Royal Society of Chemistry Slams UK Exam Standards

cheesethegreat writes "The Royal Society of Chemistry has sharply criticized the 'catastrophically' falling standards for UK school exams in the sciences. The RSC had 1,300 highly achieving students take an exam made up of questions taken from the last 50 years. The students averaged an appalling 15% on 'hard' numerical questions set in the 1960s, but managing much higher marks on the more recent 'soft' non-numerical questions. This latest report has garnered mainstream media attention. The RSC has also created a petition on the UK Prime Minister's official website, calling for urgent intervention to halt the slide, which has garnered over 3,000 signatures. The issue of declining exam standards has been an ongoing concern in the UK, with allegations that exam results have been manipulated by the government to increase pass rates and meet its own targets."

bring back the cane

fuck all this learning must be fun horse shit, making learning fun hasn't helped anyone actually learn. maybe this recession will be a good thing, you have an entire spoilt generation out there who think they don't actually need to learn anything in order to make it through life.

Re:bring back the cane

Dear AC,

Please don't conceal your identity, we wish to crown you our Emperor.

Not saying

From TFA

Even bright students with enthusiastic teachers are being compelled to "learn to the test", answering undemanding questions to satisfy the needs of league tables and national targets

I have to say, that aside from less quantifiable testing (ie essay based) the mentality of "study the test" is prevalent everywhere, even in higher education. I'm sure that if it were not, the pass rate would be attrocious and consequently, for many schools/institutions: "Goodbye tuition fees".

Re:Not saying

With the obvious point being, if learning to pass the test isn't good enough then the test must be wrong.

Re:Not saying

I was amazed by the speed with which my students (operating systems course) went from looking slightly confused to completely switched off once I mentioned something wouldn't be in an exam. I was going into detail of things like ZFS on the assumption that people who had opted to do a computer science degree were actually interested in the subject - apparently not. My favourite quote from the entire year though was a complaint from one of my students:

I'm paying £3,000 a year for this degree. I don't expect to be told to read stuff in a book!

The main problem...

... in the UK is that young people now care more about who is going to win X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent than own performance at school.

And when you can just show up for an audition to a TV program, do a little dance and become rich and famous overnight, why on earth would you want an education?

Re:The main problem...

BS. There's still plenty of kids out there who want to be good scientists, or engineers, or whatever. What's scary about this news is that they can achieve the best possible grades and be left with a half-assed education. The system's not just making it easier for students, it's failing them.

Sick of this...

I'm sick of this "Kids in the 1950s were smarter than today" rubbish. I know that these old accidemics studied back then and want to feel smart but making kids feel dumb today is wrong and they should feel ashamaned.

Let me break it down for them and you:
- Kids in the 1950s did not study what we study today
- Kids today did not study what kids studied back in the 1950s

I know this is a shocking revolation but still true. If possible I would love to see what would happen if you sat a 1950s kid down in front of a 2008 exam, my guess is the results would be similar.

The only school subject which might be the same between the 1950s and today is Maths. But even then there is less focus on doing long calculations on the page and more using a calculator.

You can claim that doing them on the calculator is dumbing people down but I think voluntarily spending five minutes and likely introducing errors already makes you fairly dumb given an alternative.

Re:Sick of this...

Wishing it weren't true doesn't change the fact, though.

Let me break it down for them and you:
- Kids in the 1950s did not study what we study today
- Kids today did not study what kids studied back in the 1950s

I don't know what subjects you studied, but it couldn't have been science. I don't have much experience with humanities and postmodernism, so I'm willing to believe that English majors today might not study the same topics as English majors in 1950, and so on.

But one of the defining characteristics of science is that it builds on its own past, and it's quite certain that kids today study substantially the same science topics as they did in the 1950s, at least they are supposed to. On top of that, there will be newer topics of course, but those should be a tiny fraction (10% at most - science hasn't changed that much in 50 years).

