Training to win

[davywavy]

The the GCSE results came out the other day (that's a set of exams for 16 year olds, non-Uk readers), with the now-traditional year-on-year improvement of results and record numbers of people scoring A-grades. Naturally, the papers and TV were full of hand-wringing comment about how exams are getting easier, they aren't what they were like in my day, and how this was all trees when I was a girl.

Coincidentally, the Olympics closed on Sunday with the GB team having got their best results in a hundred years. I can only expect to read in the press stories about how the Olympics must be getting easier, and how we should go back to those more difficult Olympics we used to have back in the 1970's and 80's.

Comments

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

This is also very funny: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7580165.stm

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Nah, the subtext is that Olympic athletes are trained to pass the test at all costs and with the exception of all else, and that's what exam-directed learning teaches our kids too.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

You'll have to get up jolly early in the morning to catch me praising this government, young man!

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

No, I'm at GenCon running exciting games on Friday.

[medusa-nw.livejournal.com]

I don't know how things work in this country, are the tests multiple choice? I remember when I did my biology A-level equivalents in Holland our teacher basically went through old exams the whole year, so it was almost impossible to fail. Perhaps that's what's happening here?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

When I did exams, they were written in a new language every year which the candidates had to translate by working from first principles before they could even begin carrying out pieces of original research and presenting their results in essay format, complete with diagrams and OHP presentations.
Nowadays kids get it easy - even the 'your name' section is a multiple choice question, to reduce the chance of anyone failing.

Or that's what the press seem to be saying anyway.

[raggedyman.livejournal.com]

chuckle-tastic, and so irritatingly correct.

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps, but the metric of success in the Olympics is not achieving a specific arbitrary level of performance defined by a third party (whatever that level might be), but simply being better than everyone else. It automatically follows that gold medallists from one Olympics may well not be as good as gold medallists from a subsequent, or even prior, Olympics, but it's not as if the bar is set any lower or higher, as it were, purely so that statistics can be massaged. If exams weren't being made easier, the the same percentages would get the same grades every year. People aren't suddenly becoming smarter at a rate outstripping evolution; the only possible answer for the surfeit of high grades is that the standard required to achieve those grades is being artificially lowered.

[(Anonymous)]

I have noticed that fifteen years ago, kids straight from school tended to be pretty useless. Now they need a degree.

[(Anonymous)]

...to match the same level of uselessness?

D

[(Anonymous)]

I wasn't really aiming my comment at people who couldn't work that out.