7/6/2008 10:12:00 AM
The Sunday Times 6 July
A book of old O-level questions stumped this year’s bright pupils
For years critics have grumbled that GCSEs are too easy. Standards have fallen and exams have been dumbed down – but are they right? This month a new book, called simply The O Level Book: Genuine Exam Questions from Yesteryear, is published. It contains O-level papers dating back to the 1950s. In the foreword, Martin Stephen, high master of one of Britain’s top boys’ schools, St Paul’s in London, writes: “Back then O-levels were proud to be difficult. It was a stinkingly hard, fact-based exam.” To test out – once and for all – whether GCSEs really are easier than the old-style O-levels we asked a group of five GCSE pupils at Brighton College, East Sussex, to take maths and English papers from the book under test conditions. The results were striking. Not one of the five teenagers is expected to achieve lower than a B grade in the GCSEs they completed a few days ago and several of our guinea pigs are predicted to score a string of As and A*s. Yet according to Louise Kenway, Brighton College’s deputy headmistress, who marked the O-level tests they sportingly sat for us on Wednesday, only two of the five pupils achieved a pass mark in the two-hour O-level maths paper; the rest failed. They did a little better in the 90-minute English-language test. All five teenagers passed the English paper, but, says Kenway, none would have scored a grade 1, the highest O-level grade possible, which is supposed to be equivalent to an A* at GCSE. Sun Times
Curriculum / Quality Assurance
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