Why GCSEs are Broken - Mr Salles
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2024
- Dear ...insert the name of your MP,
GCSEs are broken, and we need your voice in parliament to try to fix them.
As you know, the current grading by Ofqual of this year’s GCSE exams is being carried out on a statistical model. Teachers have been asked to grade each student, and then distinguish between students by ranking them all within each subject.
What this means, as Ofqual has stated, is that half of grades are likely to be changed. There are several reasons for this, but the one that shows GCSEs are broken is this:
Ofqual is going to use students’ SAT results to ensure ‘comparable outcomes’. This is not new. It is the system by which we always award grades. Broadly speaking, it means that the top 19% of students achieve grades 7 to 9. The bottom 30% achieve grades 1 to 3.
This is a ludicrous position. It means that, no matter what students know, and no matter what actual mark they get in the exam, their achievement is graded in these percentages.
If our schools got worse every year, and our students learned less and less, the same percentage would still achieve excellent grades.
Conversely, if our schools get better and better every year, and students know more and more, this will never be reflected in their grades. The same limits will apply, so that only a certain percentage can be allowed to have an excellent grade. We would expect the millions invested in Pupil Premium funding, free school meals and turning schools into academies out to have helped students know more. But the current system stops you from finding out whether you are wasting tax payer’s money.
This is a deeply flawed, even a nonsensical way to run an exam system. Imagine a driving test in which passes were allocated according to pre-set percentages. In a month where many poor drivers took the test, you might pass despite dangerous errors, simply because you were in the top percentage in that month.
Conversely, next month might be dominated by good drivers. Here you might need an absurdly high grading in order to get a pass, and would fail on a couple of minors.
The reason this doesn’t happen, the reason that there is an actual pass mark, rather than some notional percentage of drivers able to pass, is simple.
We know what drivers need to be able to do, and need to know about the highway code, in order to qualify them as safe to drive on our streets.
The same is true in the way we train doctors, pilots, accountants, any number of roles where knowledge matters.
Yet, with our young people, we don’t do this. Our exam system effectively says, knowledge doesn’t really matter.
Perhaps no greater proof of this is the call by teachers’ unions, and ASCL in particular, to modify next year’s GCSEs. Ofqual has astonishingly already embarked on a consultation to change GCSE assessment for next year.
This would be impossible in an exam system where knowledge matters. A GCSE system which is fit for purpose would decide on what this knowledge is, and stick to it. It would make no sense to claim a student had that knowledge when they didn’t. In the same way that we wouldn’t pretend a pilot could land a plane, or pretend a driver could safely navigate a roundabout, or pretend a violinist could play their grade 5 pieces, or a pretend a doctor could diagnose a heart attack.
The very fact that teachers, and their leaders, and Ofqual themselves are suggesting we alter what students are tested on reveals just how broken the current system is.
As an educational establishment, from the grass roots teacher, to the Multi Academy Trust Chief Executive, to the exam boards themselves, we have no faith in the curriculum we are delivering. Because, if we did value the knowledge our curriculum delivered, we could not imagine abandoning it.
As you know, the Chief Ofsted Inspector, Amanda Spielman, has revised the Ofsted framework so that schools are now judged on the quality of the curriculum. Not just what schools teach, but whether students actually know and remember it. This has been welcomed by teachers, head teachers and MPs. It just makes sense, doesn’t it?
We need an exam system which also makes sense.
Here are some practical solutions:
1. Have only one exam board for each GCSE subject.
2. Set a pass mark for each grade, regardless of how many students attain it. Students, teachers, parents and employers would have faith in what every grade means.
3. Have more than one exam season. Students would be able to take the GCSE when they are ready, spreading the load of examination papers in, say, November and May/June, in both year 10 and year 11. The 2019 Pisa tests showed that only 53% of British 15-year-old students are satisfied with their life, compared to a worldwide average of 67%.
And how much would it cost to fix this broken system? Not a penny.
I urge you to ask for GCSE reform and make them fit for purpose.
Yours sincerely,
Find your MP below
members.parlia...
I emailed two weeks ago and just got a letter from my local MP. He says he was very interested in the points that have been raised and has sent them to Nick Gibb, who is the Minister of State for Schools and he will get back to me when he receives a response. So hopefully other MPs have done the same and Nick will have loads of the same message and will have to respond and do something about it.
Thanks Jack, you are a star!
Its been a month and my mp replied saying theyll try and do something, and when i responded back asking if anything has been done they didnt say anything 😭😭
why have they made it so that there can never be a year where everyone passes, surely the more people that pass the better
Exactly!
@@MrSallesTeachesEnglish Something to acknowledge is that in countries like Italy, grade 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10(yes grade 10 is basically the top of a grade 9) are given in base on the amount of knowledge that a student knows compared to the amount of knowledge that the student should know!! If a country like Italy could do it I don't get why the all mighty and superior England couldn't!
