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Royal Society of Chemistry Slams UK Exam Standards
cheesethegreat writes "The Royal Society of Chemistry has sharply criticized the 'catastrophically' falling standards for UK school exams in the sciences. The RSC had 1,300 highly achieving students take an exam made up of questions taken from the last 50 years. The students averaged an appalling 15% on 'hard' numerical questions set in the 1960s, but managing much higher marks on the more recent 'soft' non-numerical questions. This latest report has garnered mainstream media attention. The RSC has also created a petition on the UK Prime Minister's official website, calling for urgent intervention to halt the slide, which has garnered over 3,000 signatures. The issue of declining exam standards has been an ongoing concern in the UK, with allegations that exam results have been manipulated by the government to increase pass rates and meet its own targets."
its well known in the uk that exam standards have been falling year after year, exam boards make their exams slightly easier, so that the students taking that one get better grades, so more people use that board over one of their competitors, and its just a downward spiral, its ruining our education, universities are having to work harder and harder to teach students what they would have come in knowing a few years ago. The universities cant let their standards slip so it just gets harder and harder for the students that actually go to university, while making those who stop at a-level seem better than they really are compared to those who sat the 'same' exams a few years ago
Keep numerical questions for the maths exams.
You're clearly a complete idiot. Without mathematics, chemistry and physics become meaningless qualitative handwaving. Without mathematics, it is impossible to interpret the results of an experiment, or even to demonstrate that your experiment is measuring the think that you think it's measuring.
If you think that science is in anyway separable from mathematics, I can only come to the conclusion that you know nothing of science.
Pirate Party UK
I would give you points if I had any.
I can only speak for this side of the pond, since I'm not well versed in UK testing, but I specialize in educational assessment and the quality of state-sponsored standardized assessments are far below acceptable. Most schools will use expensive, well made psychometric assessments when they work with students with "special needs"; university admissions board require students to spend hundreds of dollars taking similarly high-quality exams; but when a state needs a "math" test, they contract it out to the lowest bidder and get what they pay for.
New York State, for example, has used norm-reference testing techniques (determining the passing score base on group mean) for what is a criterion-reference achievement test (8th grade Math A). The publisher's "technical report" also reported the exam scores to be bi-dimensional (per a principal component analysis), but that the two factors together only explained 20% of the total variance! They excused this by quoting an IRT theorist out of context. (The theorist was explaining when unidimensionality was acceptable in meeting the assumptions of IRT, NOT when unidimensionality was acceptable in a general sense.)
All this is to say that we have the know-how and the skills to create meaningful, educationally useful assessments that don't sacrifice the traditional qualities of score reliability or the validity of those scores' intended interpretations. The problem is that people in the government a) don't have those skills, b) refuse to talk with those of use who do(1), and c) are being blinding by the publishers who want to get a ROI for their test.
(1) Yes, I've tried to bring it up.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
the student who knows when to use which abstract concept can delegate the algorithmic work to a computer algebra system.
Sometimes. However, except for the trivial integrations of "find the volume of such-and-such", integrations actually done in the sciences are much trickier, and rarely do computers help a whole lot. Mostly, one does approximations based on polynomial expansions. Many CASs can do approximations, but it takes a lot of insight by the programmer/user to know when to truncate them, how to further simplify the truncations, when to use the "simplest" version that a CAS returns and when to retain certain complexities, and so on. And all of that takes an intimate understanding of what the hell is going on. You don't get that from asking a computer to do the algorithmic work.
... and I didn't really see that great a range in difficulty. They were all fairly straightforward, which is of course what you'd expect in a high school chemistry exam. The main differences I could see were that the more recent questions had a greater percentage of descriptive (non-numeric) questions. It was actually the questions from 1975 which had the greatest percentage of multiple-choice answers.
I suspect a lot of the difference in the students' results is from teaching to the test - they did well on the 2005 questions, because those are (in terms of phrasing and presentation) the ones they were taught to answer.
