Why GCSE Results Were So Bad This Year
Vložit
- čas přidán 23. 08. 2023
- Compare news coverage. Spot media bias. Avoid algorithms. Try Ground News today and get 30% off your subscription by going to: ground.news/tldr
Today's GCSE results saw top grades falling across the UK to levels similar to those pre-COVID. So in this video, we're going to take a look at this recent grade inflation, explain why grades have fallen and what impact this might have on students.
🎞 TikTok: / tldrnews
🗣 Discord: tldrnews.co.uk/discord
💡 Got a Topic Suggestion? - forms.gle/mahEFmsW1yGTNEYXA
Support TLDR on Patreon: / tldrnews
Donate by PayPal: tldrnews.co.uk/funding
Our mission is to explain news and politics in an impartial, efficient, and accessible way, balancing import and interest while fostering independent thought.
TLDR is a completely independent & privately owned media company that's not afraid to tackle the issues we think are most important. The channel is run by a small group of young people, with us hoping to pass on our enthusiasm for politics to other young people. We are primarily fan sourced with most of our funding coming from donations and ad revenue. No shady corporations, no one telling us what to say. We can't wait to grow further and help more people get informed. Help support us by subscribing, engaging and sharing. Thanks!
Compare news coverage from diverse sources around the world on a transparent platform driven by data. Try Ground News today and get 30% off your subscription: ground.news/tldr
It's a shame they switched to numbers. When I passed my GCSE's there was a kid in my year that had the grades F. U. D. G. E. It was incredible.
6 9 6 9 6 9 would be even more impressive than that though
They still have letters in Wales and I think Scotland (Unsure on that) And as someone who just got their A level grades letters are so much more satisfying...
I had C B A for my a-levels which was an accurate representation of my attitude at sixth form 😅
hahaha
Im doing gcse 2024 any tips?
2:31 That scared the f*ck out of me.
Lol same I thought it was just me
Yeah I wondered what was going on there
That’s pretty dangerous for epileptic people needs to be fixed
@@The_Dude_Rugsit's an encoding error, could be in CZcams's encoder and not the source material. Nothing they can do in that case.
Matrix glitch, nothing to worry about…
There needs to be more opportunities for adults to take/re-take GCSEs and A-levels. I tried to take an A-level as an adult, but there just wasn't the option to do so. Your whole life shouldn't be dictated by a single day when you're 16.
Functional skills lvl 2 are GCSE lvl and quicker to complete, aswell and being pretty abundant.
I don't know about a-lvls alone, but access courses that cover lvl 3 in order to get you onto undergraduate degree are also very pretty abundant.
I'm 26 and after finally figuring out what I want to do will be staring an access course this sep.
there is no upper age limit for A levels
In Scotland and Wales theres opportunities to retake
The US state of Florida had/has a simualr thing called an FCAT that only determnined you passed a grade or not... Which the UK system sounds alot like the Chinese one then any in a 1st world contry.
Look into adult learning courses at your local college, they will have a dedicated term to help you find what course suits you and your working needs.
I was 1 of the many who sat the 1st GCSE Exams in 1988 and feel sorry for those who had to sit this years GCSE's.
Way back between 1986 - 1988 I had the exam board switch the syllabus numerous times for the subjects I was studying. So I had to adapt to the changes, which was hard enough.
The Department for Education and this Government are shambolic and should be made to sit the papers to see how they would manage.
I was lucky i came out with the grades i wanted. Many didnt and I know some who appealed.
ur old my guy
35 isnt that old
@@xanderjames8682 Very few newborn infants sat the first GCSEs. If he was a more typical 16 at the time, he'd be 51 now (there's a slim chance he could be 50 with a late August birthday, and a higher chance that he was held back or pushed forward a year)
@@xanderjames8682 when the math ain’t mathing
@@rmsgrey I'm 51 and was in the top set at my High School which had 9 form bands L,P,H, S,C,G, N,E,M and L was the top or higher achievers form. But I had friends who were from all the band groups.
The point of a passing is to show you have a certain set of skills. Not to show where you rank compared to everyone else. Sure do that with the higher grades but if we claim that we actually want to give everyone a decent education we shouldn't force a set percentage of people to fail. That is just stating that the school system will fail to educated that precise percentage of people and possibly ruin their prospects of getting a job even if they do have the necessary skills.
Not that I disagree with you, but in some sense that's the purpose of a national standard. If the number of people you slice into bands is bigger, the process becomes fairer and easier to calibrate. _Absent_ things like the pandemic, the system _as a whole_ should be slow enough moving to keep in trim, and to maintain the validity of the assumption that some knowable percentage of people are-whoever may be to blame-not coming out of the process with what they need.
And there is the reality of allocating people to seats in universities, and that, frankly, does involve ranking (along with a lot of randomness, which I wish society would learn to acknowledge).
The bigger problems are, I think, (a) point-in-time exams, even though they're the most calibratable (is that a word?) method, mostly measure how good you are at sitting exams (I've noticed this because I've benefitted from it-I find them fun and that makes them much easier, without proving a thing about my skills), and (b) the question of whether we're trying to measure attainment or aptitude. One of the things that's quite striking in the software industry, for example, is that it's almost pointless to ask what people have done in the past, because what determines job performance is how fast people pick up new skills. A similar observation applies to research tasks. But the same is not true for walking into a role in a slower moving industry where there's an established intake process that relies on certain background knowledge, or-on the academic side-for coursework where people lacking the relevant background (and indeed enculturation-it may not even be about knowledge and skills) will disrupt things for the rest of the class.