@@efeoni9499 that sounds like a much better system than England's current system
Ellie Powlesland no cos then it looses its value
Cheta Enwegbara gcses arent meant to be like money. It’s about education. It’s wrong
Refreshing to hear this from a teacher.
Why bro
@@p_4290 highschool trachers are getting 4-5s soooooo
Most teachers believe this tho.
Mr Rebuild Yep😬
The entire education system needs a rethink and one that encourages learning useful skills and information instead of memorising science facts and quotes that we will never need to know.
Smelly gcse books
I agree with that. When I sat my exams. A student asked my maths teacher “when will we ever need this” and the teacher just replied “probably never but you need it for the exam”. Although she did admit that she thought it was stupid too. I did a real life maths course 6 months later and that was actually useful. Learned how to do finances etc. Learned how to analyse data. Basically all the stuff that everyone should be learning.
@@colmanator2386 my baby ethan❤
Trying to divide the country by results on a test when you’re 16 that decide what you can do in the future is never a good idea.
Fr it sounds so dumb. Plus the thing we learn in school aren’t going to be need in our future lives🤦🏾♀️ what is Macbeth gonna do for me when I become a nurse, plumber or tax collector???nothing🤦🏾♀️🤦🏾♀️
@@Chanelx11 forgot all the quotes and it's been 4 months (keep in mind we spend over 20 hrs learning this)
@@Chanelx11 English Literature is one of the Least useful subjects honestly.
We are taught to memorise things, in my Spanish speaking mock I didn’t even know what I was saying. I was just repeating what I had remembered
ikr its so sad. its such a beautiful language but we're not really learning at all
I'm starting to panick again
oh godd me too
@epic gaming panicking will do nothing as its not good for your health; the best thing you can do is keep calm, cool, and collected.
You spelt panic wrong and its all because of the gcse’s
I’ve been watching GCSE results videos because they’re in a couple weeks and it’s stressing me out lollll
@Del stress is not gonna change ur results so just relax and chill enjoy ur summer
A lot of careers are going to be ruined
Tbh, gcse's arent the end of the world, you can resit.
Ethan how much u got?
Lol if they go off SATs I get no grades
Me too haha. I moved to England 3 years ago, straight into year 9, therefore I haven't sat my SATs :))
@@snxdrxx3363 same, i came at the beginning of yr10
They go off the average sat grade distribution of students going up to your school and the previous amount of progress made to see what the gcse distribution will be at your school. Individual sat scores aren’t important.
d Holmes That’s a wholly inefficient system, but honestly I had never heard of SATs til this year - moved from a state primary school to an independent “prep” and then senior school
same I came last year and moved straight to year 11 sooo I guess I'm gonna fail lmao
pray for me, i need six grade 7's to get into a sixth form. im doing maths, chemistry, biology and economics
I hope you get the 7's you deserve.
@@jamie_sg thanks
May god gift you with the grades you deserve💯
So we’re we gonna retake if we fail and don’t get into the sixth forms applied for ?
Very true
I feel like school is like this because there aren't enough top jobs for everyone. So they might think everyone succeeds and they all want top jobs, it can't happen so they try to stop people from succeeding with the school system.
Empowering
The top jobs are far more interested in university degrees and a levels. Nobody will give a fuck about this year’s grades
Alexander Hamilton how do u get the degree though
H1SHM 123 A levels. As long as you have semi decent GCSEs you’re sorted. Employers care more about A levels
A levels are more. Important and far more specific.
I'm in year 12 and gcses don't affect me anymore but I have to say that sadly a lot of this applies to a-levels too. We need a set pass mark, the same exam board and actual representative way of testing our 'knowledge'
Finally a teacher acknowledging the issue with GCSEs and pretty much the whole school system instead. It’s pretty fucked up that exam boards and the government are far more concerned with making sure that students are having to compete with eachother and that a certain number of people should fail each year to make education seem ‘challenging’ and ‘top tear’ and could care less about students actual learning of a subject or even just getting the qualifications they need to succeed in life.
This is so much so that they are even willing to use sat results in order to achieve an outcome of only a few benefitting. How ridiculous. This just proves that they are far more concerned with tests and ranking rather than actual learning.
Can we just abolish our school system and change it to be like Finland’s please?
This is why I am a pessimist.
love how i didn't do ANY SATs at all so all my target grades were 5s and i came out with 789s :/
Isnt it nice knowing that my year groups 5 years of secondary school are all going out the window because its based off of our SATs.
Sent this to about 5 MP’s. They work for us. Change will happen. Thank you for spreading awareness.
