead were sat online instead of in person. STEP is rather a special case, however, and I'm not sure that the circumstances that made it practical to go ahead with it online (small cohort, very specific purpose), would have been applicatble for the wider A-Levels and GCSEs. With regards to the wider point, I think it's worth bearing in mind that the decision on whether or not to go ahead with the exams was made back in March, when the situation was much less clear than now - there were certainly plausible trajectories that would have absolutely ruled out any hope of in person exams. I suspect the other concern might have been the impact of a long period of non-teaching and the differential impact that would have on different students/schools. In light of all that (and the logistical difficulties organising nationwide exams during covid, and practical difficulties with shielding families/students/etc), I'm not sure cancelling the exams was intrinsically unreasonable. All that said, it's pretty clear that the position we've ended up in is, to put it kindly, "chaos". So it'd hard to imagine there weren't better options than where we've actually ended up.
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Steerpike
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Post by Steerpike on Aug 21, 2020 8:54:31 GMT
The exams were cancelled because even if the Education Secretary had managed to face down resistance from teachers' unions, the MSM and Twitter would have crucified Gavin Williamson if even a single child contracted the virus.
So how did Germany achieve what for Britain was impossible?
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