I claim no expertise in the whole exams-are-getting-easier debate. I merely suspect, like lots of others, that they are. But this does sound seriously ridiculous:
Pupils were awarded A grades in one of Britain's most popular GCSE maths exams this summer despite having only achieved half marks.Students needed to score just 45 per cent in two exams to achieve an A grade in an exam set by the Edexcel board. Combined with their coursework scores, this meant that just 51 per cent was needed overall.
The papers were sat by 80,000 pupils this summer and more than half got an A or A*. The figures were condemned as "ludicrous" by maths experts.
So, if you are concocting your CV, and you have GCSEs on it that are not Edexcel GCSEs, be sure to say so. On the other hand if they are Edexcels, keep quiet about it.
I am an examiner for Edexcel GCSE maths and I agree that these grading boundaries are ridiculous. On the paper that I marked (the one where they can use calculators), candidates scoring 45% earned an A grade and those scoring 13% earned a C.
So, a student needs to know just 13% of the maths they have covered to be considered successful.
I used to teach AS Level maths and students would arrive, with an A grade in GCSE, having little understanding of algebra, geometry or trigonometry. Many would drop out, or go onto fail.
GCSE maths and maths education in general needs to be sorted out. Maybe our new maths tsar has some ideas...
this is not true - i did an edexcel previous paper as a mock today and it was extremely difficult. perhaps thats why the grades boundries have gone down!!!
I just got the results from my GCSE EDEXCEL Maths (Which I did early) and got an A with 88%. The A* Boundary was 90%, something which I really did not expect, I was told by my teacher it was around 80-85%. I don't know wtf this article is saying but the A* is 90%...... no way is an A 45%
Ok let me set this straight. Firstly I took this exam a year early. I got an A*, the exam was ridiculously hard and the exam board has an obligation to make sure that it has the same number of passes from year to year. So what it did this year was bump up your mark, so if you got 45% in the exam on your certificate it would say 70% which was the A boundary. If you got 65% in the exam then you would get 90% in certificate thus an A*. I got 100% in my certificate, now i know this cannot be true because I got one question completely wrong. this means i could have got a mark of between 75 and 95% this is rediculous. Some of my friends just took this exam for thier mocks this year. instead of bumping up the grades our school has decided to just lower the grade boundaries to 45% for an A, this gives people a false ope that they will get a really good mark in the exam with a low grade. That will probably not be the case, edexcel will probably not make this exam as hard as last year but they will make sure that they do not have to change the grade boundaries or bump peoples scores up. Lots of schools complained when the exam was set because it was so hard. Another problem with last years maths GCSE was the coursework, not one person in our school got an A* in the coursework, we got the coursework marked by edexcel rather than having our teachers mark it, our school has complained about this because the teachers looked at the coursework and said that some of it was beyond A level standard, the fact that not one person got an A* in the coursework 47 out of the 48 people who took it early got an A* overall with over 50% of those people getting 100% on thier exam is also ridiculous. In fact our school thought that it was so rediculous that they have stopped doing GCSE maths at all and now use the european equivelent, this will be the last year that they use GCSE for maths. Most people who take maths do so with edexcel this is because they specialise in maths, just like most people take OCRa for the Sciences. Another reason that so many people use edexcel for maths is that they are the only exam board that offers the option of doing an additional-maths GCSE.
Oh and does anyone know how i could get my origonal paper back? Because I would like to see how well I actually did in the exam.