I feel like this years GCSE Generation will be the forgotten generation
Yep but what about next years ? Its gonna be chaos compared to this years well ik that the 2021 GCSEs will he taken but in the account that they would have missed half a year of vital education and ontop do the year 11 work aswell plus the revision given the same time they would get in the previous years and given the situation that is unfair and unjust and will make many upset or angry that they got the grades they didnt want
If they are going off our SAT’s does that mean that the Mocks and the grades which the teachers put through are pointless?
ExposerDanTv They take the average sat scores going up into your school and add the average progress grade for your school to see what the average distribution should be
Your mocks and teacher grade should determine what rank you are, which depending on what percent they expect to get a certain grade, will determine your grade
yh
Yes they don’t go off individual sat scores
What if you didn’t do your sats like you came from a different country ?
It's 'nice' to know how we are told to work hard and we will achieve, yet these old professors sitting in a darkened study and will merely, with the flick of a pen or the click of a mouse, change our grades to 'suit' a system, therefore changing our future careers
I also remember how GCSEs, for science, never really tested your understanding of the subject. They just wanted you to learn the mark scheme, so no matter how correct your answer was, they don't give a flying monkeys, if it isn't worded as it is in the mark papers, you do not get the mark
That is a good evaluation of the problem with the science GCSE, and you are right - different exam boards actually have different definitions - which is stupid
That is so true and its even true at A levels like you need to use certain phrases to get marks
Dude, I barely even knew how to speak or understand English in Year 6, so my SATs were not great, but now I've been literally getting some of the highest grades possible but the fact that this won't be acknowledged just because of my SATs is very upsetting
exactly, my friend barely spoke English in year 6 and got 7,8 and 9s in her GCSEs last year. It’s so unfair I feel for you guys :(
Feel sorry for u bro
Same :(
They’re not basing it off ur individual sat grade it’s on the average of your entire year group’s sat results then comparing it to your rank made by the teacher
@@MarrSar-wz7xq and also your avg school gcses results which may disadvantage some pupils!
Sounds like the kids would feel right at home reading ‘1984’.
I’ve literally had so many nightmares during quarantine of me opening my result letter and getting failed results, I don’t know if I should be revising for the October/November retake or if it will be a waste of time :(
Imagine doing well in GCSEs and then finding out that it apparently isn't worth anything xD
It really isn’t. For the amount of stress I went through during GCSEs, it really wasn’t worth it. I’m at uni at the moment and I, nor does anybody else, don’t give my GCSEs a second thought. As long as you do well enough to get on to the next stage of your life, it’s irrelevant what you achieved. Even then, there’s plenty of opportunities to retake. The school system causes massive amounts of unnecessary stress and it needs to change
@@laurenpreston9702 Yh but it is like the most basic qualification you need to get a job so if u have no GCSEs what are you supposed to do
Siddique Muzzamil redo them? Get a job that doesn’t consider qualifications in the mean time. What I was saying is that so many people stress, unnecessarily, to get the best grades when they’re barely considered once you’ve done higher qualifications.
It’s not accurate at all. I was predicted 4 and 5s but actually ended up getting 7,8,9s. However, it did push me to work harder and work against what they had predicted me but it doesn’t represent students whatsoever.
Me too
Honestly I'm expecting high grades and still think everyone should just get either a pass or a fail
Due to grade boundaries it all comes down to brackets and percentages
That bit about teaching kids how to pass an exam vs actually teaching them something valuable is more true than I could even imagine
Should we email our local MP then?
Yeah quickly
Our English class, 2017... the first year of 1-9. Our teacher left due to maternity, our replacement didn’t show up for a month after, she took a holiday, she we didn’t have a teacher, for 3 and a half months. It was one of my most stressful times of my life, and I was abused as a child, during exams I wouldn’t sleep for 2-3 days at a time, when I got sleep it would be me crying myself to sleep, I was running on caffeine, I was depressed and so was my class, we didn’t know what was gonna happen, I practically taught my class half of Dr Jekyll and mr Hyde, as well as going through animal farm with them. I was practically a quasi teacher, we didn’t even cover most of poetry, as we just had the average supply teachers, we had enough at the end of March so we wrote a letter telling them we’re boycotting the exams. So at the end of year 10 I got a 2 and 4...
I ended up with a 7 and 8 for language and literature. I cried so badly. Honestly hate the new system, it just doesn’t give kids incentives to do well, they should’ve at least given students to do exams in the year before and or mid term exams which go towards the end of their grades.
I hardly remember anything I learnt from my GCSEs. It just goes to show how GCSEs are basically a short-term memory dump. Thank you for the educational video, I sent an email to my local MP.
The Yellow Raincoat Thank you
I honestly am shocked. You surely know that the exam board don't dictate what knowledge is necessary or valued. The government sets the AOs and all the exam boards do is use different texts and formats though actually the texts are by and large the same.
