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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."
Hard numerical questions are jobs for spreadsheets and Ti-89s
fuck all this learning must be fun horse shit, making learning fun hasn't helped anyone actually learn. maybe this recession will be a good thing, you have an entire spoilt generation out there who think they don't actually need to learn anything in order to make it through life.
The universities cant let their standards slip...
Oh yes, they can, oh yes! Being a postgraduate student at one UK university and seeing how the exams are graded and later how the results are scaled and how low the level of difficulty of exam questions has become...
Oh yes, they can lover the standards!
Even bright students with enthusiastic teachers are being compelled to "learn to the test", answering undemanding questions to satisfy the needs of league tables and national targets
I have to say, that aside from less quantifiable testing (ie essay based) the mentality of "study the test" is prevalent everywhere, even in higher education. I'm sure that if it were not, the pass rate would be attrocious and consequently, for many schools/institutions: "Goodbye tuition fees".
I record my sleeptalking
Science is incredibly maths based, how can you expect to be in any way competent in a related job after school, if you've spent your entire education doing simplified unrealistic tasks? Its like essay subjects such as history and geography saying you don't need to be able to write in clear English.
... in the UK is that young people now care more about who is going to win X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent than own performance at school.
And when you can just show up for an audition to a TV program, do a little dance and become rich and famous overnight, why on earth would you want an education?
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Everyone without a personal axe to grind is agreed that standards have declined - hell, university textbooks have had to be rewritten to match the lower standard of modern beginning students.
But the truly sinister aspect of this is not so much the decline in standards as the Government's bare-faced blank denials that there is a problem at all.
It's difficult to treat a patient who won't even admit that he's ill.
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
My early 90s Chemistry GSCE contained questions about chemical reactions.
Modern "chemistry" GCSE containst questions like "Which one of these is a bunsen burner".
The govt stonewalls any discussion of this year after year but the truth is exams are becoming trivially easy, content of syllabuses is being axed yearly and we are developing a nation of idiots - albiet apparently intentionally.
See for yourself. Google GSCE/A Level past papers (all in the public domain). Pick last years. Pick one from 15 years ago and recoil in horror. We have 16/17 year olds finishing school with the same level of academic knowledge that 13 year olds used to have in the 80s. Its there for every science, and maths too.
I'm sick of this "Kids in the 1950s were smarter than today" rubbish. I know that these old accidemics studied back then and want to feel smart but making kids feel dumb today is wrong and they should feel ashamaned.
Let me break it down for them and you:
- Kids in the 1950s did not study what we study today
- Kids today did not study what kids studied back in the 1950s
I know this is a shocking revolation but still true. If possible I would love to see what would happen if you sat a 1950s kid down in front of a 2008 exam, my guess is the results would be similar.
The only school subject which might be the same between the 1950s and today is Maths. But even then there is less focus on doing long calculations on the page and more using a calculator.
You can claim that doing them on the calculator is dumbing people down but I think voluntarily spending five minutes and likely introducing errors already makes you fairly dumb given an alternative.
First, let's get one thing straight.
This is not an argument anyone in a position of power can possibly win. More students fail? Your teaching standards are falling, your education system is lousy. More students pass? Your exams are too easy.
So instead, let's look at what organisations which aren't obliged to follow the state-designed education system think.
Several universities are introducing entrance exams, whereas previously this was more-or-less exclusive to Oxford and Cambridge.
Several universities are having to introduce more basic maths into their first year syllabus to get students up to speed.
Private schools are seriously considering dropping the state-set exams (GCSEs and A-levels) in favour of something else such as the International Baccalaureate. I myself have looked at papers which were set only 5 or 6 years after I left school and exams which I should by rights have been completely lost on - I could immediately see how to answer at least half the questions.
On the other hand, a lot of countries in north Africa and the Middle East consider that education is the only way they're going to improve their lot in the long term. Tunisia, for example, spends a third of its money on education and children leave school speaking at least three languages reasonably fluently. Many of the Arab emirates are doing something similar - they know the oil's not going to be there forever, and they want to be prepared for the day the wells dry up. No chance they can do that if most of their population can hardly read.
As for China - if you think you can move all your manufacturing out there and the locals won't one day say to themselves "Hang on a minute. We own all the factories, we know exactly how to build the kind of things that they buy in the West - why don't we design them ourselves and keep all the money?" you're living on another planet.
