Bacca's Cancelled

[Bazile]

I see the government has done a U turn on the proposed Baccalaureate Certificates and is returning to GCSE's - with a slight tweak .

1. Good thing or Bad Thing ?

2. Were kids being better educated under the O'level system ?

3. Mr Gove wanted '' more rigorous exams in some core subjects from 2015 ''

Does this mean that GCSE's will now remain rigourless ?

[andy-hughes]

I am sure that if you visit the houses of successive Educatiion Ministers from the Thatcher administration onwards, you will notice a common factor - their gardens have nothing growing in them.

Why?

Because they are incapable of letting anything stay in polace long enough to bed down and grow without moving it, changing it, abandoning it, replacing it, or ignoring it - all without any consultation with anyone who may know something about what they are doing.

How do I know this?

Becuase that's how they treat the education system in the country - as though it's a supermarket in a price war, a vote-catcher, something to make a mark in history with - in fact anything except the pricelss commodity it is - the future of our society.

[Bazile]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21363396

[Sqad]

andy.....;-)

I think that the great problem with the Baccalaureate would have been that it would have taken the average UK pupil at least two terms to spell it.
Nearly all can manage GCSE after only a few weeks.

[Zeuhl]

Baccalaureate's some kind of orgy isn't it?

No problem ....

[DJHawkes]

I thought this was about football, is that barca?

[cazzz1975]

from what I have seen of secondary education, there needs to be a big improvement in the standards of teaching.

[NOX]

Individual subjects should have individual exams, because if you have no interest in Geography but are wildly interested in History for example and it all gets lumped into a one size fits all exam for Humanitiies then you'll get pupil after pupil failing miserably and being unable to show that they shine in a specific area, so I think GCSE's work just fine however i'd like to see an improvement in teaching standards but that involves teaching being a vocation rather than soemthing you can do if all else fails because the money morale and conditions are crap.

[Old_Geezer]

I'm glad the education was as it was in my day. Separate subjects that you didn't lose marks for as the year progressed. A period at the end when you had time to ensure you really did understand it, and a period when you proved you had in the examination room. Worked well for me, I'd never have shone under a different teaching method. And as someone not involved in education after leaving it, it still concerns me that the difficulty of exam questions seem to have dropped through the floor. That can't be a good thing. I'm not saying the system I went through was perfect. My school still insisted I waste my effort on a non science subject so I had to drop one, but I guess it's not easy to sort out timetables for all pupils to do what they are really interested in. Still don't know what my knowledge of ox bow lakes will eventually do for me.

[jake-the-peg]

1/ Bad

2/ No - The 'O' level system was actually the O-Level and CSE system

(remember the CSE's ? - they were what you were put in for if you weren't going to pass an O level)

GCSEs are split into an easier paper where C is the maximum available grade and a higher paper

A common trick practiced on the gullible by newspapers is to compare O leve questions with lower grade GCSE papers to "show" how much more difficult they were.

They conveniently forget CSEs

3/ No this question is predicated on the notion Gove is right and that core GCSE's are without rigour.

Again Mischief makers are at work - GCSE questions have a range of difficulty ranging from very easy to difficult - You can pick the easy ones to support a biased argument

Here's an example these are two questions from the same Maths paper.

Write in figures the number forty six thousand and nine

A computer is reduced in price from £500 to £379 pounds what is the percentage decrease?

Both of these are from the Foundation paper

Obviously it's easy to pick the first and bandy it about as dumbing down

So here's a question from the higher paper

Simplify fully 6x²+x-1/(4x²-1)

Do you think that last question lacks rigour?

Feel free to explain the answer to us

[jake-the-peg]

BTW wrt part 1

The idea was the bad thing the fact that he rapidly accepted the proposal was flawed and backed down was a good thing.

I won't criticise someone for rapidly accepting an error and changing his mind - even Gove

[weecalf]

is education not just to important to let any goverment near it

[FredPuli43]

OG, you didn't mention cwm and oolitic limestone ! (Which comprise the whole of my gleanings from Geography)

Since the introduction of the exams, the grades achieved in GCSEs rose every year until last year. Patently the exams are not hard enough.

Were we better educated? Only in that we were required to know more and in more depth; the exams were harder and less susceptible to teaching to the test. But we did abandon subjects, whole areas of knowledge, at 16, to specialise. (It occurs to me that, as a result, I could read Newton in the original Latin but not understand the slightest bit of the maths!) The true 'Bac' would go some way to avoiding that (not that Gove proposes it), because students are compelled to read and learn more widely and for longer. New Scientist complains all the time, and with good reason, that our MPs and leaders are woefully ignorant about science.

[zebo]

jake-the-peg, your simplification example needs a bracket round the top expression, to indicate that the whole term is divided by the bottom expression! I assume you want (3x-1)/(2x-1)