In my case my entire school has been downgraded
This is evidenced statistically.
I was a prospective imperial student but make a guess as to what happened. My school was naive enough to grade us proportionally based on last years results. This is fine since i would be packing to imperial. But Ofquals algorithm pushed this down further for every student. My school expected 4 A's for computer science ( last years cohort was abysmal) and i was number 4. I have been downgraded. Safe to say comp sci results will not reflect last year. It is a mess and to assume the government is naive, well, is naive. I have seen private schools go from 60% a* to c up to 96%. Their classes are similar in size to my school.
This is unexplainable and inexcusable corruption
Extremely useful information . I am really worried for results day. One question: I have got 9's since year 10 and in my first two mocks in year 11 for a subject but in my recent mocks I got 4. What do you think my predicted grade would be?
I don't know I am afraid
Good luck shining dove
@@lucafinco1876 Thank you
Very nice to hear this from a position of experience. I’ve always been frustrated with how a lot of what I learn isn’t set by teachers themselves and the current grading system is incredibly classist and detrimental for people’s mental health right now. Finally an English teacher I can get behind and agree with 😊
I never took SATS in 6 six because I was out of the country. Technically the only evidence my school has of my progress has been since year 9 to year 11 now. What does this mean for people like me?
It means nothing as they’re taking an average of all the results for our year not individuals or else I’d be screwed 😂
Your teachers don’t grade you off sats, they grade you off of mocks, class work and the progress they think you’d have made. Sat scores are just to see the average grade distribution going into secondary and is couple with average progress in past years to see what the distribution of gcse grades should be. This is to make sure schools, especially private schools, can’t cheat by massively over predicting.
Essentially if you’ve been working hard, you’ll be fine
d Holmes Mauve thank you I get it now
@@dholmes264 Do they grade you off all mocks including ones you've done before GCSE?
I suck at learning at home. My exams are next year but I hope it goes well..
My school does English literature a year early which is great as it's less stress in year 11 but Ofsted doesn't like it. We also stated most GCSEs in y9.
Thankyou so much for this video! I will be writing to my local MP, thanks again. Some action needs to be taken 😔
How is Religous Studies gonna help me get a job honestly waste of time and resources that could be spended on core subjects
The idea that education is for a job is not one I and most teachers share!
Even if you get good grades you are never really thought about how to get a job they just tell you what a CV is or give you a lesson on it which is not enough
I came to England in 2014 I was in year 6 at the time and I had to seat my SATs regardless of the fact that I knew almost no English.
Now I’m in year 11 and obviously I’m much more smarter than I was in year 6 and the fact that they will be using our SATs to grade us. Has my stomach rolling...
love the new editing
Thank you - I'll try a few more to see if they take off
What an absolute legend.
Thank you!
i'm a year 11 and one of my best friends moved to the uk from italy when we were in year 7. she didn't do SATS and didn't speak english at the time, so she was given low target/predicted grades. however, 5 years on, her predicted grades are still low despite how much she has clearly improved. she is an inherently smart multilingual who has been getting the same good grades as her non-immigrant counterparts for a few years now. she probably won't get the grades she deserves and would've achieved otherwise just because she moved here late.. it's been almost a THIRD OF OUR LIFE since we did our SATS :/
Ive just come from your other video, I have emailed my pm and as a year 10 student going into year 11 I honestly hope the GCSE revert back and there is some form of change
Hi Mr Salles, I don't know if you remember me from a community post. I said how I loved your literature videos; they were so insightful and detailed. I've only got 1 more exam on Friday, (physics) then I've finished! I decided to hop onto this video since it came up on my for you page. I'm so grateful that I could do my GCSE exams, must've been terrifying for most student during 2020. I'll let you know what I got in English Literature and Language in August. I predict i achieve 7-6. I've been getting 5's the whole year but in April I stumbled across your channel. I'm confident with your excellent teaching and by understanding all your analysis and creative writing, I'm fairly confident I'll achieve these results. I'm definitely recommending you to my brother. Than you so much!
I’ll be delighted to hear how you get on! Good luck
Sad that it took a pandemic to have this conversation... great video btw.
Glad you enjoyed it. I agree!
To be fair, it would be very hard to get a test that works the same where the same level of knowledge would get the same mark year to year
As a student who took my GCSE’s last year (24 different exams) I can agree that they are horrible and unfair!!
Happy I took my gcse last year. Was predicted all 4’s and got straight 6’s and 1 level 7 and 8. Not to mention it triggered high anxiety levels causing me to need counselling.