Any kid who's been studying chemistry or physics or mathematics or engineering today should be able to pick up a textbook from the 1950s and recognize nearly everything in it. If they don't, then they're sorely lacking in the basics. And if they can't do the exercises in one of those books, then they need to start spending time in the library.

I went to school in the 1960s

and your comment is nonsense. The reasons behind the changes are quite simple.

I went to a selective school - called a "grammar school" - which took the top 20% of the population based on a mixed IQ/attainment test. I was then in the top set for maths and the three sciences - so that's the top 5%. In the last two years at school I was in special groups that were applying to Cambridge (our school was heavily science biased to did not have Oxford applicants, who had to do Latin)- the top 1% in maths and physics. If you failed the Cambridge Entrance there was always Durham, Imperial or University College London, or Sussex.

There is your explanation. The exams in the 60s were aimed at - let's call it an elite. In those days there were few distractions - hardly anything on television, no mobile phones, electronic gadgets were basically for nerds who were already into electronics, music was about playing instruments or listening to a few very expensive recordings, not the iPod generation, theatre was about the school theatre group or the local AmDram society if you were good enough. To be absolutely honest, if you were a nerd, and there were enough of us, school was actually the most interesting place to be, where really intelligent adults spent quite a lot of spare time encouraging those of us who were interested in their subjects.

Nowadays schools are expected to spread their teaching assets over the entire pupil list, and the children have far more things to think about outside school. Exams are taken by most children, not just around 15% in each subject. Of course the emphasis has changed.

But if you are one of the top few percent, you can still get the education you want. Despite going through the state system, my children and their friends still go to Oxbridge and the top tier universities, and they still emerge just as well educated as our generation ever did.

I don't think the problem is anything at all to do with exams. It is that society nowadays needs a higher percentage of technically educated people, but the media give the impression that the best opportunities for the bright are in banking, finance, law and celebrity culture. Most journalists are technically illiterate, and the rest follows.

As for maths, you are simply wrong through ignorance. My generation used calculators. They just were not electronic. We had Brunswiga mechanical calculators, mathematical tables (which are basically a hand operated calculator system) and slide rules. The knowledge of how to use them is obsolete, but the principle of assisted calculation is the same.

Re:Sick of this...

I must agree.
I went to school in the UK in the 70s. Being what is now recognized as Dyslexic I had a rough time, being considered 'thick' and not worth teaching. Since I now have a Ph.d in Computer Science, I often find myself wondering at this assessment, and how many peoples lives such labels all but destroyed. For me it was a hard road up the education ladder, but I got there in the end.

I didn't notice anything much better back then myself. Seems to me, given how many people I knew from that time still work in local factories, and got pretty much nothing of benefit from their 'harder' exams (I wasn't allowed to take them, so I can't comment) I don't see how things have changed that much.

My boy is also dyslexic, gets extra help as a result, and in spite of some issues with the low standard of education which even he realises is a problem, he's doing OK (far better then I did), and will be going to university to do a science subject himself.

I personally think people need to be looking to their own parenting, and how they encourage their child to learn, and not expecting the government to sort it out for them. Behavior is so bad in UK schools at the moment that I'm amazed the kids learn anything at all. This is almost entirely a parental issue.

Re:Sick of this...

This is exactly right. My maths teacher, who has been teaching maths for many many years, himself says that the tests haven't got easier or the students dumber. Nay, it's just the fact that the curriculum is different now. It adapts.

For example, when he was at school, he was routinely using logarithms at age 11/12 just because it was the simplest way to do operations involving large numbers. We didn't start that til I was 16, but we learnt about other areas of maths a bit more. Geometric, series, etc.

Everyone bangs on about how hard old exams used to be. It's simply not true, the students were just learning different things back then.

I attend a state school, and I consider myself quite gifted. I've had a good education all my life and I've always been creative/interested in all things science/maths. And honestly, after all the work that's gone in, I refuse to believe that I'd be in a majority if I'd lived 50 years ago. It just doesn't make sense; my parents' education's standards just weren't different.

