Quote:Original post by honey

Quote:However, having just sat my final school exams, I am rather pissed off at this attitude many people have that it is somehow the pupils' fault that these exams are easier. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but pupils don't normally set exams. Nor do pupils mark exams. Nor even, do pupils decide on cut-off grades. But despite all this it is clearly the pupils that are to blame for sliding exam standards.

in a sense the students are responsible.

many students take the easier subjects (just look at the current debate: Media Studies has overtaken Physics) because they want to get maximum grades with minimum effort, hence in order to attract students at all to the more important subjects (sciences, languages, ....) the standards have to be lowered to make the people without effort pass, otherwise the whole country would take philosophy, media studies, general studies and the like.

I don't know if I agree with that, personally. Looking at my fellow pupils, the people who take Media Studies and Business Management to get out of difficult subjects do it because the subject matter is easy. They don't do it because they will get better grades. Most of these people don't care what they get at all.

However going with your assumption, it was still the people in charge of the system who decided to lower exam standards. To my mind, that's a flawed method - it would be much better to increase the difficulty of the "easy" subjects. Either that, or make it easier to drop these deadweights on the educational system.

That's just my thoughts and I don't want to turn this topic into a flame war.

In a sense I do agree students are to blame but looking deeper it can be blamed on earlier teachings.

I think the introduction, in Maths, of Core as opposed to Pure is to make Maths easier, if there's ever been such a drop in difficulty it was this year, Pure is much harder than Core. I think this is because less and less people were taking Maths, still a great quantity but less than what it should be.

Also, Physics is becoming less and less popular but this may be due to bad teachings, Physics is generally hard because of hard concepts and, to the average students, difficult formula's to remember. I think the average grade in my college for Physics is somewhere near D/C.

However, as stated above, I think the fact that, in my opinion these s*i*** subjects such as Media Studies are more appealing to young people today, people such as TV reporters and journalists are more appealing and more acceptable today than Physisists and Mathematicians.

Sometimes aswell, I get the impression people are proud of their innumeracy (in fact I think I read about this in the book Innumeracy).