Thursday, August 30, 2007

GCSE Science to be dumbed down?

The Times yesterday carried this article on how GCSE science exams are being dumbed down.

I have read the example paper and some of the questions are good. Most are asinine whilst some are based on subjective criteria where the question setter does not understand the subject matter enough to be able to make a comment let alone set a question and some of the multiple choice question's have the potential for all answers to be correct.

Utter stupidity.

I will Fisk some of the government comments and the paper at a later date. It does however break my heart. It is clear that science in this country is not being dumbed down. Clearly it has been already.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's obvious we have a problem.
Tawk 'bout dumbing down!

Anonymous said...

Benedict,

It gets worse. Today you have Schools Minister, Andrew Adonis, claiming he is "pleased" with the results for seven year olds - when the results show that their maths, science and reading results have failed to improve (in spite of all that tax which has supposedly gone to the glorious goal of "Education, education, education..."). And those for writing have declined for the second year running.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6970206.stm

The man shouldn't be pleased; he should be hanging his head in shame or (preferably) incandescent with rage that the education of our children is going backwards on his watch. He should be screaming from the rooftops that this is piss-poor and the system isn't working. He should be demanding help from people who can fix this devastating indictment on failing Government. But no - he's "pleased". Sheeesh....

After all the talk that this guy was thinking of defecting to the Tories, thank God he didn't. He should resign and retire from public office.

But of course, it is still the fault of the Tories (out of power for 10+ years) that the education standards of 7 year olds is sliding...