And, of course, we have to contend with a significant proportion of people who, philosophically, don't really believe in education, and see it as a question of paying in time (or perhaps even cash?) to get a certificate that then guarantees them work.
Complicated.
@@stephenspackman5573Great comment
The thing is college's could easily test applicants going in to their college, and see if they actually have the skills for the course they are doing.
Let's say someone does hair and beauty at college, do they really need maths?
@@pixeldubsofficial I'm personally of the view that individual classes should have entrance tests rather than exit tests, with a thesis/project/performance at the end of the entire programme, since individuals are better judges of how to spend their own time than anyone else and the prime concern of stepwise testing of adults is avoiding wasting _other people's_ time and effort by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that doesn't answer the problem of how to allocate people to _highly contested_ seats. Systems where institutions handle their input screening autonomously don't work well _or fairly,_ because students must go through that evaluation process separately at each school they apply to, and it's likely going to involve a lot of travel and scheduling issues (biasing things strongly in favour of the wealthy and well connected). The solution to _that_ is to set up commercial examination systems to fill the gap left by state ones, which brings you back to the same point but at a higher cost (this is the tradition in the US, for example, where the education is only slightly less messed up than the healthcare).
The question of whether you need maths to do beauty is a rather different one, and (as someone who did maths at college) there's the further irony that the maths you study at school is probably more relevant to hair and beauty than it is to college-level maths-few actual mathematicians work much with numbers, for example, while any small business has to.
But yes, there's far too much one-size-fits-all-ism in society. The only real argument against it is that most of us will go through at least one large change in direction in our lives, so having skills that don't relate to our plans can be as important as having ones that do. But that's a general platitude and can't be used to defend current policy!
I may be wrong but I don't think they have a percentage that will fail. Reading the document from AQA about grade boundary setting from their website called A basic guide to standard setting, it says that what the examiners do for linear GCSEs is get together and set the grade boundaries for grade 1, 4 and 7. It seems like they look at samples of papers and discuss where to put the boundary for those grades then set the rest arithmetically. This suggests they are doing it by merit rather than percentages. So theoretically everyone could get a grade 4 and pass. In reality, cohorts of students don't change dramatically from year to year so there is not much change every year, but there are some changes. If it was set so a certain percentage would fail every year then you wouldn't see changes in the percentages of students getting grade 4 plus every year.
I did well in my GCSEs. Fucked up my A-Levels. Pottered around as a sign maker for a while, joined the army and did really well for the first time in my life. I'm now studying computer science at uni. Don't stress, you can still do well in life. It's what you make of it, you just have to want it and work for it.
I hope that you did well if you just got your results, but if not, you've still got this. Other than in rare life and death situations, nothing in life is as important as it seems in the moment.
This is inspiring. Thank you for your words.
what grades did you get in your gcses?
i am 16 got my results today and despite missing most of y11 due to cance4r I got better than most of my peers and I got a grade 9 in history, sorry I couldn't resist bragging. Aside from english everyone else did not do as well as they were predicted. But now I have the subjects I want it is a useless piece of paper
Aww I’m so sorry you have that terrible illness, don’t lose hope 💖 Congratulations on the 9! Get well soon ❤
Im really sorry about that, you have my prayers that you get well soon.
As a fellow yr11 student who also received their results today - congrats. I didn’t get the results I was hoping for though 😢
@@YahyaOnYT Well A levels are way more important anyway, don't worry my guy
@@YahyaOnYTyeah fellow Yr 11 that's unhappy about results, sorry you feel the same but we have a levels to prove ourselves and the grades don't define us ❤
I got my A-Level results this year. The most infuriating thing for me is the fact that “results will return to pre-pandemic levels” despite the fact that my cohort has literally never sat exams before and still had a COVID-disrupted few years. I actually had to repeatedly ask the invigilators questions on how to fill out the papers as these hadn’t been explained to us (under the forgetful assumption that we’d already know) and we’d had no prior experience with these answer templates; I wasn’t the only one. On a COVID level, I missed a week of Year 12 while in isolation, and actually amongst my friends I was relatively lucky insofar as my isolation was short, partially within half term, early on during sixth form, and I only had to self-isolate once. It just feels infuriating to hear that “things will return to pre-pandemic levels” and I’m like “well hold on I was affected by the pandemic too”.
Same here, its so annoying,
As an Australian (Victorian) it’s quite startling to see just how different our education system runs, we seem to have a lot more emphasis on school assessed tasks rather than the final exams (although they are still quite important)
Might be due to the smaller population of Australia, meaning students get more qualitative time with the teachers, whereas classrooms are growing over here, needing quantitative solutions in marking.
Not an expert, just an educated guess (pun intended)
We used to have loads of course work in schools when I was there. Then for some reason they scrapped it all focusing exclusively on final exams.
UK scrapped the school assessed due to wanting to create something as fair as possible, preventing teachers bias, preventing cheating and allowing resources to be more standerdised
@@blucksy7229so, "fairness" made them shoot themselves in the foot?
@@nameTBA Plenty of very high performing education systems are strongly exam based. I honestly don't think it's related to that specific factor.
