Reflectin on exam results and entry requirements for post-16 progress.

 It’s GCSE results day. Last Thursday was A Level results day. I’ve never found out why Thursday is a good day for results. It’s also the day of the week when we get to vote. I wonder what’s special about Thursday?

Anyway, it’s GCSE results day. Back when I was a sixth form tutor it was the day when we started enrolling students for the coming year, getting into the desperate competition to get the most and the best students in our college.

Here are a couple of today’s headlines that caught my eye:

“Overall results slightly better than last year, with share receiving grades 7, 8 and 9 rising by 0.1 of a percentage point to 23.1%”

Every year someone will say the results are better than ever. How can that be? Is this evidence that young people are getting more and more clever year on year? Is that possible?

Then there’s this one:

“GCSE results: almost one in four boys in England get top grades in maths”.

Now, yesterday I read an article which explained that we should stop making young people re-sit GCSE examinations, by which, of course they mean Maths and English. I’ve never heard of anyone being obliged to re-sit GCSE Geography, for example. Apparently, the stress of re-sitting Maths and English GCSE is detrimental to the mental health of our young people. It’s one of the factors that contributes to their dropping out  becoming NEETs - Not in Education Employment or Training. Girls get more stressed about re-sitting Maths,’ it seems, while boys are more stressed about re-sitting English.

I must say that I have come across a fairly large number of students who re-sat Maths three or even times before achieving a pass - taking the exam in the autumn term and the summer term of their lower sixth uear and again their upper sixth year.

What the writer of the article I saw failed to say was that universities usually ask for pass grades in those subjects as an entry requirement. Go back far enough and  pass in Latin was required for some courses, eventually replaced by a pass in a Modern Foreign Language. And I remember a top university getting rather sniffy about one of our students taking a GCSE course in Spanish rather than French or German, somehow considered more rigorously academic!  (The student in question had not been deemed suitable for a Modern Foreign Languages course in high school, and so we helped him out when his GCSE results proved him to be an above average student.)

Maybe here needs to be a review of entry requirements for all kinds of post-GCSE activity for our young people.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!