Do you agree?

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Permalink Reply by Luke Haggerty on September 23, 2009 at 8:38pm

I appreciate your concern but i think your solution evades the problem. I do A lv maths and F maths i score really well, with my average coming in about 95 but i must say that the issue is not with the grades but the exam. It's easy to slip up on one question, a plus instead of a minus can lose you 10 % of the marks in a paper or more if the question has later parts, this seems pretty ridiculous to me. Secondly the exams are fare far to easy, the most recent FP1 paper was however somewhat more challenging and i think that if more papers were to reflect the same degree of difficulty in the application of the taught mathematics. Not only would this allow university's to discriminate more easily according to skill but it could improve teaching as teachers would have to gear lessons towards comprehension of maths as opposed to the regurgitation of it. Your points however are quite relevant to most other subjects but i feel that a major part of the issue is still the ease of exams.

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Permalink Reply by Amos Abrahams on September 25, 2009 at 7:12pm

I think that, for the most part, what you are suggesting is fairly sound. In fact, it sounds like a more official version of what the admissions tutor and King's was talking about: to try and take into account a candidate's performance relative to their school. And it makes sense - if someone has got AAA from a low performing state comprehensive, that would, to me anyway, suggest that they are very able and have worked hard to achieve top grades in an environment not normally condusive to this. If you were then to compare this to someone who has gained the same grades at a school where 90% of the students achieve them as well I would say that the first student is the the better candidate in most cases.
In regards to Luke's comment regarding the Maths exams I would disagree about the extent to which a simple slip up would affect your marks, for the simple reason that I know I made some of these slip ups in my own exams and still ended up, like Luke, averaging about 95%. As far as I am aware they award follow through marks if you have made an error such as using a plus sign instead of a minus but your working is still correct. Similarly, if your actual answers in the latter parts of a question are wrong due to an earlier incorrect answer but your method is correct, they cannot deduct marks. Or so I have been informed.
I think Luke's suggestion of making the exams more challenging also has its points but work better if used in conjunction with some of the ideas you have suggested in your letter. Sure, simply making the exams harder will make discrimation between candidates easier, but it will also gear top university places even more towards students from top schools who have already shown that they are more able to churn out top grades.

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