I can’t fail my GCSEs if I never did them in the first place
Same here. They have no real worth
Bro got a Xbox360 profile pic, explains a lot😅
@@gabrielsiteny Before you judge gamers... Some gamers have Computer Science degrees. What are your qualifications?
@@blazzz13 Before you judge a CZcams comment... Being a gamer and having an Xbox360 profile pic, aren't the same thing.
@@blazzz13You probably don't have a computer science degree if you brag about not doing your GCSEs on the Internet.
It's hard to study when your parents can't afford to heat the house or feed you properly.
Now this is a valid take
Having re-taken my mathematics GCSE over the last few years (having first taken my exams in 1995), I can tell you from experience that the standards needed to get a good exam result have been raised year after year with my actual exam being much more difficult than the mock exams (being actual exams from the last couple of years) I had been practising before then. I had been expecting a grade 5 but only got a grade 4 since (despite feeling I had completed the first two exam parts easily enough) I was not able to complete the third part of the exam within the allowed time.
You’ve been taken your maths gcses on and off since 1995!! Almost 30 years ago! That’s dedication. I’ve just passed my functional skills level 1 maths and I’m done with maths thank fuck
I'm curious, is there a reason why you've been re-taking your Maths GCSE several times?
@@Fireberriesif you keep failing you have to re take it. It can get in the way of getting certain jobs like teaching.
As an American, when the sentence "1 equals a U and 9 Equals an A*," came up, I realized I not only knew nothing about the new UK grading systems, but I also knew nothing about the old UK grading system.
I sat my GCSE exams in 2018 with the new system, and we were massively disadvantaged as teachers had no idea what to teach as well as very few mock exams or resources for us. It impacted me in the long run as i was refused to do A level Maths achieving only grade 6 rather than 7. Years later i am now a qualified accountant after an apprenticeship, and yes the Math A level would've been hugely helpful for my future studies.
I used to go to a grammar school but due to the strict requirements, which i missed by not a grade but by ONE SINGLE MARK, I cant continue. Im currently reviewing my papers, so I hope I can actually get back in.
The innate issue of single exams is that sometimes the exam is just shit. Had that for my Maths M2 back in A-Levels years ago, was predicted basically perfect marks, had done excellently throughout the entire year and aced every single mock paper i'd done, which was basically all of the prior papers of the past decade. Then the paper was absolute dogshit, didn't recognise half of what the questions were asking and ended up barely passing, and barely scraping an A in maths overall thanks to all my other papers going fine.
This is incredibly important, most of the time, the paper itself is just a joke.
@@Nepetita69696I’m convinced that the exam writers 90% of the time haven’t even gone over the curriculum for that test
From personal experience I think the stress of exams can be extremely detrimental to students sucess later in life
J
Edit: J
Burnout
Bingo
One of the many reasons why they should be banned.
I wholeheartedly agree and there needs to be a system of mental health care put into the education system. Rather than cutting budgets for what the Tories see as pointless subjects.
2:32 sanity check, its not just me that saw that right?
Yup, saw it as well
No thats just you, the stress seems to be getting to you lol
I am you, so yes it was just you.
The way this works it shows PURELY that it's school comparisons and not as much skill/knowledge otherwise you could actually compare years against each other
How would you compare one year against another? If you ask the exact same questions every year, then people learn what those questions are and rote-memorise the answers. Okay, after a few years, the year-on-year advantage from knowing the questions in advance would pretty much entirely disappear, but there'd be a rough transition, and you'd no longer be testing broader skills/knowledge as effectively.
If you ask different questions each year, then those questions will inevitably have different difficulty levels, so raw marks will fluctuate.
The current system assumes that the very roughly one million pupils taking the exams each year are going to be more equivalent to the million the previous/next year than the questions are year to year, so takes the overall population as the standard.
2:31 am I the only one seeing that glitch? When I watch it with the comment section open, the comment section doesn't break or whatever, only the video.
I’m Canadian and not one of our provinces has an equivalent GCSE. It’s insane to think teachers, who better understand their students strengths and weaknesses are seen as a less reliable indicator of a students intelligence than the government.
Teachers have favorites, so examination is needed to remove that bias. That said, the way the UK does it is just wrong
@@bzuidgeest , what's the alternative though if reduced teacher bias and objectivity is the aim with examination?
@@inbb510 what needs an alternative?
@@bzuidgeest , you said the UK does it wrong. What is the alternative to our current way of examining students then?
@@inbb510 doing test across the entire year every year and combine that result with what you call GCSE or a-level. That way you get the average accomplishments at school, not a single instance that leads to such stringent categorization of a student over the events of a single day.
I'm an idiot. I don't understand the expectation that results MUST increase year on year, or there's a big problem. What?
I don't understand that either!
Not necessarily increase, but be consistent. This is because you can compare fairly across year groups so previous year groups aren’t favoured more over this years despite them actually having a similar skill level
People have to get smarter, economy has to grow and grow and grow infinitely, no breaks, no stopping, march forward, progress, progress, progress (except for where it helps the lower classes of course)
The grade inflation is unfair to all those that did the exam before and after
it's bad for all of us - I know I sat exams in a year with significant grade inflation, and it means that I don't feel that I can trust that my grade is a true representation - I don't know whether I would have got the same results without the inflation or not, so I cannot be proud of the grades I did get, and I often wonder if people will look at my grades and discount their validity because of the year I sat the exams
You need to fix that visual glitch at 2:33 that is extremely dangerous for epileptic viewers
I did very average at school but passed College twice (went back to do another subject) with top marks and even got some extra courses done too (Half GCSE level but they were free 2/4 week courses so be stupid not to get free extra grade).
