Hey ho, its exam time again.
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19 / 06 / 2008 | Author: dnorris
Exam Time.
Hey ho it’s that time of the year: - exams time.
It’s the time of the year when the hall gets transformed into a surreal furniture shop filled with rows and rows of desks. It’s the time when you aren’t allowed to turn round and speak to the person you have been friends with all year. It’s the time when you are asked to fill 15 blank sheets of paper full of concise information when in fact it’s your mind that is blank. Most remarkably it’s the time when you are asked to write in longhand for the first time for months a on the pretext that if it’s legible and grammatically correct you could earn an extra 4 marks.
Exams occupy a very strange place in the psyche of the British academic mind. They are deemed the only factors for measuring the educated person.
The latest benchmark sets all schools the objective of 30% of pupils achieving five grade A* to C GCSE’s. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Indeed many would deem it the very minimum that all parents would expect but the strange factor is that nothing else is expected. There is no mention of learning how to cope with the vagaries of real life. No need to develop a personality. No need to be able to cope with adversity or family difficulties. No need to be able to relate to other people, no attempt to communicate with people from other lands, manage money, play a musical instrument or learn to dance.
Thankfully all schools do do this. We may cringe at the titles such as PSHE and Civic Training and positively scream when mention is made of the hidden curriculum but deep down we realise that this is still the fundamental socialising role of a school.
The run up to pupils taking GCSE exams is usually three years. Years 9, 10 and 11 are the years when subjects have been chosen and others dropped.
If you study the small print on a GCSE syllabus (especially those distributed to external candidates who are studying evening classes or at home) you will notice that they recommend approximately 75 hours of study. There will be some coursework questions to submit and perhaps an assignment but these are a kind of homework and in truth not compulsory.
If you stand at the school gates of any school you will soon realise that schools no longer all finish at 4 0’clock. Some finish as early as 2.30, others at 3.00 or 3.30. The explanation is that they all vary the length of the lunch breaks and playtime and some work straight through. But underlying all the variations is the inviolate rule that there needs to be 5 hours of class contact or teaching in every day or put another way 25 hours per week.
The bizarre connection between these two statements is that each GCSE subject is equivalent to just three week’s school teaching. For five subjects that represents 15 weeks and yet the school year extends over 38 weeks. Over three years it exceeds 100 weeks.
I for one welcome that. No matter how many subjects are studied, be it five or ten, there still needs to be recognition that the school is more than a factory for qualifications. The school play, the swimming gala, the sports day, the assembly, the choir festival, the school trip, the inter school cross country competition, the house points competition, the school band, the after school chess club, basketball club, craft club and even the fund raising committee all play a role in shaping a pupil.
