The new GCSEs are harder but the grades remain the same

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/sep/02/the-new-gcses-are-harder-but-the-grades-remain-the-same

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Important details seem to be missing from the coverage of the changes to the GCSE model and the inclusion of IGCSE into the argument (Letters, 27 August). GCSE grades are, and have always been, decided by norm referencing: papers are marked, and the scores are ranked and then compared with a normal distribution curve so grade boundaries can be allocated to ensure the same proportion of students each year is allocated each grade, give or take some statistical tinkering at the boundaries. Grade inflation occurs when the tinkering is too often rounded upwards rather than downwards.

Michael Gove and his successors are correct that the papers are much more difficult, but the same proportion of bright kids get the A*/9 grade and the same proportion of weak kids get the G/1 grade equivalents. The difference now is that there is actually less discrimination between the highest students due to the narrowing of the grade boundaries. The least able are confronted with papers where the majority of each question is way beyond their basic comprehension.

IGCSE science subjects are 1970s O-levels in all but name, and were written with no requirement for practical work so that they can be taught in foreign schools, which often have no access to lab facilities or technical support. Norm-referenced marking criteria mean that British students taking these papers have a distinct advantage when competing in a cohort where many foreign students are attempting an exam in their second or third language.Ian GarnerGuernsey

• Your editorial (That private and state pupils are sitting different exams is a policy disaster, 26 August) seems to accept government claims that the “reformed” GCSEs which state school students sit are superior to the “unreformed” IGCSEs which can be taken by students at private schools. Yet these are the same GCSEs that prevent candidates from demonstrating sustained critical thought, creative expression or unrehearsed responses.

There’s no possibility within the GCSE format for students at Oxford Spires Academy, for example, whose extraordinary poems the writer-in-residence there, Kate Clanchy, has circulated, to show and be rewarded for their qualities as writers. Under the IGCSE format this might be more possible.

Abolition of a coursework element, enforcement of “closed book” approaches, and infiltration of content more appropriately studied at advanced level, have ensured that GCSEs are now far more a test of mere recall than of thought. This is intellectually impoverishing not improving.

There are many arguments for the abolition of private education. The refusal by teachers in private schools to accept as educationally superior what the “reformed” GCSEs impose is not one of them. Patrick YarkerDereham, Norfolk

• Your editorial and Lucy Powell have picked the wrong issue in exposing the unfairness of independent schools’ ability to choose “easier” IGCSEs instead of GCSEs. Having examined English scripts since 1982, and written questions for GCSE and IGCSE, I think there is a widespread naive acceptance of a myth created by government spin that Gove’s reformed GCSEs have created a “rigorous” educational “gold standard”.

If the reformed GCSEs were more rigorous, the pass rates would have fallen. They have not. Ofqual and the awarding bodies have achieved fairness by delivering the same share of awards for this year’s candidates as for their siblings previously.

Examined reading in GCSE is restrictive. The ABs reassure teachers and candidates that the exam papers will be predictable each year by rubric repetition of the same questions, in the same order, with the same mark tariff, on three texts selected for reading. This template helps teachers and students to prepare exam-ready responses, but fragments teaching into rehearsing “Paper 1 Question 4 English” and “Paper 2 Question 3 English”. This is not an incentive to rigorous cognitive development: formulaic questioning leads to formulaic answering.

The Oxford/AQA English Language IGCSE has a more rigorous coursework option. This requires research of a topic using five independently found sources containing conflicting data and interpretations to write an original article, selecting, scrutinising, evaluating, and extrapolating from their sources. Candidates add a commentary on their research process and another on their writing process – three assessed written pieces for a 40% component.

Selective schools in the UK and abroad choose the IGCSE not because it is “easier”, but because it offers more stimulus and challenge to the most able than the GCSE – and because it matches the rigorous intellectual demands of the universities to which their students aspire.Peter ThomasBassenthwaite, Cumbria

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