Point is, some people do better when it's their chosen subject and it's self-driven learning rather than being taught. Sure, College tutors help you out but they'll never stop you if your alternative methods work and get grades.
Meanwhile I just have a high school diploma and I do Calculus, aerospace engineering for my creative pursuits with help from online calulators pretty often but I could never get a college degree to disabled.
Ooh, what were those courses if you don’t mind me asking
My gcse results were horrendous today i wasnt even expecting it especially for chemistry
Honestly, GCSE exams are something you shouldn’t worry about. In reality a 4 and a 9 at GCSE carry the exact same weight as all you need from GCSE is a few 4s so you can go onto A Level or another Level 3.
I was a 2021 graduate, me and most of my school did horribly because despite exams being cancelled we still sat full exam papers for every subject which was marked internally at 2019 grade boundaries, no advance information or anything. We literally missed the entirety of Year 10 and most of 11 and was still made to do them like nothing had happened. I also had undiagnosed Autism at the time.
I got one 5, three 4s and the rest 3s. I felt pretty terrible when I got them but literally the exact same day I received them they became irrelevant, as I enrolled at a Sixth Form College for A Levels the same day… I’ve never had to use them for anything else since.
You're extremely lucky, I applied with similar results years ago and got rejected. Perhaps the pandemic got taken into account.
I did my GCSE’s the year before the Pandemic hit. But my AS and A Levels were done throughout the pandemic. It would be interesting to see the data on my year since you can properly see how the pandemic effected results by comparing GCSE and A Level.
I myself was hit super negatively. Due to a lot of studying being done at home which I wasn’t used to, I wasn’t able to concentrate. And when we actually went back to school I was months behind on the syllabus and never really caught up.
I did Maths, Further Maths and Physics at A Level. In GCSE I got a 9 in Maths, an A in Further Maths (They hadn’t updated that one yet) and a 7 in Physics. At A Level I got an A* in Maths, a C in Further Maths and a D in Physics. Quite a drop. So I’m interested to see if that data is reflected in the general populous or whether I’m an outlier.
Sounds like you did good to me. Well done G.
@@MEHOLE Well a D in Physics when you were hoping to do Physics at Uni isn’t great.
It's hard to say, most people drop 1 to 2 grades between gcse and a level in the same topic, I went from ABB in the GCSEs i was continuing to BCC in my a levels. I didn't have a pandemic as an excuse. I'm not saying it didn't have an effect on your education I'm just saying that it's impossible to validate
@@gardenshed6043 I can't even do uni because I'm poor :) Not the end of the world
@@cantin8697 Yeah. I now work as a delivery driver for a food bank. It’s good work. But because I was generally high performing academically in school, people who knew me then often look at me a little confused that I’m not using my academic abilities in my work.
It should also be noted that the parity with 2019 data wasn't announced "just before results", but much earlier in the year - I think it was around February!
In the days of O-levels, the percentage allowed to get a C or better was limited to the top 20% of students in any given subject (approximately). The rest got either CSE grades 2 to 5, or nothing (around 35% to 40% in any given subject got nothing). The average student got a CSE grade 4.
Just to point out as it wasn't mentioned in the video. Teacher Assessed Grades were still moderated by the exan boards. TAGs were checked by at least 2 members of staff, one of whom hadn't taught the pupil, then those grades and all evidence for them were sent to the exam boards for moderation.
The increase is more due to the difference of average grades versus single day performance, because (big surprise) people who are stressed tend to perform worse than they otherwise might.
So before people start jumping on the "teachers just gave out marks to kids they liked" bandwagon, all those grades and marks were vetted by the exam boards.
Thanks for clearing that up to everyone else, I was waiting for him to mention that.
the two years of teacher assessed grades were different - the first year, as the system changed at the last minute due to protest, essentially was teacher assessed grades could be whatever; the second year had a lot more checks. I get quite annoyed when people conflate the two years (I was doing A Levels in the second year) as after exams were 'cancelled', the requirements for evidence that the exam boards could check grades against were so stringent that the school made us sit exams, more of them than usual, and earlier in the year (on less content, yes, but also in a much more stressful way given we had not had mocks and had had very patchy schooling for most of our A Levels)
Diagnosed autistic/adhd well over a decade after high school, I loathe high percentage exams. I already struggle/struggled with time management, test anxiety, malnutrition in the week/weeks leading up to exams, chronic pain, etc. To have my "worth" as a person measured by one or two exams that I know I was and am still unable to complete to the best of my ability is frustrating and discriminatory. I'm glad that some schools now have accomondations, but my experience in university showed that many professors are unwilling to grant those. Some teachers who want to be able to give those accommodations are unable to due to space, understaffing, multiple classes, or department interference. I hope that changes. I get that the GCSE is The One across the pond, but I'm glad that students had a couple years of an alternative that better represents them.
Great video as always! In future, a visual number under the circle graphs for visual clarity would be very helpful.
Numerical grades were not introduced in the "uk", they were introduced in England. Wales, Scotland and NI continue to use letters for grading GCSEs or equivalent
I know that there are some things going on with academic institutions adjusting to the grade drop. Even though I actually did my A Levels this year, we still had a pretty big drop in grades. My grades were lower than I hoped but I still managed to get accepted to my course. Perhaps universities and sixth forms are anticipating slightly lower grades and taking in some students regardless??