20 years from now, the West isn't going to be the technical research place it is today.
Your friendly neighborhood anarcho-capitalist chiming in again.
I understand that people think that education is a right. I don't see it that way, but it's where we are today. If people want to socialize education, so be it. My problem is in the grading system.
If you were allowed to grade the work you do at the office, what would you give yourself? This is the problem with teachers also being graders. When you socialize learning, you never want to strive for the perfect straight A class, or the complete disaster total failure class. Ending up with a C average means you can moan for more money and staff and administration next year.
I would accept socialize teaching if we had completely private and competitive grading systems. Think of the ACT and the SAT, but on a per-class basis. Let teachers know what is required for each tier in terms of learning, and then let the teachers hammer that home.
With private, competitive grading systems, different future work industries might look for different scores or even different grading systems. The student can pay for the ones they need, and take those tests. The educators can focus on "educating," and the cost of grading isn't passed on to the taxpayer. Some students may just want a "Social Equivalency" exam, and most private graders would offer similar ones. Other higher level students might need specific exams, to get an interview, for example.
When you socialize learning AND grading, of course you're going to eventually dumb down the system. That's how these things work.
I spotted this years ago when I sat my A levels and GCSEs (back before you need UCAS points and actually needed "this number of As, this number of Bs etc).
I have a GCSE textbook from back when GCSEs were new - some of the questions in it relate to maths that is now not taught until A level. I have an O-level maths textbook too - it could substitute quite easily for a current A level textbook in some areas.
There's no doubt that the exams are getting easier, and perhaps calculus has no need to be on the GCSE maths exam (if the aim of the maths GCSE is to give every 16 year old basic understanding of maths to help them in the real world), and belongs in the A level syllabus instead, where it becomes more relevant to someone who may need to use it in a future field (like an engineering degree).
The trouble is, I think it's just slipping further and further down. I remember on my chemistry GCSE paper there was a photo of a car (an Austin Meastro!) that covered half of the page, with a question underneath that said "suggest a material that the windscreen could be made of (2)"
A silly enough question as it is, but 2 marks? Geez. A mark for laminated, a mark for glass perhaps? I have no idea.
I went to a selective school - called a "grammar school" - which took the top 20% of the population based on a mixed IQ/attainment test. I was then in the top set for maths and the three sciences - so that's the top 5%. In the last two years at school I was in special groups that were applying to Cambridge (our school was heavily science biased to did not have Oxford applicants, who had to do Latin)- the top 1% in maths and physics. If you failed the Cambridge Entrance there was always Durham, Imperial or University College London, or Sussex.
There is your explanation. The exams in the 60s were aimed at - let's call it an elite. In those days there were few distractions - hardly anything on television, no mobile phones, electronic gadgets were basically for nerds who were already into electronics, music was about playing instruments or listening to a few very expensive recordings, not the iPod generation, theatre was about the school theatre group or the local AmDram society if you were good enough. To be absolutely honest, if you were a nerd, and there were enough of us, school was actually the most interesting place to be, where really intelligent adults spent quite a lot of spare time encouraging those of us who were interested in their subjects.
Nowadays schools are expected to spread their teaching assets over the entire pupil list, and the children have far more things to think about outside school. Exams are taken by most children, not just around 15% in each subject. Of course the emphasis has changed.
But if you are one of the top few percent, you can still get the education you want. Despite going through the state system, my children and their friends still go to Oxbridge and the top tier universities, and they still emerge just as well educated as our generation ever did.
I don't think the problem is anything at all to do with exams. It is that society nowadays needs a higher percentage of technically educated people, but the media give the impression that the best opportunities for the bright are in banking, finance, law and celebrity culture. Most journalists are technically illiterate, and the rest follows.
As for maths, you are simply wrong through ignorance. My generation used calculators. They just were not electronic. We had Brunswiga mechanical calculators, mathematical tables (which are basically a hand operated calculator system) and slide rules. The knowledge of how to use them is obsolete, but the principle of assisted calculation is the same.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
.....as the Government's bare-faced blank denials that there is a problem at all....It's difficult to treat a patient who won't even admit that he's ill.
The govt. is not the patient here. The govt is what is causing this decline in standards to begin with.
