"Most 16-year-olds today would not be able to get good grades in the old O-Levels, which were replaced 20 years ago by GCSEs, he said."
Hmmmm! An incomplete statement that misleads: the other half should be that most 16-year olds of 20 years ago would be hard pressed to do well in GCSE's today. The curricula are different. Take languages; my daughter has just done her Spanish GCSE a year early. I've been overseeing her learning as she changed school a year ago and the new one doesn't do Spanish. I was disturbed at first because the curriculum had less grammar than my 'O' level 30 years ago. Then I realised that she was far more able to hold everyday 'essential' conversation in Spanish than I was at the same stage: the focus is now on conversational competancy rather than preparation for literary study.
I imagine similar tales could be told in other subjects. We need also to realise what the political leaning of the PAT is; let's say ... they are the kind of people who were happy to consign students from my background to achieving far less than I actually have on the basis of there being only one grammar school place for kids from my primary school.
EducationGuardian.co.uk | Special Reports | Call to bring back grammar schools:
27 July 2005
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I think that you are presening partial evidence. I know first hand the relative ill preparation of the O level on the oral side, as I mention in the posting. There does seem some confusion in what you write between standards; what much of what you say comes down to appears to be that you liked the O level marking scheme better, that standards are different is not the same as they are lower. The GCSE kids (most a year away from exam) that went on exchange visit to France a month ago, on the whole did far better than I would have expected my O level cohort to have done in coping with the language 'live'.
There may be grounds to diss GCSE standards but we need to make sure that we compare like with like AND do a security check for ideological baggage!
(My own test is how would a proposed system work for a late-developer high potential learner such as I was? I'm afraid that the PAT seem to be the kind of organisation whose pursuit of 'excellence' was the kind that was quite happy to see me fail. So perhaps I am overskeptical of what they say, but their failure to compare like with like and thus implicitly norm their own standards is questionable).
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