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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."
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.
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!
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'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.
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."
Standards are not falling in private schools
Which is why the NuLabour government is doing its best to get rid of private schools. There is a marked and increasing difference in standards, and levelling down is so much easier than levelling up.
A while ago, the UK government's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) fined 50 leading private schools a total of GBP3.5 million (about $5.25 million) for exchanging information about the fees they were charging. See, for instance, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1511429/50-public-schools-fined-for-fixing-their-fees.html
Note that in the UK, "public school" means a particular type of private (independent, non-state) school. The name was adopted before there was any state-run education in the modern sense, so it was logical in its day.
The irony is that most (all, AFAIK) of those schools have charitable status - they are "not-for-profit", so that the fees they charge merely pay their costs. No one is getting rich from running those schools. Moreover, the fine of about $100,000 per school could only be paid by increasing the fees!
Obviously, the purported motive of the fines - to stop the schools colluding to distort trade, reduce competition, and raise prices - was not applicable in the case of the public schools. What could be more ridiculous than fining a bunch of charities for not being competitive enough, when none of them makes a profit?
It's even stranger when you reflect that the body doing the fining - the UK government - forces all children who do not attend independent schools to go into its own state education system, which offers no competition at all. Moreover, competition law does not seem to apply to transport (where big companies enjoy state-granted monopolies), TV (where Sky has a monopoly in satellite and Virgin in cable), or banking (in which, as we have recently noticed, there has hardly been any regulation at all).
It seems pretty obvious that the motive for the investigation and subsequent fines could only have been to damage the public schools' reputation and financial status. As it had to be passed on to the parents, it was really a fine on them for daring to avoid the state education system. In itself, this attack has apparently not forced any of the schools to close (yet), but the government and its supporters live in hope.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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.
Nice Post. I couldn't agree more.
I'm an English teacher at a good school, but even here, we are forced, not just from administration, but more diffused social pressure, to make sure our scores are good, even though we know the tests are flawed.
The problem with education is it has become a political issue, which means we keep slathering nice pretty paint on a school building that's rotting away from the inside.
I'm afraid the whole system will have to collapse before we begin actually fixing it.
An important change for 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.
... 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.
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
Here's my answer:
The Electron finds itself full of negativity, despite feeling an attraction toward the Proton; however, the Proton is distant and closely attached to the Neutron, and the Electron uncertain about itself, possibly on account of constant travel. Sometimes an outside influence, which feels like a flash of light, raises it to new spheres, so to speak, and at those times it is full of energy, but the feeling is short-lived and dissipates in a radiant burst of activity, and the usual negativity resumes.
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).