I am 15 and currently studying Standard Grade (thats our equivelant grade to GCSE up in scotland) and I am simply exasperrated by the current system. Everything is based around passing the Standard Grade tests, not actually learning anything. Being that I am posting this on slashdot I obviously am into computers and would like to do sys admin. However computing is a joke. There are people leaving schools every year thinknig they know about computers.
For example when we did hardware, the teacher regards the CPU as the Processor, RAM and some other daft totally untechnical name that bassically meant the northbridge and all interconnects. When i tried to say its not i was actually sent to the head of arguing.
This happens in all subjects. Infact maths is the worst subject for it. Im good with maths, top class, etc,,, but a couple of weeks back i asked this:
myself: "Just out of interest, what do we actually need to learn this for?" *in an enquisitive tone*
teacher: "To pass your exam"
myself: "Well ye, but what actually would this be used for" *actually asking out of interest*
teacher: "You need to understand it to pass your exam"
What disgusts me is that my teacher cannot point a single practical use for what we were doing. If so, whats the point in the need for us to learn this at all?
Stuff gets shuffled. Back in the 50s there was a lot more focus on geometry: I did as much maths as was possible at school (2 A-levels and an AS) and I'm sure I didn't cover nearly as much geometry as my mother. In fact, I doubt I covered 10% of Euclid. On the other hand, she was surprised that group theory had moved into the A-level syllabus - she didn't encounter it before university - and the two "discrete mathematics" modules I took covered topics such as graph theory which were research material in the late 50s and early 60s. (Dijkstra's algorithm, by way of example, was invented in 1959 if Wikipedia can be believed).
The French Baccalaureate is not the same as the International Baccalaureate. (Although, having complete the IB program, I do not have many good things to say about it's science standards and offerings.)
Frosty piss posts are worthless, GNAA posts are worthless and hurtful, but they are the least of this site's neuroses.
The Charities Act 2006 brought in new rules, stating that a "charity" has to be operated for the public good, rather than merely being a non-profit organisation. This isn't specific to private schools, but also affects religious organisations etc. To many, it seems absurd that someone could gain charitable status for an organisation that is set up to only benefit certain racial, religious or social groups, and it is true that charitable status was being used by some as a blatant tax dodge.
"Under the 2006 Charities Act, for the first time all charities - including charities which advance education or religion, or relieve poverty - must show they are established for the public benefit. The Act gives the Commission, as the independent regulator, responsibility for raising awareness about the public benefit requirement and carrying out public benefit checks on charities" (Charity Commission, 2007, p.1).
It is hard to see how a school that generates an income of tens of millions of pounds a year from the wealthiest families in society, like Eton, is run for the public good. Certainly, it is hard to see why it should be given the same tax breaks as a real charity that, say, provides care and support for children with cancer.
And the changes aren't opposed by everyone in the private school system - "Jonathan Shephard, general secretary of the Independent Schools Council, said he could find 'no quarrel with the principles set out'". (source)
What exactly is wrong with a charity having to show that it does some work to benefit the public good? Otherwise there would be no difference between a charity and a NFP organisation, and every small business owner would be registering as a "charity" for the tax breaks (NFP status doesn't mean you can't pay employees whatever you wish, it just means the parent organisation should break even at the end of the year).
Not sure what they mean by "Instead, they are doing the completely different, and more rigorous, International GCSEs, which are still in demand in Commonwealth countries."
It's a reference to the IGCSEs which are still in demand from countries which use the UK to provide their exams. Presumably the education system in Australia is large enough that you don't need to buy exams in from outside.
I have experience of only the maths IGCSE. It's much more like the old maths O-level. It's widely used in UK independent school because it's seen as being a better test of students' ability. The government won't allow it to be used in state schools for the same reason.
The year after I started teaching (summer 2004) the pass mark for the EdExcel higher level GCSE maths exam was, wait for it... 13.5% It would have had to be even lower to meet the government's required pass rate if there hadn't been coursework to massage the figures with.