Don’t understand why they hype gcses up that much
I did them last year too, at the end of the day they’re no different to any other test you’d do at school and moreover within 15 years you probably won’t bother even including them on your cv
@@Ollie-dh9it Exactly
Mr Sales videos are the BEST
For those of you who are watching on phone and can't copy:
Dear ...MP's_name... ,
GCSEs are broken, and we need your voice in parliament to try to fix them.
As you know, the current grading by Ofqual of this year’s GCSE exams is being carried out on a statistical model. Teachers have been asked to grade each student, and then distinguish between students by ranking them all within each subject.
What this means, as Ofqual has stated, is that half of grades are likely to be changed. There are several reasons for this, but the one that shows GCSEs are broken is this: Ofqual is going to use students’ SAT results to ensure ‘comparable outcomes’. This is not new. It is the system by which we always award grades. Broadly speaking, it means that the top 19% of students achieve grades 7 to 9. The bottom 30% achieve grades 1 to 3.
This is a ludicrous position. It means that, no matter what students know, and no matter what actual mark they get in the exam, their achievement is graded in these percentages.
If our schools got worse every year, and our students learned less and less, the same percentage would still achieve excellent grades. Conversely, if our schools get better and better every year, and students know more and more, this will never be reflected in their grades. The same limits will apply, so that only a certain percentage can be allowed to have an excellent grade.
We would expect the millions invested in Pupil Premium funding, free school meals and turning schools into academies out to have helped students know more. But the current system stops you from finding out whether you are wasting tax payer’s money.
This is a deeply flawed, even a nonsensical way to run an exam system. Imagine a driving test in which passes were allocated according to pre-set percentages. In a month where many poor drivers took the test, you might pass despite dangerous errors, simply because you were in the top percentage in that month.
Conversely, next month might be dominated by good drivers. Here you might need an absurdly high grading in order to get a pass, and would fail on a couple of minors.
The reason this doesn’t happen, the reason that there is an actual pass mark, rather than some notional percentage of drivers able to pass, is simple. We know what drivers need to be able to do, and need to know about the highway code, in order to qualify them as safe to drive on our streets.
The same is true in the way we train doctors, pilots, accountants, any number of roles where knowledge matters.
Yet, with our young people, we don’t do this. Our exam system effectively says, knowledge doesn’t really matter.
Perhaps no greater proof of this is the call by teachers’ unions, and ASCL in particular, to modify next year’s GCSEs. Ofqual has astonishingly already embarked on a consultation to change GCSE assessment for next year.
This would be impossible in an exam system where knowledge matters. A GCSE system which is fit for purpose would decide on what this knowledge is, and stick to it. It would make no sense to claim a student had that knowledge when they didn’t. In the same way that we wouldn’t pretend a pilot could land a plane, or pretend a driver could safely navigate a roundabout, or pretend a violinist could play their grade 5 pieces, or a pretend a doctor could diagnose a heart attack.
The very fact that teachers, and their leaders, and Ofqual themselves are suggesting we alter what students are tested on reveals just how broken the current system is.
As an educational establishment, from the grass roots teacher, to the Multi Academy Trust Chief Executive, to the exam boards themselves, we have no faith in the curriculum we are delivering. Because, if we did value the knowledge our curriculum delivered, we could not imagine abandoning it.
As you know, the Chief Ofsted Inspector, Amanda Spielman, has revised the Ofsted framework so that schools are now judged on the quality of the curriculum. Not just what schools teach, but whether students actually know and remember it. This has been welcomed by teachers, head teachers and MPs. It just makes sense, doesn’t it?
We need an exam system which also makes sense. Here are some practical solutions:
1. Have only one exam board for each GCSE subject.
2. Set a pass mark for each grade, regardless of how many students attain it. Students, teachers, parents and employers would have faith in what every grade means.
3. Have more than one exam season. Students would be able to take the GCSE when they are ready, spreading the load of examination papers in, say, November and May/June, in both year 10 and year 11. The 2019 Pisa tests showed that only 53% of British 15-year-old students are satisfied with their life, compared to a worldwide average of 67%.
And how much would it cost to fix this broken system? Not a penny. I urge you to ask for GCSE reform and make them fit for purpose.
Yours sincerely,
Wait, what? I didn’t even do SATs... man all I can hope for now is that I get the grades I need for the A level subjects I want to do
It’s about being the best. Everyone can pass. It’s about who works the hardest. It is also the best indicator for universities.
This is why the Edexcel iGCSEs are "easier" and better. No wonder why private schools do so well when it comes to GCSEs, they haven't got to remember (retain) 2 years worth of content when they do their exams they're only tested on one modulr/unit at a time (I think) and apparently the marking is more lenient in the iGCSE compared to the 9-1 "normal" GCSE. Go and compare a 9-1 iGCSE English Language paper with a regular 9-1 GCSE paper, you'll find that the iGCSE questions look a hell of a lot easier. Linear exams are grotesquely unrealistic and need to go 👋.
