Why I like the new English GCSE exams
There's a lot of kvetching about how hard it is and how many poems students have to memorise now that the exams are closed book. There is similar concern about the English Langauge exams - that they are too demanding.
Call me crazy, but I for one welcome the new tests.
Firstly, for what they do NOT contain - controlled assessment. I absolutely hated spending 5 or 6 lessons watching my students write and being unable to help or guide them. And then when I read the inevitable dross some of them produced, having to reteach the topic and try again with a different title. All this was done in a climate of suspicion about what other teachers were doing in other schools - how rules were being bent or broken.
And then there was the last minute scramble to get the CA marks up - countless lunchtimes, after school sessions and even Saturdays spent hauling kids through it AGAIN for a few extra marks. It was worth it at the time, but I don't miss it!
The closed book element is not a problem once you get past the IDEA of it. I have been in many an exam room where candidates had copies of the novels they had studied. The best candidates rarely opened the text because they knew it inside out, and because they had been taught not to waste their time flicking through looking for the exact wording of a quote. Think about it. In order to use the text in the exam you have to know the quote you want and roughly where it is - at which point why bother? Texts in exams are a distraction. And anyway, candidates for these new exams have extracts to focus on in all but one section of the two papers to enable them to analyse language.
As for the "unreasonable" expectation that students will get to know a small anthology of poems - is it really so much to ask over two years of study? Sure, if you leave it to the last minute you will have a bit a mission on, but then this is not a course where you can leave things to the last minute.
The second Literature exam is 2hrs 15 minutes and has four questions on it, the last of which is a comparison of two unseen poems. Initially, we thought that this final question would be inaccessible to our weakest students. Not a bit of it. On a recent mock, 90% of our students attempted it and got marks. We were also worried that it was too long a time for them to concentrate, but that turned out to be nonsense too. We have to stop assuming that kids today can't sustain effort and therefore not expecting them to - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Show me an employer who doesn't expect their workers to focus for a couple of hours on a task and I'll show you someone going out of business fairly pronto.
We are doing the AQA exams and I really like the way they are structured. Each of the language papers starts with a 4 point question which focuses on AO1 - information retrieval and then builds up in terms of skills. On Paper 2 for example it goes like this: find the information from part of the first text, then summarise the differences in the information in the two texts, next analyse how language has been used in the second text before finally comparing the way the writers have presented their different experiences or ideas. It makes sense.
If the tests are hard, it's because they are supposed to be - GCSEs should mean something. It's not Alice In Wonderland where "all have won and all shall have prizes". There has to be challenge, or the top grades don't mean much.
I should also add that I really like the fact that these are exams which reward readers. We have been saying to each other that there is a national crisis in literacy for over 20 years - my entire career in fact. Finally, we have GCSE exams that address that problem If you do not read, don't expect to get more that a level 3 in English language. If you do not read more challenging texts, you will not get more than a 4. It's a really clear message that we must give consistantly to KS3 kids and their parents, and one that they ignore at their peril. I'm having it printed on a t-shirt to add to my growing collection of preachy teacher attire. (Possible brand name??)
These exam results will give us much better information about the cohort and their abilities than we had previously. Under the A-C system, you had 3 grades above a C. Now we have 5 grades to describe achievement above the "pass" grade 4 which tells you a lot more when they land in your A Level class.
The ideology behind the changes was questionable to say the least, but the exam boards seem to have succeeded in making a silk purse out of sow's ear. At least that is what I think on the evening before our kids take the first of the four new papers - I may be eating my words come results day!
Updated version
Comments
Post a Comment