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GCSE Results - good luck if you're getting yours today!

Edie said:
Hopefully everyone can just realise that the exams ARE harder, but kids ARE doing better cos they ARE smarter and they DO work harder than we did before them. My son excepted, cos he’s a silly little knobhed who mucks about cos he hates school and thinks he’s gonna charm money out of thin air in life :facepalm:
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I'm not sure whether you're serious or not. :confused:
 
Fozzie Bear said:
My daughter got all 9s in her GCSE's which slightly undermines my point about Gove being a cunt. :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:

Fair play to her, she doesn't get that from me. :D

Bit speechless to be honest.
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No it doesn't Gove is definitely a cunt, all this has proved is that your daughter is intelligent
 
The SGD (who's in Year 9) did a bit of her science GCSE (possibly biology) this year, which seems terribly early. She got 83%, which represents a C and was the maximum possible grade she could achieve.

She is very pleased. She will probably be less pleased to discover (as she surely will) that I do not consider it appropriate to reward good exam grades with money :D
 
Edie said:
Hopefully everyone can just realise that the exams ARE harder, but kids ARE doing better cos they ARE smarter and they DO work harder than we did before them. My son excepted, cos he’s a silly little knobhed who mucks about cos he hates school and thinks he’s gonna charm money out of thin air in life :facepalm:
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Mrs MickiQ who is a secondary maths teachers hates with a passion (second only to the one with which she hates Gove) people who go on the TV and "say look at me I left school with nothing and now I am a videogamer/reality star/youtube celeb/(add your pet hate) earning £000's a week". She reckons she has seen to many kids who could get good grades who haven't bothered because they were blinded by the thought of easy success.
She made a load of cupcakes this morning to bribe her class into telling her their results and went to school about 11ish along with our 16 yr old whose GCSE results are due today.
So far I haven't heard, whether this is because they're too busy, don't know or are trying to work out how to break it to me I don't know.
 
My son is due his IT exam results today but isn't bothered about finding out his results today. He says he'll find out when he goes back to school.

He's entering year 11 and from his mocks it's clear that he needs help with his maths and English. I've signed him up with a tutor once a week and apparently I've ruined the summer holidays. :thumbs:
 
The women of the household have returned home, it seems that following a simple instruction like "Text your Dad and tell him your results" is harder to achieve than being one of the only four kids in the year to get a 9 in Maths
She has a 9, 4x8's, 3x7's and 2x6's
Didn't bring any of the cupcakes back with them, the teachers snaffled those that the kids didn't
 
Edie said:
About the exams or my son? Why wouldn’t I be serious?!
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About the kids being smarter.I don't happen to know whether exams are easier or more difficult or much the same, and the pupils might very well work harder than I ever did, but I'm not sure that kids "ARE smarter". Is the whole human race becoming more intelligent with each generation?

Anyway, you're probably not *really* serious about your son being a silly knobhead. :D
Edie said:
Hopefully everyone can just realise that the exams ARE harder, but kids ARE doing better cos they ARE smarter and they DO work harder than we did before them. My son excepted, cos he’s a silly little knobhed who mucks about cos he hates school and thinks he’s gonna charm money out of thin air in life :facepalm:
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Celyn said:
About the kids being smarter.I don't happen to know whether exams are easier or more difficult or much the same, and the pupils might very well work harder than I ever did, but I'm not sure that kids "ARE smarter". Is the whole human race becoming more intelligent with each generation?

Anyway, you're probably not *really* serious about your son being a silly knobhead. :D
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Curiously, that’s exactly what IS happening. By 3-4 IQ points per decade. It’s called the Flynn Effect. Although I don’t know how much of exam grade improvement it accounts for, as I think both teaching and effort have increased too.

I’m also perfectly serious about my son. He’s an immature little dick who gives his teachers gip and thinks he’ll style through life with a quick wit and hard graft (once money is involved). That remains to be seen.
 
MickiQ said:
I take it she is a mature student?
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in her 50's - did it in a year - very impressed as she has appeared numberlexic to me since I met her - it just made no 'sense' to her, until now.

There's a chance of VR @ work so she needed to get Maths to apply for most other jobs (these days) despite being a professional in her field for 20+ years(which doesn't need maths)
 
Edie said:
Curiously, that’s exactly what IS happening. By 3-4 IQ points per decade. It’s called the Flynn Effect. Although I don’t know how much of exam grade improvement it accounts for, as I think both teaching and effort have increased too.