Re:Sick of this...

That's not the point. Nobody cares if you "understand" the concepts but cannot apply them to a problem. Many people would say that if you cannot apply the concepts in a problem, then you haven't "understood" them in the first place.

This is one voice among many

First, let's get one thing straight.

This is not an argument anyone in a position of power can possibly win. More students fail? Your teaching standards are falling, your education system is lousy. More students pass? Your exams are too easy.

So instead, let's look at what organisations which aren't obliged to follow the state-designed education system think.

Several universities are introducing entrance exams, whereas previously this was more-or-less exclusive to Oxford and Cambridge.

Several universities are having to introduce more basic maths into their first year syllabus to get students up to speed.

Private schools are seriously considering dropping the state-set exams (GCSEs and A-levels) in favour of something else such as the International Baccalaureate. I myself have looked at papers which were set only 5 or 6 years after I left school and exams which I should by rights have been completely lost on - I could immediately see how to answer at least half the questions.

On the other hand, a lot of countries in north Africa and the Middle East consider that education is the only way they're going to improve their lot in the long term. Tunisia, for example, spends a third of its money on education and children leave school speaking at least three languages reasonably fluently. Many of the Arab emirates are doing something similar - they know the oil's not going to be there forever, and they want to be prepared for the day the wells dry up. No chance they can do that if most of their population can hardly read.

As for China - if you think you can move all your manufacturing out there and the locals won't one day say to themselves "Hang on a minute. We own all the factories, we know exactly how to build the kind of things that they buy in the West - why don't we design them ourselves and keep all the money?" you're living on another planet.

20 years from now, the West isn't going to be the technical research place it is today.

Practice

When that comparison between easy English and hard Chinese exams was in the news I asked a Chinese guy about it. He said that although the questions are harder, they vary very little across years so the students all just practice the question forms a lot beforehand, and regurgitate the method with minor changes during the exam.

Still, I'm sure exams have got easier over the years. It would be interesting to see if this has happened to university exams - Oxford and Cambridge must have records going back hundreds of years...

nothing new

Repost of an old theme :

The following examples may help to clarify the difference between the new and old math.

1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price. What is his profit?

1970 (Traditional math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. What is his profit?

1975 (New Math): A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth $1.

(a) make 100 dots representing the elements of the set M

(b) The set C representing costs of production contains 20 fewer points than set M. Represent the set C as a subset of the set M.

(c) What is the cardinality of the set P of profits?

1990 (Dumbed-down math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Underline the number 20.

1997 (Whole Math): By cutting down a forest full of beautiful trees, a logger makes $20.

(a) What do you think of this way of making money?

(b) How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?

(c) Draw a picture of the forest as you'd like it to look.

I left school the year before they merged GCE (General Certificate of Education) and CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) into GCSE.
The CSE syllabus was taught to those who were less academically capable (as evidenced by their past results). In my opinion, GCE taught how to calculate an answer, whereas CSE taught how to recognise an answer from a group of candidates. But that wasn't "fair" so everybody had to learn at the lowest common level.

That is the problem.
I do have experience of both types as although I did GCEs at school, I also went to college to learn car mechanics where I had to take basic English (Communication Skills) and Maths (Numeracy) as part of the course. Having already got GCEs in both, I pissed the college courses with distinctions. The top grade in CSE was only ever a C in GCE. The laughable thing from this recent article is that you can pass with around a 20% score.

Re:Numerical questions...

Science is incredibly maths based, how can you expect to be in any way competent in a related job after school, if you've spent your entire education doing simplified unrealistic tasks? Its like essay subjects such as history and geography saying you don't need to be able to write in clear English.

Re:Numerical questions...

Keep numerical questions for the maths exams.

You're clearly a complete idiot. Without mathematics, chemistry and physics become meaningless qualitative handwaving. Without mathematics, it is impossible to interpret the results of an experiment, or even to demonstrate that your experiment is measuring the think that you think it's measuring.