GCSEs should be scrapped. I did my GCSEs back in 1998 and I hated it because I hate exams.
The UK education system SICKENS me to the very core. Exams were flawed from the beginning, as they rely SOLELY on the mental ability of memorization, which not all students excel at. Too many thick skilled people believe that it will compliment in attributes such as discipline as well as showing what the student has learnt, which is NOT true. Coursework is superior at showing what the student has learnt in practice while also achieving attributes such as the aforementioned discipline.
I used to believe the same as you, but memory is the bedrock of learning, no matter how you assess it. If exams are constructed well, anyone getting a good mark in the exam, would also get a good mark in coursework. However, the reverse would not be as true. It is easy to get good grades in coursework with short term effort, but also more importantly, short term memory. So what you did learn at the time is much more easily forgotten.
@@MrSallesTeachesEnglish I agree that memory is important, but even then the students who took the exams don't actually retain the knowledge in the long run. Evidence behind this is the huge multitude of students I have spoken to that claim they do not remember ANYTHING from their GCSE years. Furthermore, the stress that comes with the standardised method increases the likelihood of memory retention loss, making succession in remembering and comprehension even more challenging, which honestly goes to show that nothing about exams should be considered as being 'long term learning'. So no, I don't believe that exams are effective at all in aiding the student in what they have learnt; as they are just more 'rigid'. You say that 'memory is the bedrock of learning', which is true, yet comprehension is of higher critical value to the process of learning.
@@gundam5281 I agree that we tend to forget a lot of what we studied, but that is because we have been taught to cram for an exam in the last few weeks. This doesn't build memory. All understanding is memory in disguise, as the psychologist Daniel Willingham tells us.
i sent the email to my local mp! hopefully things change in the system. thank you
Thanks!
Thank you so much for talking about exam stress and burn out! You have truly spoken on behalf of GCSE candidates and IGCSE candidates TOO!! Personally, being an IGCSE candidate in an African country, just for mocks in preparation for the October/November IGCSE session, we write over 4 papers a day which is absolutely ridiculous! These are our golden and precious years of life which we are supposed to enjoy to the fullest before we take up adulthood but with such a ridiculous education system, it is impossible. This system must change and it must change for the better
That does indeed sound like very hard work. Good luck!
Having completed my English GCSE and continuing at A Level, not being allowed to take the books into your exam makes no sense. Being expected to remember quotes from 3 novels and various poems with all your other subjects is unreasonable. This is different at A level as I can take my books in with me.
I can’t agree more
Thank you for your bravery and honesty!
Sadly for a few of us, our mps are quite partisan, I'm in chesham and amersham and writing isn't likely to do much to one of the safest conservative seats in the country
Sent a letter to my MP. Really hope he reads it and attempts to do something about the broken GCSE system.
It’s so stupid- how they’re doing grades basically endorses the idea that a meritocracy doesn’t exist, grades are predetermined from the age of 11 😒 the grades should definitely represent knowledge instead of highlighting competition ugh
I am retaking my gcse english and maths and I myself along with others Did not ever know or infer just how important sats were and was told "well sats are for the school you shouldn't worry too much"
Come collage and one of the higher achievers in my English gcse class only for covid to hit and I may get my results downgraded from a 7 to.. well who knows!
And they said to us sats were just for the schools benefit.
Shocking. It's like they do the thinking for us.
Don't worry for anyone who is reading this on the 17th gcse grades are now solely teacher predicted
Couldn't agree more!
I'm so fucked on results day😔
Why GCSE's are REALLY broken:
IN CLASS: 2 + 3 = ?
HOMEWORK: 2 x 3 = ?
EXAM: x is inversely proportional to 2/3, use this to work out the mass of the sun. (100 marks).
I moved to the UK in 2018 and jumped straight into year 9 when i went to school so what will happen to people like me who never did their SATS?
Not very comforting to hear so close to August the 20th 😅😅
I love this new style of video! How did you make this?
Why do we have to compete against each other for good grades. Why can’t good grades just be rewarded for reaching a certain level. Having a changing grade system just creates a toxic competitive system which is ultimately unfair when you compare each year.
I largely agree with the points raised in this video, but I thought the reason certain grades are allocated to certain percentiles of students was to account for variation in the questions asked each year. Some years the exam questions asked are piss easy, and other years they're incredibly difficult, so if there was just a benchmark '70% = 7, 80% = 8, 90% = 9', then some years would have tonnes of grade 9 students and some years would have almost none, which would be completely unfair for students who would now have worse career prospects simply because they were born in the wrong year. Also, students' circumstances vary each year, most prevalently with the current Year 10s who are likely gonna perform far worse in their GCSEs than other years cuz they've had about 4 months of school disrupted. If adjustable grade boundaries weren't a thing, then they'd be screwed again to no fault of their own. Driving tests work the way they do because they're all of equal difficulty and have been for years. The tests are practically identical, and you can't cheat on them. However, if school exams were the same every year (the only way they'd be able to fairly set benchmark percentages for each grade), then the entire paper would be leaked within a week of the first year taking it.
