GCSE students are getting better at Maths

In 2005 we couldread that "Results... for the 600,000 pupils who sat GCSEs this summer will show a rise in the proportion of candidates achieving A* to C grades in the subject...The increase, expected to be about one per cent, will take the proportion securing a good pass to more than 52 per cent."

What good news...


However we could also read that "Pupils needed less than half marks to gain an A grade in this year's maths GCSE. Grade boundaries set by the biggest three exam boards show thousands of students have secured good GCSE passes despite getting the majority of questions wrong."

As well as reading that "Pupils have been awarded a B grade in a maths GCSE exam despite scoring only 17 per cent...The pass marks for the new exam, which was taken last summer by 7,500 children from 65 schools and is due to be introduced nationwide next year, were an all-time low. Pupils sitting GCSE maths last year had to achieve about 40 per cent to get a B grade. But with the new exam, designed by the Cambridge-based exam board OCR, those who got as little as 17 per cent were given a B, while those scoring 45 per cent were awarded an A."

And also read that "Three quarters of the brightest maths students were unable to convert a fraction to a decimal in one of this year's GCSE questions, according to examiners' reports. A significant number thought a third was the equivalent of 0.3 (as opposed to 0.333 recurring) and only a quarter of candidates taking the hardest papers answered a geometry question correctly by identifying the angles in a semi-circle. The examiners' report published by Edexcel, one of the three exam groups in England, noted that "the general level of algebra was disappointing" among the best candidates put in for the highest tier paper and Pythagoras's theorem was frequently used incorrectly."

I seem to remember having to know Pythagoras's theorem for my school entrance exam at age 9. However that was in the early 1970s before the education system in this country had been comprehensively (pun intended) screwed up. The dumbing down of education that began in the 1970s has increased in intensity under this Labour government. One could almost believe that the Labour government wanted an overqualified but under educated population, now why would they want that?