Value of exams

UK.

I teach maths and English. It seems to me that there's a lot that isn't quite right about maths and English GCSEs (for those praise the UK they're the exams 16 year old pupils take before they go to further education)

The whole point of an exam is to see how well someone performs under pressure, and I've yet to see a doctor perform emergency trigonometry.

Perhaps maths and English could be part coursework and part exam: literacy should be entirely coursework, writing as it is now - stories, prose and poetry - could be mostly coursework, but an addition of functional English - writing transactional letters, preparing a CV, etc - could be done largely under exam conditions.

Maths exams need to cover estimation skills, untangling complex worded questions, conversions and formula, and double checking someone's appraisal of a maths problem. The rest could be coursework.

Submitted October 01, 2023 at 09:22AM by Digital_Arts_Wizard https://ift.tt/imcgSRy