A unified exam board - equal for all

Don't state that i'm shortsighted just because you are not willing to understand the idea that exams are important and are effectively the be all and end all. By all means be an idealist thats fine but don't criticise me just because you wish you had better or scores or you are attempting to ratify your own failure to yourself. Your grades define your school career. You do not achieve extra marks for being nice or kind or a talented sportsman. You are defined by exams. Things shouldn't be as they are but we are so we work within the system that we are given

Don't state that i'm shortsighted just because you are not willing to understand the idea that exams are important and are effectively the be all and end all. By all means be an idealist thats fine but don't criticise me just because you wish you had better or scores or you are attempting to ratify your own failure to yourself. Your grades define your school career. You do not achieve extra marks for being nice or kind or a talented sportsman. You are defined by exams. Things shouldn't be as they are but we are so we work within the system that we are given

This is the role that Ofqual has across all the English exam boards and they do regularly make the boards change grade boundaries in order to ensure that exams for different boards are comparable.


There will be a lot less of this in future for state schools as they will not be able to teach any IGCSEs any more (there're a lot they can't teach now) and the choice will go back to just GCSEs.

Despite grades defining us at a base level, your activities, achievements and interviews have just a much a influence when getting a job or a uni placement. People always undersetimate the power of the interview. Think about it - the professor interviewing lives and breathes their subject, and so if you don't show interest, they won't want to teach and accept you. Similarly, if you are not a nice person, they won't want to.
Although its difficult to appreciate at this time (i completely understand), if you are a kind person, other people will help you through life, regardless of your grades. I can understand why people think that grades are the be all and end all; but the fact is that in wider life, especailly when we are older, it is kindness and who we are that will define us - it may not get us a job, but it'll make us happier than the rich person who hates their job.

Hilarious. You know nothing about me or my exams. Yes I think you are shortsighted. Exam grades are important, but they arent all education exists for.
Im not attempting to ratify anything I just believe a system with a bit of choice as long as they stick to the overlying criteria is better.

I made a comment about you in the same off-hand way that you commented about myself. You can trick yourself into thinking failure in exams will be outweighed by your social and sporting ability but the letters next to your subjects will be an everlasting testament to your failure.

If only we could get everyone in the country to agree on what should be on the syllabus for each subject and how difficult the exams should be.

I personally think just a much more useful set of exams (i.e about 5x as many exams per student) would be so so advantageous.
1) If you're sitting 50 exams instead of 10, every year, the pressure of exams will go down. Each one means less.
2) Tiny mistakes become less significant. In some exams these days, you can go down a whole grade by a carried forward mistake - which seems outrageous to me.
3) There's too much content we learn that never comes up. Why not test everything - all your doing is adding an element of chance to supposedly representative scores.

This, may I add, would also drastically decrease disparities between exam boards purely due to how much more representative results would be.

I personally think just a much more useful set of exams (i.e about 5x as many exams per student) would be so so advantageous.
1) If you're sitting 50 exams instead of 10, every year, the pressure of exams will go down. Each one means less.
2) Tiny mistakes become less significant. In some exams these days, you can go down a whole grade by a carried forward mistake - which seems outrageous to me.
3) There's too much content we learn that never comes up. Why not test everything - all your doing is adding an element of chance to supposedly representative scores.

This, may I add, would also drastically decrease disparities between exam boards purely due to how much more representative results would be.

I understand your logic but have you considered how much this would cost to organise - I work at a pretty average sized school and our exams budget is around £125,000 a year now - or how much teaching time this would lose?

I agree with the principle of your statement with the idea of loving your subject and loving your job. But this is a thread discussing the possibility of unified exams and this has veered more into the importance of the exam itself. While i still maintain that exams are extremely important and some people decide to underplay them to hide insecurities about their own failure i do agree that having an interest in a subject along with general good social skills are beneficial to your future