Bob Ruperts You are right if we accept that in 10 months of prep time an exam board could not construct a paper which had the same difficulty as the year before. I just don’t accept that. The driving test is the same - you need 80% on the knowledge test - the Highway Code and then have to be able to demonstrate particular skills, no matter what the traffic, weather or road conditions are like on the day. Just as with GCSE, it is entirely possible for a driver to fail a test in the morning, but pass another in the evening. It is a pretty exact analogy.
@@MrSallesTeachesEnglish Yeah I suppose so if like you said each subject had its own exam board then drawing up a new set of papers in 10 months would be doable - likely a lot more doable than asking e.g. AQA to rewrite a new set of papers for every subject they offer. I guess the one issue that would remain though is trying to get exams to be of equal difficulty (and requiring the same knowledge as the previous year) without being the same exams as previous years. Obviously you can't test every single topic of a subject in maybe 2 or 3 exams, but yet exam boards have to test every topic over the course of 3 years. So one year for English Lit, the question may be about Macbeth's famous monologue before he murders Duncan, and the next year it may be about Malcolm or Lennox. Obviously they can't ask easy Macbeth questions every year, and at some point they'll have to ask questions about niche themes or characters, so it's effectively a wheel of fortune as to what year gets the easy questions and which get the hard. With the driving theory, there's 50 questions which require basically the same level of knowledge just slightly differently applied, but with subjects like English, there's only like 2 questions per exam which have to be different to previous years, which means the same knowledge required for each isn't the same, meaning the pass rate shouldn't be the same either
Yes, you make some great points here
i was dumb in year 6 but smart in year 8-11
i'm not sure if A-levels differ all that much froom the GCSEs. Kinda sucks that I've just finished year 12 and not 11 or 13, but also glad that I did well in my GCSEs through my own efforts
In my country you have a universal exam at the end of your last year, consisting of 3 to 4 subjects and it's graded by local teachers. That's it. If you're not happy with the outcome you can try next year.
if this has a impact and they decide to change wont this affect the becoming y10 and 11's and will it become a drastic change?
I wish we got to specifically choose what subject we wanted to do a gcse in like we do have options but there are some subjects that are compulsory and I dont like that. 2020 needs to be the year if change in the UK!
We do...
@@IN-pr3lw sorry I worded it badly
The only subjects where I felt GCSE’s actually helped me were History, English, and about 50/50 for math. 🤷♂️
They should have more frequent exams.
If I got my GCSE's based off of my SAT's then I'd be in oxford right now.
I've sent the email a few weeks ago and got a reply. My MP said that they will monitor the situation as we go along.
The exam board gives out a big ‘fuck you’ to everybody by saying that students that are unhappy with their inaccurate results can resit them in September despite the fact that we wouldn’t have been in school for 6 months
Wow, and I haven’t done SATS because I wasn’t in the UK! Great
same here but SATs wont affect people on the individual level, rather they'll be used so distribution can be measured as a WHOLE so we should be fine :)
I hope we do good! I just want to pass all mines and go to my sixth form! They accepted me already but with the offer of resisting maths I just hope that’s that case and I get all my 5 GCSE’s at 4+ atleast
Same😔
Hello Mr Salles! I emailed my MP however he just responded with information about the 'new' 9-1 GCSEs.
Perhaps they are a bit dumb, or think you are! Why not reply?
To be honest, I think a lot of our problems in education, are down to switching to GCSEs in 1987. I do remember an old CDT teacher of mine saying that they were too easy. I think we lost a lot of academic vigour when they got introduced.
I think they have to be scrapped. We need a completely new system.
Yes, I agree
I disagree with this. In my opinion the percentage way to give out grades is good, for e.g top 5% get a grade 9 etc etc. This is because it’s all relative, so it’s fair. It’s good because if 1 year everyone does bad, the grade boundaries will drop, so still the top 5% will still get a grade 9. This is completely fair as this would’ve happened because the exam was obviously harder, hence why students did worse. Similarly if everyone did good that year, which is probably because the exam was easy, the grade boundaries should rise and the top 5% should still get a grade 9.
If you were to set a score students must achieve, let’s just say to get a grade 9 you need to get 80/100 marks, if one year the exam was hard, very few people would get a grade 9. This is unfair because they are smart and they do deserve a grade 9, but the exam was generally more difficult. Similarly, if one year the exam was easy and most people managed to get over 80 marks, you can’t award everyone a grade 9 because it’s highly likely that it was because the exam was easier.
