Lower Standards?

[Lonan3]

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High-flying GCSE students set for an A or A* pass scored zero points in a mock science exam which included old O-level questions.

The two-hour exam, devised by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and named "The Five Decade Challenge", included questions from past science papers spread over the past 43 years.

The results published today showed the older the paper, the fewer marks the students scored. For instance, the average score for the 2005 paper questions was 35 per cent, compared to 15 per cent for the 1965 questions.

Overall, the average score was 25 per cent but the RSC said some children scored no marks at all. The RSC called the test, taken by just over 1,300 of the country's brightest 16-year-olds, the first hard evidence of a "catastrophic slippage" in exam standards.

[Slim]

CLICK

 

High-flying GCSE students set for an A or A* pass scored zero points in a mock science exam which included old O-level questions.

The two-hour exam, devised by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and named "The Five Decade Challenge", included questions from past science papers spread over the past 43 years.

The results published today showed the older the paper, the fewer marks the students scored. For instance, the average score for the 2005 paper questions was 35 per cent, compared to 15 per cent for the 1965 questions.

Overall, the average score was 25 per cent but the RSC said some children scored no marks at all. The RSC called the test, taken by just over 1,300 of the country's brightest 16-year-olds, the first hard evidence of a "catastrophic slippage" in exam standards.

 

Wouldn't the older exams differ from what they'd studied in the previous year?

[Lonan3]

Despite taking into account syllabus changes which meant certain topics – such as enthalpy and bond energies – were not tackled until A-level, the results, it argued, provided conclusive proof that the papers had become easier.

[The Old Git]

Wouldn't the older exams differ from what they'd studied in the previous year?

 

I left school 44 years ago and haven't really studied anything since then. I could do the examples from the current paper quite easily but didn't have a clue about the older exam paper questions.

[La_Dolce_Vita]

Should they change the A-level and GCSE system or just make it harder? I don't understand why they don't continue to keep the level of difficulty the same every year. Maybe I don't know too much about how the modules are created.

[alph3]

Read the article on the bbc news site, and the RSC was saying that pupils are conditioned to memorise facts for tests, basically teaching for tests, and that few, if any, of the tested pupils had the required skills for applying problem solving and mathamatical techniques to find solutions to problems.

[Sebrof]

Should they change the A-level and GCSE system or just make it harder? I don't understand why they don't continue to keep the level of difficulty the same every year. Maybe I don't know too much about how the modules are created.

 

They make the papers/marking easier so that they can claim they are doing a good job with education.

 

It's one of the most egregious and damaging failures of this government.

 

S

[La_Dolce_Vita]

They make the papers/marking easier so that they can claim they are doing a good job with education.

 

It's one of the most egregious and damaging failures of this government.

 

Paper are definitely getting easier then? I don't understand why, when it has been in the news for so long, something is not done about it. But then again who has the power to make decisions over such things? Certainly not those flagging up the issue.

[Lonan3]

As long as politicians attempt to satisfy the aspirations of the voting public by producing meaningless targets and even more meaningless 'league tables,' the people who are charged with educating our youngsters will not have the freedom to do their jobs properly.

The only way to cover such a failure is to reduce standards to give the appearance of increased success.

It is not the fault of the students. It is not the fault of the teachers. It is not the fault of the schools.

It is entirely the fault of the politicians who made 'education' a cornerstone of the manifesto promisies that were always unrealistic.

[triskelion]

The whole basis for the above outrage seems to be the assumptions that a) education was better in the past and b) the aims and and requirements of an education have (of should have) remained constant.

 

Firstly, 50 years ago, what percentage of the population required academic qualifications in their employment? Excepting professionals, which were a smaller proportion of the work force than now, effectively none. The need for even high-school level-understanding of literacy, mathematics, history or chemistry is pretty minimal if you are going to spend your whole life working in the same factory/mine/etc. As a result, it didn't really matter that all but a tiny minority, an elite if you will, would pass the O-level exams to such an extent as to mark them out for further academic progress.

