The Official Off topic thread-the place for off-topic stuff

Moving the conversation over from the Gaston thread then...

Yes Joe I am about to explode

 

I'm up so late because I was having to catch up on all the work I missed out on last night. lol

Also to add because it has been mentioned to me that someone has pm'd me. Sorry my pm option is set to receive from Mods and admin only I'm afraid

On the GCSE thingamy I agree it is pretty poor for people in the same academic year to be graded differently. should have waited till next year however they have got easier over the years to the point that the differing exam boards were touting for business from schools by making theirs the easiest and thus schools would choose them over the others to achieve higher grades.

Should be a universal whole of UK exam (or at least someone 'ITK' and 'can be trusted' should be checking these exams against each other before they are allowed to be 'sold' to the schools.

Twas in it's infancy when I first took GCSE's and they were quite tough (IMO) although I managed to revise like mad in the final 2 years and retrieve a reasonably respectible 8 C's, and 2 B's.

Good considering I went off the rails and was on course for 10 fails, bad because I went into secondary school supposedly the 'straight A kid' plus no-one had heard of Aspergers back then. You were either thick or a troublemaker if you didn't do well back then.

 

I have to say, I don't think I would've been able to hold it in.

 

My brother turns 30 this year. He had a similar issue. They thought he was disruptive and ignored the teachers. It later turned out that he had hearing issues and required gromits.

Another thing on GCSEs, part of the new plans for bringing back O-Levels is that one exam board will be responsible for a subject.

It won't be as it is current where a school has a choice over an exam board:

AQA - Maths
Edexcel - Maths
OCR - Maths


It will become like:

Maths - Edexcel
English - AQA
Sciences - OCR
History - Edexcel

Makes far more sense personally to just have one exam board approved for each subject.

 

Surely they don't actually sell exams based on difficulty?! That's ridiculous I guess OCR won this year: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7414129.stm

I've complained about it so much, I've run out of steam

 

Did you do Media Studies at GCSE, Dan?

 

The exam boards weren't openly selling them as 'buy from us we're easier' however many of the schools that were getting surprisingly 'improved' grades once a new headteacher was installed to sort them out. I would guess that is how they discovered it and from there investigated what sort of patterns they found with other schools that get higher than average grades.

No idea really but remember a program about it.

 

No, why?

 

It makes sense I'm still completely unconvinced GCSE results matter at all once you get into college/sixth form.

 

I was just wondering if you'd have done the exam I did. It was set by WJEC, they were motherfuckers the year I did it.

 

Quick Google. lol. Knew I had seen or heard of it somewhere.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/educatio...stions-over-standard-of-exams-it-allowed.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/educatio...how-the-exam-boards-compete-to-be-easier.html

 

Heard of them, never sat an exam set by them though.

So seeing as ImpsSaint released his GCSE grades of the time, is anyone else brave enough to follow suit....?

 

Why, did they make it particularly difficult? All of my exams were pretty easy as I recall...

 

We've done all we can do. Hopefully we've struck a chord with some certain people, even though they'll never admit it. It's a thankless task.

 

I honestly don't remember mine. Got an A* in Maths which I did in year 10 and didn't give the slightest **** for Year 11 because all I needed was four more A*-C grades.

 

Haha yes I'm sure. Though judging by earlier tonight, not much of a difference has been made...

 

I'll put it this way, we had to analyse a segment of film in one section of the exam. My teacher told us that if Anime came up, we'd be ****ed. Sure enough, when we did it, it came up. When we saw what it was called, we all looked at each other with that same look of "we're ****ed".

1 A* in Maths; 4 As in Additional Maths, English, Media Studies (somehow) and Spanish; 3 Bs in Chemistry, Physics and History; a C in Technology and a U in short course RE, but the U doesn't really count as it was half a GCSE anyway.

 

I'm so glad that I don't have to go to school anymore.I'm free.

Exam results don't measure intelligence at all.It's all based on memory, not intelligence.

You get the odd person who doesn't study and gets A's in everything, but this is very rare.

 

Basically, we're exactly like Pussy Riot.

 

Serves you right for doing media studies! #snobbystudents

Is this who I think it is..?

But yes you're right, exam results don't measure intelligence. When you get to uni it's less about memory, more about having good essay technique. Still not about intelligence. Intelligence is far too complicated a concept to be able to quantify, though.