In the news today. This is the pathway to becoming an Engineer for many and considered "equivalent" to having completed a skilled apprenticeship by the educational establishment.
I fully agree with your comments and I have absolutely no problem with the scores being normalised each year to compensate for the variations in the exam difficulty. Where I have a problem is with this being done while at the same time the numbers of passes being increased year on year with the claim that teaching methods are improving as the only way to verify if teaching is improving is to compare exam results, and if the exam result are being normalised......
I personally am happy with what they have done on the basis that it should ensure a more level playing field between this year's students and last year's (and next year's). What I am less happy about is how do we know how this year's students compare with my own year (1975, if you are interested). My only issue with this year's exam is that they have had to move the grade boundaries more than I would think desirable as a 'pass mark' of 9% is incredibly low to provide sensible differentiation between pupils.
I fully agree with your comments and I have absolutely no problem with the scores being normalised each year to compensate for the variations in the exam difficulty. Where I have a problem is with this being done while at the same time the numbers of passes being increased year on year with the claim that teaching methods are improving as the only way to verify if teaching is improving is to compare exam results, and if the exam result are being normalised......
I personally am happy with what they have done on the basis that it should ensure a more level playing field between this year's students and last year's (and next year's). What I am less happy about is how do we know how this year's students compare with my own year (1975, if you are interested). My only issue with this year's exam is that they have had to move the grade boundaries more than I would think desirable as a 'pass mark' of 9% is incredibly low to provide sensible differentiation between pupils.