I was directly involved in the application of Teacher Assessed Grades (TAGs) from the awarding body side of things. Everything said here is absolutely correct though there are some ommisions that need filling in to see the real impact on these.
1) The government / Department For Education changed their mind about applying TAGs ~four times before sticking with applying them since there was immense backlash from educators nationally regardless of which side of the fence the government placed themselves on. This made preparing for TAGs for both schools and awarding bodies extremely difficult, and thus the guidance for teachers very sparse.
2) Teachers can be (and were) biased towards their 'favourites' within the class. Unsurprisingly, those in favour did better (no quotable stats to back this up). If evidence was requested to back up claims, schools would have often 'misplaced' work. There was no recourse for this and schools were allowed to keep claiming TAGs as legitimate.
3) Influencing factors for TAGs included a student's ability to return homework on time, their attitude in class, previous mock exam results, and the accuracy of their work in class time to make an educated guess at students' expected ability had they sat. What does a student gain in Maths or English if they do not return their homework on time? Lets not even go down the route of monetarily disadvantaged students..! Following from this - what bearing does a student's attitude in class have on their knowledge in a subject area? Previous mock exam results, though initially heraled as a good idea, were later criticised too for their potential innacuracy as students are less likely to take mock exams seriously enough to revise and try their best...Imagine finding out the exams you took as a joke were later used to work out your future prospects...
4) Artificial inflation by teachers to make sure they stayed in employment. If ever a teacher stood at the front of the classroom and said "waste your own time. I get paid to be here whether you learn this or not!" WRONG! Teachers are constantly pitted against each other and their ability to hold their job directly correlates to their students' pass percentage - makes sense; if only your class is failing, where their other subjects they're passing, the common denominator is the teacher so the teacher must be bad at teaching. In order to save their jobs, where the education sector was in ruins over the pandemic, teachers would ensure all of their classes maintained at least the national average pass rate even if it meant fudging the numbers a bit. This pressure often also come from higher up in school heirarchys...the perfect opportunity to make some bombastic claims that their teachers must be really really good because of a rather unrealistically high pass rate school-wide. The number of schools / test centres who had claimed a 100% pass rate were in their 1000s.
5) TAGs were continued in 2021 due to Year 10 students being directly impacted as a result of home, remote, or just generally incomplete schooling. It was not a decision made because the country was still in lockdown. Students started to return to school in a very limited capactity in 2021 if they lived nearby and could make their own way in without needing public transport (for obvious reasons). Additionally to this, teachers had much less data to make informed decisions since mock exams were cancelled and teachers had less personal interaction with all the rules in place limiting class size. This may have had an impact on the reliability of the TAGs
6) 2022 grade boundaries were much squishier as it was always a consideration that these students experienced the pandemic and all its influences on the state education system. The drop would have been more severe between 2021 and 2022 had this not been considered
(Full disclosure: none of this can be backed up with evidence)
I've never seen a camera glitch out like that before.
If it's a full year dropping grades consistently then there really isn't an issue. College places aren't going to be left unfilled as they are run as businesses so the entry requirements would be lowered proportionately so it will balance out. The system is designed with the expectation of each level feeding the next, but when you get there the previous grades don't really matter that much.
Can't there be people of last year and so on ?
It's also makes each year's qualifications incomparable, and it's not fair for this year's cohort.
2:31 - Guessing everyone saw the flickering? Thought it was my monitor at first (which luckily it weren't as it's brand new). Really hurt my eyes though
One thing they forget to mention is us in 2018 who sat the GCSE exams only had two years to do a three year GCSE as we were the first year to do the new exams.
it is not *supposed* to be a three year GCSE; they are all supposed to be two year courses, but given the way that skills build on each other a lot of schools have slowly moved towards doing the content over three years rather than the traditional two years.
Failed all, but 1 of my GCSEs resitting maths in may but now happily doing a bench joinery course in college
The issues with TAGs (that i noticed doing them) is that we used evidence from the years we teach the pupils. However if we started giving too many high grades for a class group, we had to reduce to fit in line with the apparent distribution. I had a class of top set physics students, in which 5 of the 32 children were predicted and were attaining grade 9s across the three years. I was told to only give 2 of them grade 9, as i was told that grade 9 is roughly 3 or 4 (maybe 5) out of 100 children (roughly 1 in a class of 30). The knock on effect was the other top set class, which had 4 kids out of 30 attaining and predicted grade 9 was told the same.
The same happened for all the other grades, and as you can guess, kids eneded up trickling down a grade because the students from the upper grade that were tricked down to theirs were pushed down a grade too.
TAGs didn't allow for a great accurate assessment of the students (in my experience), before being processed by the moderators, who might just change grades again anyway.
But no longer a teacher, so just my thought for a penny.
