Exam Changes
<strong>Exam Changes</strong>
<strong> </strong>The press gets excited about A Level and GCSE exams each summer, and loves to print stories about exam pressure and administrative mistakes, and to speculate about grades. Will they go up or down? During my Half-Term, I have a little more time than usual to read the newspapers, and I was slightly alarmed to read that the exam regulator, Ofqual, was writing to headteachers warning of greater ‘variation’ in marks this summer owing to the new examinations being sat both at GCSE and at A Level. So should we be worried?
The short answer is that the Grammar School is more confident about the reliability of A Level grading than it is with the GCSE. A Level reforms have been spread over 3 years, and we already had in Summer 2017 our first set of results with the new exams. Ofqual always promised that the distribution of grades would not change with the introduction of new qualifications. You will no doubt recall that LGS had its best A Level results for five years last summer, and I am pleased to report that there were no nasty shocks for us. Politically, it is essential that grades do not fundamentally change at A Level either positively or negatively. With university places relying on the grades achieved, the government would suffer huge criticism if students’ futures are derailed by a change to A Level grading. The Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (of which LGS is a member) is confident that we will be able to rely on the results of the overall school cohort. This does not necessarily mean that there won’t be a paper, or subject where boys have suffered from ‘rogue marking’ and we will be very attentive to any inexplicable patterns in results.
With the new A Level, however, individual boys may perform very differently to their school prediction. With the old A Level (prior to 2017), half of the exams were sat in Year 12. It was therefore easier for Grammar School teachers to predict boys’ final grades, as they were going into their exams with half of the marks already ‘in the bag’. Now, everything depends on the work of a few days in June of Year 13. I don’t necessarily agree that this is fair, but this is what Government determined was the best way to assess students’ attainment. In conclusion then, I expect A Level results to be fair if a little more unpredictable on the level of the individual.
At GCSE, everything is changing. There was widespread dissatisfaction with the ‘old’ GCSEs, which had led LGS, in common with most independent schools, to move to the International (I)GCSE in many subjects. It was felt that they did not prepare pupils adequately for further study, particularly through the preponderance of ‘Controlled Assessment’ that required pupils to spend hours of lesson time being tested rather than taught. In addition, critics pointed to grade inflation as having led to an erosion of standards. It is true that the proportion of A* nationally almost trebled between their introduction in 1994 and 2011. Although Ofqual had started to reverse grade inflation (the percentage of top grades declined between 2011 and 2016), it was felt that a break with the grading system was required to recalibrate standards.
<table width=”0″>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td width=”56″><strong>New</strong></td>
<td width=”57″><strong>9</strong></td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”57″><strong>8</strong></td>
<td width=”57″><strong>7</strong></td>
<td width=”66″><strong>6</strong></td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”66″><strong>5</strong></td>
<td width=”76″><strong>4</strong></td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”101″><strong>3</strong></td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”95″><strong>2</strong></td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”104″><strong>1</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width=”56″>Old</td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”85″>A*</td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”85″>A</td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”104″>B</td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”104″>C</td>
<td width=”72″>D</td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”76″>E</td>
<td colspan=”2″ width=”76″>F</td>
<td width=”76″>G</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width=”56″></td>
<td width=”57″></td>
<td width=”28″></td>
<td width=”28″></td>
<td width=”57″></td>
<td width=”66″></td>
<td width=”38″></td>
<td width=”28″></td>
<td width=”76″></td>
<td width=”72″></td>
<td width=”28″></td>
<td width=”47″></td>
<td width=”47″></td>
<td width=”28″></td>
<td width=”76″></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
The table above is a reminder of the new currency at GCSE. Although schools have been told that grades 7-9 replace the old A and A*, we cannot be sure that there will be a direct equivalence because of the political desire to reduce the number of top grades. Last summer, English was ahead of the game in introducing the new GCSEs a year early. At LGS, we were encouraged to receive more grade 9s than we had expected, but unfortunately, there were also more grade 4s – it seemed that examiners wanted to spread the scale out more than had previously been the case.
I have used the word ‘political’ again, because we can’t forget that education is political, even outside the maintained sector. Although I don’t want to worry Year 11 boys finishing their GCSEs, it is possible that we will see a reduction in the proportion of top grades to make the political point that standards have increased, and that students and schools are going to have to work harder. I should nevertheless reassure boys and parents that this will not make it more difficult to get into university. Universities are currently in the dark about the new GCSE standards, and will be watching results very carefully this summer in order to decide on their policy for future recruitment. Higher Education is a buyers’ market at the moment, and universities will not set ridiculously high GCSE matriculation standards. Universities need your children’s fees!
It is true that Year 11 boys have expressed surprised in recent weeks over the difficulty of certain papers, not least one of the Mathematics exams. I was relieved to find that other HMC schools were in the same boat, and I really hope that exam boards have not gone too far in creating exams that put students off taking a particular subject at A Level. If our highly numerate pupils are finding Maths GCSE hard, what about the rest of the country?