GCSE Standards

The petition is entitled Bring back standards in education and discard GCSE and replace with O level and CSE standards and the explanatory notes say

"It is about time that education was reverted to the way it was, make the teachers confirm that the pupils understand the elements being taught and remove the coursework part for core subjects, after all how hard is it for a pupil to sit on the internet and do their work, make it fair for all and bring back the final tests after two years studying."

This sounds like a bandwagon-leaper; someone who has read a little bit about how GCSEs work and so thinks they know it all, and thinks it sounds easy.

There are certainly things to criticise about GCSEs. The one that I always think of first is a mini-rant one of my favourite teachers used to have: he said the main reason he understood GCSEs to be replacing O Levels and CSEs was so that you didn't accidentally stream someone bright into a CSE theme and make them miss out on an O Level, or a less-bright pupil into the O Level stream and land them with a fail where they could have had a CSE. Only then, he said, he was now expected to assign students to one of three streams: one that could get grades from A*-C or a fail, one that could get grades B-E or a fail, and one that could get grades D-G or a fail. This, he said, was clearly ridiculous, and he was right. A quick examination of Wikipedia shows that to an extent this idiocy has been reversed - there are now a maximum of two tiers. But you can still enter a student for the wrong tier and do them out of a good grade or cause them to get a fail where they could have had a pass, just as you could for O Levels/CSEs.

But in any case, this is not a criticism the petitioner is making. He contends that teachers are not making sure that pupils know their subjects (on what grounds does he contend this? None are given) and that coursework leads to plagiarism. He complains of a lack of fairness (no examples or explanation given) and appears to think there are no longer final exams. (Final exams for subjects with a heavy coursework component, like music or art, may be worth as little as 40% of the final grade. If this wasn't the case with O Levels, I'm damned if I can see how that was justified - you can't test something like art or music solely with a final exam!)