Facebook campaign against A-level exam paper

Are lessons these days so specific that students can't answer something they haven't exactly prepared for?

Anyway I'm sure some of the schools will be pleased to see the conduct of some of their students online, especially when it comes to posting pictures of exam papers on facebook.

That usually works better for history, politics, economics, sociology, enlish lit, lang, psychology, theology, classics, medieval history and to an extent geography not the sciences (chem, bio, math and physics).

I'd be personally annoyed that, in a subject that requires knowledge over opinion and judgement, an exam board might set questions outside of the specification.

I'd be less annoyed in subjective subjects however in sciences that rely on objectivity there's no room.

Then again I would be tempted to infer this is a load of whiny students who didn't do well enough so are just complaining Wah Wah Wah resit learn your stuff this time DONE!

There's tonnes of students nowadays knocking about believing it is thier god given right to go to the best universities in this country.
There has been an emergence of students who seem to be already the next generation of smug, arrogant back stabbing greasy pole climers.
But then again the majority are more down to earth.

+1

It does seem that a lot of the complaints are the fact that the questions that appeared on the exam are not the questions they were told would appear.

From what I can gather it seems the questions WERE on the syllabus and the subjects WERE taught to them but the teachers said that something else would be on the exam and so they learnt the other stuff instead.

I've just read the paper.

It's a piece of piss.

I could have got a high mark on that....

... and I didn't study past GCSE. Had I sat through the lessons I would have been laughing.

Wingeing little oiks.

But perhaps you're missing the point?

Questions are only easy to answer when you know the subject.

The allegation is that this paper includes questions that are not on the syllabus.

Whether you know the answers or not is neither here nor there.

Having had a quick skim over the paper and syllabus I can't see anything ridiculous between the two.

Links again from the other thread.

Paper

Syllabus

But that's the point - I don't know the subject as well as someone who has studied Biology at A-level.

Most of that paper was relevant to my GCSE Biology in 1996. The only bits I would have struggled with were the NAD and cycle-specifics questions.

Everything else could be worked out from the questions by deduction with little prior biological knowledge.

They moaned about 6 wasted months? Surely they have studied the subject for a couple of years? And how should the teachers know what is on the exam paper? That was always held secret until the actual exam took place. The teachers would tell us what types of question appear regularly, but we had to basically revise everything we had ever covered in class over the years...

as put in another thread.

IMHO there is no wonder grades have risen so high, the way exams are structured if you have half a brain its practically impossible to not get a decent grade. Add in the retakes and the obligatory appeals because little jonnys hamster had a cold.
My wife showed me a religious studies exam paper and the required religious knowledge to get a c grade would equate to ooh about zero.

<yes im still grumpy >

Frankly though, if you did your job as a student and learnt it properly the first time around, you shouldn't have to revise very much at all.

Then it shouldn't matter what's on the paper as long as you were taught it.

That was always my approach and it works.

I disagree, revising is important as it reinforces the learning, which in some cases can be 2 years old say, just like practice reinforces the learning it's important to reinforce the learning to demonstrate understanding of the area.

Absolutely, they didn't effectively prepare for the exam, their problem

Yep, about 4 hours of revision the night before the exam was all I needed for an A in biology

At the start I thought they were complaining that the exam had questions relating to things that weren't on the syllabus. That would have been reason to complain.

Seeing as it turns out the questions do relate to what was taught on the syllabus, but they were just asking in a different style to what the students were used to, well, I'm sorry, but that's how exams work. Well they did when I did them.

It's not designed for answers just to be regurgitated exactly how they've been told to.

Another reason why I think constant assessment is more valuable, and more realistic, than being asked to write the sum of your knowledge gleaned over a year inside a one hour period.

With the amount of collusion I've seen over coursework I think there is certainly a place for moderated exams.