 

As the basis of the UK (and Manx, for that matter) economy has shifted away from the local jobs-for-life, there has been a need to make qualifications more accesible. Otherwise (bearing in mind that exams work on a 'past the post' system) you end up making people who could quite possibly do a job, having no evidence of such - a nation of technically under-qualified workers. This isn't the same as some one lacking certification to fix a boiler or operate heavy machinery. This whole debate risks over-emphasising the extent to which a school-based education opens doors for people.

 

A moron who spent his school years chatting about trials bikes with his mates rather than preparing for coursework or exams is not going to end up monitoring the core temperature at a nuclear powerplant, just because he got a 'C' for chemistry at GCSE.

 

And thus we get the bizarre paradox that the significance of a school-leavers' qualifications does in fact increase with the level of derision.

[VinnieK]

The whole basis for the above outrage seems to be the assumptions that a) education was better in the past and b) the aims and and requirements of an education have (of should have) remained constant.

 

That's the crucial point of this continuing debate. Twenty or thirty years ago, a study was done of British scientific qualifications (specifically mathematics) compared with those of other countries. Whilst it was found that the UK qualifications were significantly more difficult to attain than those of Japan, a further observation was that this meant that Japan had a larger pool of students who went on to study these subjects at an undergraduate level and hence significantly increased numbers of graduates who, whilst perhaps not being nobel material, were more than qualified to work in Japan's growing engineering and scientific sectors. By comparison, Britain was being left behind, and the implicit conclusion was that the expectations made by the British education system of its students were arbitrarly high, and that this was in fact helping to damage the UK's industries.

 

It's also interesting that in scientific research, the area where we'd expect declining educational stadards to have its most pronounced effect, the UK still performs very strongly compared with other nations despite the apparent catastrophe that we're told has taken place (punching well above its weight. In fact it's been more damaged by a lack of funding than it has students not having to cover this or that topic at this or that age).

[La_Dolce_Vita]

That's the crucial point of this continuing debate. Twenty or thirty years ago, a study was done of British scientific qualifications (specifically mathematics) compared with those of other countries. Whilst it was found that the UK qualifications were significantly more difficult to attain than those of Japan, a further observation was that this meant that Japan had a larger pool of students who went on to study these subjects at an undergraduate level and hence significantly increased numbers of graduates who, whilst perhaps not being nobel material, were more than qualified to work in Japan's growing engineering and scientific sectors. By comparison, Britain was being left behind, and the implicit conclusion was that the expectations made by the British education system of its students were arbitrarly high, and that this was in fact helping to damage the UK's industries.

 

Never looked at it that way before.

[Albert Tatlock]

That's the crucial point of this continuing debate. Twenty or thirty years ago, a study was done of British scientific qualifications (specifically mathematics) compared with those of other countries. Whilst it was found that the UK qualifications were significantly more difficult to attain than those of Japan, a further observation was that this meant that Japan had a larger pool of students who went on to study these subjects at an undergraduate level and hence significantly increased numbers of graduates who, whilst perhaps not being nobel material, were more than qualified to work in Japan's growing engineering and scientific sectors. By comparison, Britain was being left behind, and the implicit conclusion was that the expectations made by the British education system of its students were arbitrarly high, and that this was in fact helping to damage the UK's industries.

v

 

The reasons people don't go into scientific careers these days, are: it is hard, there are few jobs available in it, the pay is abysmal and there is limited scope for progression. Fact is, working on the tills at Tesco pays better.

 

The reasons people don't study science these days is choice. Give students a choice and they'll generally take the easy option. More often these days there isn't even a choice for students even if they wanted to study science, due to the great shortage of specialist science teachers to teach them.

 

The reasons the government is killing company science are bureaucracy, tax, and health and safety. Both the UK and Japan had falling demographics, and where Japan has invested in science and technologies and science and technology education to make their falling demographic more productive, the UK has imported millions of low skilled immigrants to make the UK more productive. Bureaucracy rules in the UK and is a stealth tax in many UK companies.