That’s so unfair! How does that even make sense? Because obviously the amount of children in a class achieving an A* won’t always be the exact same
I did the last set of O Levels
GCSE was brought in to be project based as opposed to exam at the end
Seems this goal was dropped and they've gone back to being O Levels
Why did this happen?
in Algeria, we have a GCSE-style exam at the end of every stage, primary, middle, and high school. with increasingly narrowed down and specialised learning. so by the time you sit for the big GCSE in high school, which decides what you do in Uni, you've already narrowed down and focused your studies on your speciality (Foreign languages, literature and philosophy, management, exact math, technical math (electrical engineering, process engineering), experimental science) all in HS, with the highest grade expectations on your core subjects and you get help from some electives to buff up your grade and also keeps you knowledgeable in a variety of things and avoid "the master of one" educational paradox. i never understood systems that just let you pass from primary to middle to high with no big end of stage exams, as if everyone made it through at the same rate for 10 years of education. that's just unrealistic. everyone who fails in those earlier stages gets a second chance, or a possibility to apply to vocational schools. education is required by law until the age of 16, where you can choose to either continue in the normal system, vocation, or the military. you can retake the "CGSEs" every year, granted you have the fees, there is no limit on how many times you can retake it.
Sounds similar to Germany, so I assume your school system is based on the French system?
Here is my theory: I sat my GCSEs in 2021, originally we were going to sit a reduced version of the full exams, with a few topics in each subject cut, but due to the post christmas lockdown in 2021, we only sat mocks in class. From what I have heard, 2022 students sat essentially what my year group were going to sit: slightly reduced exams. This was true for both gcses and a levels from what I have seen, for example media a level were given information about the upcoming exams, what would show up. 2023 is the first year where we sat all exams as normal, like before, as in theory, both gcses and a levels students exam study and prep time has not be affected by covid. This was the cause in the drop. In my opinion, they were too quick to go back to normal on the boundaries, as many a level students such as myself this year had our exam season essentially on easy mode 2 years ago. We were not prepared, and the government were overzealous. I have friends who were predicted Bs and Cs in physics, who got Es, many of them. They are not lazy or non-chalant, they are hardworking people. I only just made my grades by a few points. They should have waited a year to return grade boundaries fully to normal.
Really though, these results won't matter in a couple of years. Mine certainly don't.
Keeps saying UK. Scotland doesn't use the GCSE system. Just FYI.
2:32 Yo what... you ok bud?
As someone from Germany: Are the GSCE grades really that important in the long run? Seems like the GSCE is roughly equivalent to the "Mittlere Reife" (Grade 10) in Germany.
Here you usually dont need this grade at all if you are going for the Abitur (A-Levels, you basically just need a passing grade in order to be able to stay in school) or just once for applying for the Ausbildung (Apprenticeship).
After that it really doesnt matter and no one will ask you what your grade was in school since your performance at work is much more important.
They are used by colleges and sixth forms for admissions, though usually its a passing English Language and Maths grade (4 or 5) that is needed. Some subjects may have specific requirements, like a school may require a 7 in Maths GCSE to take A Level Further Maths. This can have knock on affects when apply to university, as if you didn't get the grade needed at GCSE to study at A-Level, you may not be able to apply to certain courses or your application may not be as competitive. I don't have any experience with apprenticeships but I would imagine it is similar.
When applying to university, all GCSEs grades have to be included on your application. Most universities courses look for an English and Maths pass at GCSE and many use them as a guide to your general academic performance. When applying to top unis (any of the Russel Groups, Oxford, Cambridge etc.), having high GCSEs can make your application more competitive as they show what you are able to achieve, especially as most students apply with predicted grades, rather achieved AS or A-Level grades. But ultimately, they are only a part of your application as AS levels (which have mostly been dropped now, but are basically the first year of an A-Level with an exam at the end), predicted A-Level grades, references and personal statements are also considered.
So, it's a bit of a yes and no. They are important for moving onto the next step but it's really dependent on what you chose to do. Hope this helps!
No, GCSE grades are irrelevant apart from an 4 in English and Maths. Only A Levels matter and again only so you can get into University.
School system here is different. You go to college for your A levels, as they don't have separate schools for Mittlere Reife and Abitur. They only have Gesamtschule here and pupils are graded and put in different sets throughout their school life. It's extremely unfair, biased and manipulative compared to Germany. As schools also compete for grades against each other here, they teach very differently and the quality of teaching suffers greatly. Add to that that apprenticeship is not a thing in the UK (apart from trades) and your school results are super important. No one in Germany would expect an average office worker to have a college or university degree to do their job, here they do... Not as extreme as the US yet, but working towards that, due to the lack of apprenticeship, which is essentially the German form of a college degree, just more practical and less subject removed.
GCSE grades can end up quite important for University applications, as students apply to University before they sit their A Level exams, so the universities have essentially three things to decide between people: a short personal statement (in which a lot of people lie, and many people get a lot of help with), predictions from teachers of what their A Level results will be (which are notoriously inaccurate, as teachers want their students to get University offers) and the student's GCSE grades. The GCSE grades are the only concrete marker of a students ability that universities have when choosing who to give offers to. These offers are then contingent on getting good A Level grades, but they want to have pretty good security on numbers etc. before the A level grades come out, as they come out so late compared to the start of the university term. So essentially, GCSE grades become a main factor in what university you are likely to be able to go to
@TLDRnews 2:30 to 2:35 is corrupted and you should probally put a seziure warning the rapid flashing green light may tirgger someone who is light sensitive!
When GCSE courses were first introduced in 1986 and sat in 1988, most had a coursework element. Thus, coursework showed progression and ability over a period of time and exams focussed on a pupils ability to recall knowledge in a timescale under some pressure.
