In the case of English Literature – which I studied at school and university, and have taught in the classroom and as a tutor for the past 10 years – there has been a transformation in both the books studied and the critical approaches adopted. My conclusion, having studied syllabuses and exam papers at O-level/GCSE and A-level going back about 30 years, is that the subject used to be considerably more stretching than it is now...Much more in an op-ed piece at The Telegraph.
After reading a dozen or so papers, it seems to me unarguable that the old JMB O-level was a superior exam to the modern GCSE (first introduced in 1986). And the Oxford board O-level, I discovered, was tougher even than the modern A-level. The paper was a simplified version of the exam the university set its undergraduates, and students were required to translate lines from Chaucer. The Oxford A-level was commensurately superior and clearly designed as a stepping stone to an elite university. It contained three long extracts from Shakespeare (mainly the tragedies, but also romances and histories). Questions often consisted of a great critic quoted on a great author: Johnson on Milton or Eliot on Marvell...
The form of the exams is also measurably easier. The exams are shorter than they were: O-level papers used to be three hours long; A-levels now often take two hours. Where once you were forbidden from taking your copy of the text into the exam (I can hear the intake of breath from current students), you can now bring in marked-up books with notes and underlined quotations...
Plagiarism is rife and some students order custom-written essays from the internet. Five per cent of the exam is supposed to be allocated for Sag (the unlovely acronym for Spelling and Grammar), though one examiner I spoke to said that this is quietly ignored whenever the results need an artificial boost. The result of all this? At both GCSE and A-level, nearly a quarter of students are awarded an A or A*...
Good grief! Even in England they're dumbing down the education of their young 'uns.
ReplyDeleteI was a part of the penultimate school year to take the old JMB O-Level exams in 1986. A couple of years later our A-level chemistry teacher showed us the first GCSE paper. One of the questions on the multiple choice paper was a picture of a bunsen burner with "Identify this piece of lab equipment." We laughed at the time. I'd imagine now we have children of our own, most of us have stopped laughing.
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