If you think that science is in anyway separable from mathematics, I can only come to the conclusion that you know nothing of science.

Re:not news

Everyone without a personal axe to grind is agreed that standards have declined - hell, university textbooks have had to be rewritten to match the lower standard of modern beginning students.

But the truly sinister aspect of this is not so much the decline in standards as the Government's bare-faced blank denials that there is a problem at all.

It's difficult to treat a patient who won't even admit that he's ill.

Re:not news

.....as the Government's bare-faced blank denials that there is a problem at all....It's difficult to treat a patient who won't even admit that he's ill.

The govt. is not the patient here. The govt is what is causing this decline in standards to begin with.

Re:not news

Nice Post. I couldn't agree more.

I'm an English teacher at a good school, but even here, we are forced, not just from administration, but more diffused social pressure, to make sure our scores are good, even though we know the tests are flawed.

The problem with education is it has become a political issue, which means we keep slathering nice pretty paint on a school building that's rotting away from the inside.

I'm afraid the whole system will have to collapse before we begin actually fixing it.

Re:Standards of education falling in UK?

Standards are not falling in private schools

Which is why the NuLabour government is doing its best to get rid of private schools. There is a marked and increasing difference in standards, and levelling down is so much easier than levelling up.

A while ago, the UK government's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) fined 50 leading private schools a total of GBP3.5 million (about $5.25 million) for exchanging information about the fees they were charging. See, for instance, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1511429/50-public-schools-fined-for-fixing-their-fees.html [telegraph.co.uk]

Note that in the UK, "public school" means a particular type of private (independent, non-state) school. The name was adopted before there was any state-run education in the modern sense, so it was logical in its day.

The irony is that most (all, AFAIK) of those schools have charitable status - they are "not-for-profit", so that the fees they charge merely pay their costs. No one is getting rich from running those schools. Moreover, the fine of about $100,000 per school could only be paid by increasing the fees!

Obviously, the purported motive of the fines - to stop the schools colluding to distort trade, reduce competition, and raise prices - was not applicable in the case of the public schools. What could be more ridiculous than fining a bunch of charities for not being competitive enough, when none of them makes a profit?

It's even stranger when you reflect that the body doing the fining - the UK government - forces all children who do not attend independent schools to go into its own state education system, which offers no competition at all. Moreover, competition law does not seem to apply to transport (where big companies enjoy state-granted monopolies), TV (where Sky has a monopoly in satellite and Virgin in cable), or banking (in which, as we have recently noticed, there has hardly been any regulation at all).

It seems pretty obvious that the motive for the investigation and subsequent fines could only have been to damage the public schools' reputation and financial status. As it had to be passed on to the parents, it was really a fine on them for daring to avoid the state education system. In itself, this attack has apparently not forced any of the schools to close (yet), but the government and its supporters live in hope.

Re:Standards of education falling in UK?

The problem with most education systems is their assessment focus. If you create a heavy emphasis on rewards (gradings), you make students work the system rather than learning. That's basic organizational psychology. Assignments are especially demented, because they are so damn easy to cheat on. The good teachers can't cut back on assignments though, because their students focus on the subjects with the most assignments. That's suboptimization. Unfortunately, most politicians use "education" and "the attainment of pieces of paper" interchangeably (as do hungry educators), which perpetuates the myth that gradings are education.

Re:Standards of education falling in UK?

Actually, private schools consistently get better grade averages because:

1. They select their intake
2. The parents take part in the kids education
3. They can permanently expel disruptive children
4. They can afford to employ the best teachers
5. They can afford to buy better facilities

Re:Totally dumbed down

Here's my answer:
The Electron finds itself full of negativity, despite feeling an attraction toward the Proton; however, the Proton is distant and closely attached to the Neutron, and the Electron uncertain about itself, possibly on account of constant travel. Sometimes an outside influence, which feels like a flash of light, raises it to new spheres, so to speak, and at those times it is full of energy, but the feeling is short-lived and dissipates in a radiant burst of activity, and the usual negativity resumes.