In 2010s Gove, as education secretary, got rid of coursework. No coursework means less essay writing which means less practice at essay writing which can lead to some struggling to write essays for A-Levels. My eldest has changed to level 3 arts course as she failed two of her three A-Levels in the first year. She knew her struggles and had support, so the transfer was more positive for her mental health.
Comparing between letter and numerical grades is also pointless. The grade boundaries, even on a bell curve, will differ. What's also bloody annoying is that until 1994 there was no A*, so those with a D in the first 8 years may have had enough marks to get a C afterwards. My eldest cousin and I sat pre 1994 GCSEs which aren't comparable to my younger cousins who sat them post 1994.
The pass rate was 67.8% in England, 64.5% in Wales, and 86.6% in NI
And 78.8% in Scotland (in National 5s, the equivalent of GCSEs)
Northern Ireland is smart, eh?
@@spaghettiisyummy.3623 probably isn't hard when you're compared to England and Wales 😂😂😂😂
From personal experience. Didn't do well in my GCSE's only could do foundation papers where the highest mark I could get was a C. Went on to do an apprenticeship in IT, and then went in to university at 21 as a mature student. Graduated with first class honours. Basically it seems I excelled out of school where I needed to think for myself and not actually be told what to do by some teacher. I remember university with may students leaving after the first year, they simply didn't get that lecturers were not teachers and you had to learn for yourself.
The years of work added to my pension contributions and national insurance. Ill retire well before my friends who did the A-level thing and then university. I have a house in the south east and ear well above average income. My Degree and what I did in school isn't even important any longer. I also was recently diagnosed with dyslexia, but it never stopped me - have a problem with spelling. In any case, if you dont do as well as you thought you would do, I wouldn't worry about it, just spend the extra years thinking if going to university and getting in to all that debt is worth it?
Weird flex
@@asterock_1742 :-) trying not to flex, but university isn't for everyone, and kids these days seme to get tested all the time reciting facts. I think children would do better learning manners and be prepared for the real world than getintg 5 A* (9s?), but thats just me
In Scotland, students do 3 exams instead of 2.
You have National 5s which are equivalent to GCSEs and happen at about the same age. These are basically worthless and are more like practices for the actual exams.
Then you have Highers. While other parts would spend two years for the exam, Scotland does one each year. Therefore, the Highers are worth slightly less than A-Levels, but they're what are used to get accepted into university.
Finally, you have Advanced Highers, which occur at around the same age as A-Levels, but are actually worth a bit more than A-Levels. These would be used if you get a conditional offer at university.
@TLDR Your video flashes random colours and then your body shakes at the 2:31 to 2:35 range, might want to get that sorted
It's difficult to definitively prove, but I wonder if the rampant child poverty is playing a factor. Children in the UK are malnourished to such an extent that they are literally smaller and shorter than children from other countries now. It's getting that bad.
LOL that’s funny.
@@EliStettner, yes I also find hungry children a great aspect of comedy (wut?)
Whats your source on this?
The younger people ive seen are actually a lot taller than my year was, they seem to be getting taller.
CZcams is strange with links, but Google "children shorter austerity" and you'll find all the data and comparisons with other countries as well as the analysis from the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health.
And fatter too
2:32 whoa calm down bro dont scend into the mtrix just yet😂😅
dude you have no idea how hard i flunked in gcse english and maths because of how they go about making exam questions under aqa but since ive gotten into college and was under the eduqas system both the english and maths was honestly better and it allowed me to retake my english and maths and of course having a lower percentage needed to pass was honestly far better, while keeping the maths and english down to reality which aqa couple years ago started to go off the rails and it was honestly pretty boring with what they come up with and with the reduction in stress i was able to complete it all in the allowed time
To be fair, grade 9 is meant to be basically an A** so it is not surprising that fewer people got a 9 in 2018 than got an A* in 2017. A more accurate comparison would be between the number of grade 8's achieved in 2018 compared to the number of A*s in 2017.
@tldrNews there is a flashing glitch at 2:32 - 2:35, is that just me??? Can't see anyone else in the comments mentioning it, but would probably trigger a seizure in people with eplilepsy! (I refreshed and it still did it!) (NOT SURE IF ITS JUST ME THO)
Stress causes higher chances of having a stroke therefore school and exams cause higher chance of having a stroke
2:30 what the hell happened here???
In my country teachers started a 1 month strike beacuse they were barely paid anything and a person that just started teaching got as much paid as someone with years of expirience
As a tutor, there is a significant effect of covid-19 to student that graduates high school last year.
My assumption is they skipped the most important grade for math: grade 8-9.
Where you start learning about algebra and its manipulations
The glitching at 2:32 really scared me
I agree with many comments about the value of exams. They are overrated and carry too much weight. They happened to work well for me in higher education, but it's about the system and not the individual.
At 2:32 there is a super weird glitch and flicker
2:32
you ok over there?
The stress killed him.
I would be interested to see how the change in teaching styles affected students, eg, for SEND students or those with undiagnosed hidden disabilities. How many send students score much lower on exams but are brilliant day to day. Teachers who work with send students are definately likely to be more accurate in their assesment of send students than the exams are.