I’m also perfectly serious about my son. He’s an immature little dick who gives his teachers gip and thinks he’ll style through life with a quick wit and hard graft (once money is involved). That remains to be seen.
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I get the impression that the Flynn Effect is not uncontroversial, but I can't access any of the studies. I must admit, it seems to fly in the face of most of the assumptions I make about human psychology, so I'm going to be interested to find out more. Any links most welcome :)
 
existentialist said:
I get the impression that the Flynn Effect is not uncontroversial, but I can't access any of the studies. I must admit, it seems to fly in the face of most of the assumptions I make about human psychology, so I'm going to be interested to find out more. Any links most welcome :)
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Am no expert mate, just something I’ve come across in passing
 
Edie said:
Curiously, that’s exactly what IS happening. By 3-4 IQ points per decade. It’s called the Flynn Effect. Although I don’t know how much of exam grade improvement it accounts for, as I think both teaching and effort have increased too.
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That's interesting. Not sure I'm intelligent enough to take in even the Wiki article on it. BUT, apparently we might be getting stupider in Britain.
Research suggests that there is an ongoing reversed Flynn effect, i.e. a decline in IQ scores, in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, France and German-speaking countries,[4] a development which appears to have started in the 1990s.[5][6][7][8]
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Oh woe. :(:(:(
Edie said:
I’m also perfectly serious about my son. He’s an immature little dick who gives his teachers gip and thinks he’ll style through life with a quick wit and hard graft (once money is involved). That remains to be seen.
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He probably WILL manage very well with the quick wit and hard graft. I envy him already. And I'm sure your earlier post mentioned "charm" too. Yep, a born winner, I'd say. :D
 
Edie said:
Am no expert mate, just something I’ve come across in passing
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I do suspect that a lot of what this is down to is that we are getting better at doing IQ tests, rather than there being an objectively observable change in intelligence per se.

The whole question of what "intelligence" constitutes is, in any case, a rather vexed question, and one that is increasingly tending to be seen as rather societally and artificially constructed.

I think the same argument probably applies to GCSEs et al - my experience working in schools leads me to some dark suspicions that any improvements in the education we are giving our children are, essentially, in the field of training them to perform better in the very specific, and not terribly real-world, task of regurgitating information in order to pass examinations. My perception is that we have actually gone quite a long way backwards in critical thinking and reasoning skills, overall, certainly in terms of under-18 education. I could be wrong: it's a subjective impression, though is borne out by conversations I've had with teachers and other professions, but I certainly don't find the mere escalation of grade achievements in itself anything to be excited about.
 
I’m on holiday so I am buggered if I’m getting into a bun fight. But, having worked in education for some years now, it is my strong opinion some exams are getting a lot easier. And here’s how.

In the past, many exams required long form essay answers. Very few now do. Here is an article from today’s Guardian that gives actual exam questions for you to try. In the comments section below the author of the piece actually says “it’s a selection of long form essay questions”.

How tough are GCSEs? Try our exam questions

Long form? Many of these questions are expected to be answered in a handful of minutes. The psychology one even asks you to evaluate a study of aggressive behaviour...in seven minutes. In my experience, this is typical of exams these days. Lots of short questions for small marks, that all add up. If you look at that article you’ll see the longest question is from an English Literature paper. The paper is 2.5 hours long. At my last school, a school of 1500 pupils, there were four students who took English Literature. This is not a coincidence I feel.

A* and now 9,8,7 were invented for a reason. It’s not because we suddenly had more and more bright kids who needed differentiation in marking to show the outstanding ones. It’s because we started overmarking exam grades, to the detriment of those bright kids who were now getting the same marks as kids who previously got what we called Bs.

Exams are now shorter, in all ways, not harder.

(There is a caveat to this. Many science exams are unchanged. But you have a look at the difference now between a Maths GCSE - or a numeracy one as we’ve suddenly decided pupils can have two Maths GCSEs - and any Maths GCE A level. The difference is enormous. And to get even a B, on the Maths GCSE intermediate paper, requires no actual Mathematical conceptual knowledge at all.)
 
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