However, like everything, there are flaws. A year who isn’t as bright as a whole, a certain number of people will still get a grade 9, which may be unfair. For example, let’s just say there a 100 student in the year, across the UK, and let’s just say the top 5% get a grade 9. Let’s hypothetically say Student A got 97marks, student B got 96 marks, student C got 95 marks, student D got 94 marks, then student E got 47 marks and the rest of the students got less than 46 marks. With this system student E falls in the top 5% and therefore will get a grade 9, despite there being an enormously massive gap between the other top 4 students. The question then is is that student actually a ‘grade 9 student’?
All in all, I still think the percentage was of grading is the way to go.
You can't have an opinion about a known fact
Will IGCSE be graded the same too. And also for IGCSE grades is it possible for them to be lower than mock grades or is it highly unlikely
Using sat results is just stupid. I did okay in my English sats but my maths went terrible. I was bullied in primary and put down by some teachers, I wasn’t a very smart student back then. However when I went into y7 and y8 for some reason everything began to click I can do some pretty hard maths and I’m doing very well in every subject. I’m getting grade 7’s and 8’s in tests when I’m in y10 and my target grades (based on my sats) are only 5’s and 4’s.
As a year 11, I am so worried about my results. I really hope they turn out okay because I keep hearing I should be preparing myself for the worst. My SATS were okay - but I 100% could’ve done better! I can’t believe a few exams I took when I was 10 is going to define how I do in my GCSES.
It is the SAT scores of your year group in school, not your personal ones
The Advanced informations were absolutely useless. I could of revised all the topics but because of the vagueness of the language I didn’t revise a major topic which affectively dropped me down a grade. Everyone revising advanced information will not help anyone. It’ll just increase grade boundaries exponentially..
The only defence for 'relative' grading is that it means paper difficulty shouldn't matter year on year as getting a paper to be the exact same difficulty year on year. I can understand ofquals point even if it's utter tripe.
The one thing I disagree with from this video is testing more frequently. Back when my brother did GCSEs, he had ‘controlled assessments’ pretty much monthly in most subjects so he had constant exam stress. I did all my exams at the end of year 11 and was only properly stressed during exam season (and no more stressed during that time than my brother was throughout his whole 2 years of GCSEs). (Admittedly, I only had 22 exams. I’m not sure how GCSEs nowadays have 3 times as many (30 per year so 60 total) exams as I had. Mine were only 4 years ago.)
30 in year 11
My issue is that I am so bad at exams. I speak so well and can present my self so well that is why I love languages want to continue a career in it. I have extremely bad ADHD and only want to be able to succeed and not loose out next year just due to the fact that I struggle putting what I think down on paper.
김민재 Have you thought about using the dictation apps to speak all your ideas first. Then you can read them and edit. I do this a lot now and find it is a really quick way to write loads.
Hi there, Mr Salles.
A quick question for you regarding GCSE grades, which grades will be mostly affected are we talking about 7,8 + 9 or the ones such as 4/5/6. Reason being in my school a few people took Religious Studies and only about 3 are being predicted a 9 (from my own deductions) and I’m one of them. What are the chances those three will get a 9?
Thanks, hope your well.
PS: sent the letter to my local MP
9 is always a dodgy grade to predict, but at least an 8 seems likely
I work for my target grade for 2-3 years, it is an accurate representation of my abilities. I have a bad day and so bad in my exam, that follows me forever
My GCSE’s next year are going to be a shitstorm
Haha same mate
Ahhh so they decide that gcses are broken when I finish my gcses. Ahh I’m sad, if I knew what marks I would need to get to get a grade my life would’ve been so much easier than to stress about other people being better than me. I would’ve just focused on myself.
Why should teachers grade us from our SATS, we don’t even do all the subjects
They will just grade the basic knowledge that you had from English maths and science but there are lots of people who didn’t do sats so I dunno how it’s gonna fully work
Your teachers don’t grade you off sats, they grade you off of mocks, class work and the progress they think you’d have made. Sat scores are just to see the average grade distribution going into secondary and is couple with average progress in past years to see what the distribution of gcse grades should be. This is to make sure schools, especially private schools, can’t cheat by massively over predicting.
I didn't even do science in my primary.
The problem with having a set pass mark is that the test has to change each year and some tests are harder than others. From doing past papers in lead up to my GCSE's (class of 2020 BTW) in subjects like science the class average mark was vastly different not because we got stupider but because the test was harder. I agree that the percentage system is stupid but a set pass mark would be worse in my opinion.
As the new watchdog legions trailer said,
"Ladies and Gentlemen, London is fucked"