Also, i got bullied by teachers in school, so i would be interested to see how the teacher graded system could be appealed by students if they thought it was unfair/non-reflective of their abilities.
you have an interesting point there - but I would say that there are a lot of SEND students, and especially undiagnosed students, who will 'act out', or at least not behave how the teacher expects, in class and therefore will not be assessed by teachers as as capable as they end up being in exams; it absolutely goes both ways
You might want to fix the video glitch at 2:31
The government are treating exams and grading exactly the same as epic does with rocket league competitive ranks. Constantly moving the bar to achieve ‘consistency’ and not being top heavy, all they are doing is making it worse.
The fact they haven’t come up with a solution that works leads me to believe they are ignoring the only solution that makes sense to me which is scrapping exams. Instead they scrapped course work.
In real life if we struggle with a problem we don’t sit in silence pulling our hair out trying recall the answer from something we read in a textbook or someone told us, we reference the text book or we collaborate with other and ask questions, education needs to reflect how we problem solve in the real world.
No wonder we have a productivity problem the current system is solely focused on getting a grade to get another grade to get another grade to get a degree.
Your thumbnails do crack me up sometimes 😂
Are you trying to trigger epilepsy? What's up with the editing at 2:30? Had to close the video
yeah was part of this cohort... basically ignored all 2022 mock papers because they were so laughably easy!
Oh my god. Epilepsy warning?!? 2:31
you have a videp glitch that could make somebody have a seizure
What the hell is going on at 2:30 😂
What does it matter. We need some correlation with the real world. How do students who get 9 compare to the 4-8 cohort? How do they do in the real world or at uni?
THEY GRADE IT ON A CURVE!!!!!!!! SERIOUSLY WTF!!!! As a Canadian I just can't believe it! Grading on a curve is criminal, it shows a complete lack of understanding of the most basic maths! My test score should have NOTHING to do with the test scores of other students, period!
Yeah, it’s actually really quite dystopian when you think that the system is literally designed to always ensure atleast about 20% of kids will have their futures ruined every year, no matter how hard those kids work.
Yeah but ours is just as bad, the Canadian system makes it soo easy to get top grades, I've moved from Canada to the UK, and oh my god the difference is massive, its much more difficult here. I could easily get a top grade consistently (if the teacher didn't hate me in english based courses), but here I have to try, which is how it should be. There should be some sort of standardized testing.
@@lolithighs Compared to what?
@@noobplays-saslow2920 bro your comments may be some of the dumbest takes I've ever heard. Sure 20% of people will fail, but those 20% are always the people who know less...? What do you expect to pass out of pity? It's not like it's predetermined, you can easily get out of that 20% by actually studying
Your test score should have everything to do with the test scores of others, because the only thing that truly matters is how comparatively intelligent you are to others.
There's a visual error at 2:31
What the hell happened to the video from 2:32 to 2:36?? There were several glitches.
2:31 great job guys
Its such an artificial system. Someone who gets 70% on an exam shouldnt get a lower or higher grade than previous cohorts who get the same mark
Did you watch the video? The whole point of grade boundaries being decided after marking is to ensure that students are not unfairly penalised by harder-than-average tests resulting in fairer weighting of the grades.
@@inbb510 ok
The exams were not necessadily hard for A-levels, however the grade boundaries skyrocketed. I was a straight A*/A student throughout my time at college but got below my expected results in nearly every subject. I still got into my first choice, however they were a huge shock and I have to congratulate anyone who got high grades this year.
2:31 all of the sudden Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer
Why are Education Employees so stupid all the time in Germany they changed the entire exam system for your graduation to a point where Teachers said to us that they dont know what will be in the final exams.
They didn’t cover the why for this year
Just got my results. Bang on the grade boundary for a nine in one
how tf does @2:30 get through QC...
Perhaps a mixture of open exams and teacher assessment should be used to grade the student ?
You mean like in other countries? Where doing well in a year can meditate a bad exam day? The UK is so backward.
@@bzuidgeest not really, the exam is still the majority of the overall score because it provides equal footing for all students, but perhaps 20%-30% of the scores is granted by the teacher through regular tasks to complete throughout the year, the tasks could be a test or a project. Because the school score is bias and provide by the teacher alone, the open exam is still important
So... no one gonna mention the seizure that was given at 2:32?
Luckily i managed to get a 5 or more in all my subjects without much revision, however i can admit the exams we did (AQA+Edexcel) were actually a piece of piss
I think the GCSEs are not helpful but single-teacher decisions are a perfect way to incentivize private schools to do EA video game strategy and “pay to win”
Exams are inferior to constant assessment. Although the teacher given grades were an abysmal system because it directly resulted in people who cheated in mock exams being given absurdly high grades and those who didn't getting punished for life.
In Australia we use both exams and constant assessment that determine our results, although there are issues with this system this might be better than using only exams or only constant assessment
the grade boundary for a 6 has been increased by 20 marks since 2019 in maths. any other year i would have nearly got a 7 but instead ive got a five which is really not a representation of my ability
GCSE grades don’t matter at all lmao. As long as you pass English and Maths most providers will let you do A Levels/Level 3 BTEC and only those matter, since they are the only grades that higher education providers will look at.
People expected higher grades due to the teacher assessments, leading to people being disappointed when it went back to normal
2:31 TLDR finally revealling that they're all automatons for a second there.
thank goodness i though my screen was glitching
2:32 Video glitch
Letting the teachers decide is very flawed... The smart kid who is a bit of a fuck about will get marked down by the teacher purely because they are not liked. Results should never be about how likable a person is.
To answer the thumbnail question, the "Why not both?" meme seems to fit nicely.