The problem with most education systems is their assessment focus. If you create a heavy emphasis on rewards (gradings), you make students work the system rather than learning. That's basic organizational psychology. Assignments are especially demented, because they are so damn easy to cheat on. The good teachers can't cut back on assignments though, because their students focus on the subjects with the most assignments. That's suboptimization. Unfortunately, most politicians use "education" and "the attainment of pieces of paper" interchangeably (as do hungry educators), which perpetuates the myth that gradings are education.
So this is a unique opportunity to talk on /. and actually know what I'm on about.
I agree, the science exams we work towards these days are a pitiful shadow of what was taught in the past, and the slide is continuing.
Have a look yourself if you're interested:
http://www.ocr.org.uk/qualifications/gcse/index.html
This is our exam board at the moment. There are past papers and mark schemes etc so you can see what the kids get put up against.
Calculations have gone out of the window it seems, moved up to A-levels. That's why there is a massive drop off in A-levels - kids think that it's the same but as soon as they get a bit of real science to do, it's too hard.
We're all supposed to make science relevant etc. The courses are a joke and the science is a joke, filled with 'science for everyone'. The science of mobile phones to teach microwaves (plus discussion on phones causing brain tumours). Cooking potato as a first lesson in organic chemistry to check on texture and colour. I kid you not. Everything is a discussion and an opinion, with little right or wrong answers. They are expected to debate whether we should build nuclear power stations or not without (I'm not exaggerating here) useful knowledge of nuclear power, decent atomic structure, other forms of generation, pollution concerns, resource management or how electricity works. It's far too touchy feely with far too little rigorous intellectual content.
As a student who has just started an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Physics straight out of secondary school in the UK, I'd have to agree with the Royal Society. The exam boards revised the standards in examinations as recently as two years ago and I remember how disgusted most teachers I knew were by the low level at which they were suddenly expected to teach. When a 16 year is forced to learn the electromagnetic spectrum as the "Space Rainbow" because the concept is 'too hard to comprehend' then there's something wrong.
Most of my current friends took the International Baccalaureate, whereas I took A levels. The difference between their knowledge and mine is astounding even though I achieved good marks at A level and attended a selective and supposedly high standard grammar school. I consciously feel left behind in my studies compared to them, and I wish I had gotten out of the English education system earlier.
I think the exam boards are trying too hard to make the subjects that students fall down on in exams easier to understand. To make up for the extra content this requires, the harder material gets pushed out. Lack of understanding is not necessarily because the subject is too hard however; if that is the case then the students should not be studying it. I believe the fault lies in bad teaching and management of school resources by governors as well as lack of attention to individual student needs. Perhaps once these standards improve, overall expectations will too.
Odd thing is, I know a lot of kids, and the all work hard at their studies, help out on community programmes and generally behave very well. I don't suppose your view of kids might be based on the kids you notice rather than on the actual majority?
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Actually, private schools consistently get better grade averages because:
1. They select their intake
2. The parents take part in the kids education
3. They can permanently expel disruptive children
4. They can afford to employ the best teachers
5. They can afford to buy better facilities
6. They can afford to employ more teachers, so they have smaller class sizes.
I would guess that numbers 2 and 3 account for 90% of educational success.
In the U.S., #4 is incorrect. I'm not sure how things are in the UK. But in America, private schools pay less than public schools. Is that different from the UK? I believe the reasoning is that teaching in a private school is more desirable than teaching in a public school. Where I live, which has terrible terrible schools, teachers get paid higher. It's like hazard pay.
The problem here is cultural. We, at least here in the US and apparently in the UK as well, do not have a culture that places a high value on education in its own rite.
"Right". "Rite" in this context would be talking about rituals and magic, and I don't think we're discussing Hogwarts.
(On a more serious note, kids can get bullied horrifically basically for being clever, so I'd say that culture is a huge problem here. I have found university and most professions that being halfway good at what you are doing will tend to earn respect, but of course that doesn't help much for the first 13 years of education).
I think 1 is pretty important too
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
It's common sense that if exam grades go up the exams must be getting easier and if exam grades go down the students are more stupid and/or the teachers are incompetent. And for my next trick I shal demonstrate how chalk is so much better than cheese.
How I love common sense
The govt is what is causing this decline in standards to begin with.
or in other words, the current UK govt (and the previous Tory one) are the disease.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();