 

The reasons business is killing science in the UK is outsourcing. Business says it is crying out for scientists and engineers in one breath and then in another outsources the work. One of the main problems is that from the 1980s manufacturing began a gradual move towards the east, whilst which has allowed European and U.S. employees time to redefine their job skills it has meant a significant move into the service sector for the bulk of the population. More recently, however, that has gone on to include not only manufacturing, but data processing, call centres, IT jobs and even engineering design and development which are now being moved overseas. Money is the major driver for this, as offshoring means you can get the job done for 1/6th of the cost.

 

The reasons that people in Britain are killing science is that they are generally: selfish, lazy, indifferent and want everything for nothing. Additionally ask most people in the dumbocracy that is now the UK what a 'star' is and they'll say Russel Bland.

 

The reasons why investors are killing science is that they won't invest in it. So the money men invested in 'housing' instead as it was the only tangible asset they had left in the UK. They borrowed and pumped and pumped money into it until it went pop. Now we don't make anything, the banks went bust pumping money into housing to artificially raise the asset values (money which people can't pay back) and ironically, with most of us now in the service sector, we now have to rely on the rest of the world that makes things to now drag us out of this mess.

 

RIP British science and engineering.

 

RIP Britain.

[VinnieK]

The reasons people don't go into scientific careers these days, are: it is hard, there are few jobs available in it, the pay is abysmal and there is limited scope for progression. Fact is, working on the tills at Tesco pays better.

 

That's an exagerration. Little of it is true, apart from the fact that it's hard. The pay for scientists in the private sector is pretty good, and even in academia a starting wage for a postdoc is around 28 grand (compared with Tesco, which pays minimum wage for till workers and even the wage for line managers has an upper ceiling of 24 grand). Similarly there's plenty of scope for progression, in the private sector you typically work as a junior researcher, with the potential to work up to senior positions overseeing major projects, whilst in academia you can make a pretty penny and rise to a number of different positions. The only sense in which working the tills might have an advantage is that it offers short term job security (most scientists' very early careers being made up of short term contracts).

 

The reasons the government is killing company science are bureaucracy, tax, and health and safety.

 

This does play a part. I don't know that much about the situation in the private sector, but in academia the biggest hinderance by far is the lack of funds allocated to projects (and the method of distributing funding according to who can stick the most buzzwords in their proposal).

 

the UK has imported millions of low skilled immigrants to make the UK more productive.

 

It's also imported a large number of incredibly skilled immigrants for the same purpose. Most of our universities' science and maths departments would be in a far worse state were it not for the large numbers of (particularly Russian and Eastern European) academics, researchers and even international postgrad researchers (especially with their tasty fees) who have found work here and plugged the gaps left by previous generations' aversion to careers in scientific research.

 

The reasons business is killing science in the UK is outsourcing. Business says it is crying out for scientists and engineers in one breath and then in another outsources the work... that has gone on to include not only manufacturing, but data processing, call centres, IT jobs and even engineering design and development which are now being moved overseas.

 

That might be the case in engineering and programming, but generally speaking science, the deeper side of computer science et al seems to have been doing pretty well in the UK out of business (hence the increased number of big research parks associated with universities, collaborative projects across the private and public sectors, and so on).

 

The reasons that people in Britain are killing science is that they are generally: selfish, lazy, indifferent and want everything for nothing. Additionally ask most people in the dumbocracy that is now the UK what a 'star' is and they'll say Russel Bland.

 

I think you're a bit premature to suggest this generation is any worse than previous ones. There has always been a shortage of scientists in the UK (and indeed there is and has been in most countries). Also, if we're going to drag people's tastes into the ad hominem against an entire population, I don't think the generations that spent their evenings shovelling oven chips in their mouths and cackling at bumwitted toss like Love Thy Neighbour and On The Buses have much of a case against this generation's tastes!

[guardone]

A major problem in the Uk is that we value entertainment and entertainers, footballers and other celebrities as more valuable than scientists and engineers. An example is that we allow singers to collect royalties on records for 50 years plus, yet scientific patents or new drugs have a limited protection life of (I believe) up to 20 years. Which is the more useful to our society and which could we do without?