Why do I find the new GCSE curriculum so hard?

Obviously the syllabus has changed. Which is what Michael Gove, when he was Education Secretary, wanted to do - turn the clock back to what O levels used to be.

There has certainly been a lot said in recent years about GCSE being easier than O level was. The pass rate kept going up and up, and are we really all getting brighter that fast? The A* grade had to be introduced because so many people were getting A. And having looked at some GCSE maths papers, they certainly seem to be easier than I remember my O level papers (I did them in 1981, except my school always put the top set in for English Language and maths early, so I did those in November 1980). One clear fact I DO know is that we did basic differential calculus, which as far as I can see is not on the GCSE syllabus at all. And mine was the last year in which calculators were not allowed, though I do remember the exam board changing the paper the next year to compensate - you had to do 6 questions out of 9 instead of 5 out of 8.

In other subjects, O levels were more like university exams. I see a lot of short answer papers on GCSE, while when I did O level history, it was all essays. Pick 5 questions out of 22 and write a short essay on each. Typical question (I remember this one being my history teacher's favourite): "The League of Nations was a total failure. Discuss." That paper was the entire exam. I really don't remember many papers at all where you wrote short answers on the question paper.

Gove thinks the old O level was better, and that's why he changed it all.

And look at it this way - O level was introduced back in about 1950, to replace the old School Certificate which you only got if you passed 5 subjects or more. What if you could pass 4? Sorry mate, you get nothing. But with O level, and now with GCSE, you can get a certificate showing you can do 4. Or even just one if that's all you can pass. Quite right too. However, it was still only intended for the 20% who were bright enough to go to grammar school. Go to secondary school instead because you failed your 11-plus exam and it was normal to come out with no qualifications at all. (CSEs were introduced later on to provide something for people who weren't good enough for O level, and GCSEs are a merger of the two - GCSE grades C-G are what CSE grades 1-5 used to be.) And yet now the government expects everyone to get 5 GCSEs at C or above, the equivalent of 5 O level passes before they introduced grades (before 1975 you just passed or failed). Surely that isn't possible unless the exams have become easier, right?

Incidentally, that's why in some subjects you have core and higher papers. Just one exam isn't good enough to cover the whole range of ability people have. In the jargon, it is not a sufficient discriminator. In an exam where you write essays, it works because the marker can just mark how good it is. But in something like maths, that doesn't work. So you have core papers which are the equivalent of the old CSE and higher papers which match to the old O level. I seem to remember when the GCSE was introduced that one argument for it was that teachers wouldn't have to decide which exam to enter you for. LOL - it didn't work like that, did it?

So there you have it - the exams are getting harder again, and your parents were, and your sister is, being taught to that standard. You weren't. Never mind - YOUR exam will be on what YOU were taught.

To get off the point but just for fun, as we're both curious people, the 11-plus was definitely something that needed to be abolished and thank goodness it was. My local authority did it in 1974, and turned all the secondary schools and grammar schools into high schools. Just an English exam and a maths exam at the age of 10-11 determined whether you went to a grammar school or a secondary school. Ridiculous - things change a lot in a few years when you're a teenager and what if you had a bad day? There's no chance to resit, because you're changing school next year whatever happens. I think my parents are the perfect example. Mum passed it and got 2 O levels at grammar school. Dad failed it, went to a secondary technical school and got 5 O levels.

Germany still has different schools for different abilities but they aren't stupid enough to decide it on one exam. They work on what your teachers think from the whole 6 years of primary school.

When I was 10, my teacher showed us the 11-plus papers from 1934 and I remember they DID look hard! Perhaps they've been getting easier for even longer than I think? Anyway, Gove thought so too and wanted to push standards back up, which is why the new papers look harder.