Education and the Examination Swindle – Part 4

Image from "Get the Best Grades Now Blog"

Editors note: The lovely Alicia Cuddeford has gracefully written a post to continue with our "Education and the Examination Swindle" series. As ever, I may or may not [suspense!] agree with her views, but I have written a few footnotes for the reader's amusement. Enjoy!

Hello again TheCompBlog readers! Since Nicolas didn’t think that my post last year was complete rubbish, I have been invited back to write for him about this darn education that keeps inconveniencing my life. For those who don’t know who I am, I’m Alicia and I am a student in the grand old city of Winchester. I wrote a post for Nicolas last April about my opinions on secondary education which can be found here, but now, seeing as my past year at 6th form college is fresh in my mind, Nicolas thought it would be nice for me to share them.

I feel like I should probably introduce my college, because I’m told that it is quite prestigious. Peter Symonds College, or “Hogwarts” as it is commonly known by a street urchin like me, is one of the largest sixth form colleges in the country. Ben Ainslie and Jack Dee came here, something which Peter Symonds really get off on – newspaper articles are smeared along the walls to let us know that we too could achieve greatness, while also serving the purpose of allowing cynics like me to snort at them. As previously mentioned, it is in Winchester, therefore the target student is from an affluent family who shop at Waitrose and dress in Jack Wills clothing. Because of this, I initially thought that I wouldn’t fit in well here, but I was wrong.[1]

The Trials and Tribulations of the GCSE - an Introduction.

Image from The Guardian

Well, what do you know. It's been a while, hasn't it? A wild ride of frantic revision - because you were too lazy to do any proper revision over the Easter holidays - and a wide variety of GCSEs, twenty-two, actually. For some reason, I am finding it very hard to write fluently, so please forgive me for the somewhat erratic nature if this post. It's been a while.

Notice that rhetoric technique there? No? Well, I probably got an A - as opposed to an A* - in English language, which would be rather disappointing, given that I was predicted ten A*s and a B.

B, you say? Yes, a B. sorry for the rather confusing nature of the previous structure and for my rather pompous tone! That B was for Ancient History. Interestingly, that was the one of two GCSEs I took, everything else was iGCSE. For my foreign audience, keep on reading and I shall explain everything in a moment. Anyway, having seen that mark, I basically ignored all other subjects and revised Ancient History like there was no tomorrow. As it is a GCSE, it's modular, which is annoying to the umpteenth degree, considering that it was the only qualification for which there were three exams.

Anyway, I feel like I did not screw any exam up hugely, so I am relatively confident for straight A*s, but we will have to wait for August.

A bit of context. The GCSE - the general certificate of secondary education - is a stupid qualification (see here, here and here). Despite its stupidity, it's the mandatory qualification all UK students have to do at 16 in order to get into a sixth-form college (or years 12 and 13 to get GCE A-level qualifications, the general certificate of education advanced level, to get into university. Silly naming schemes, right? You'll hear me complain about this later on!). There is also the iGCSE, the international  general certificate of secondary education. This qualification is done by only international UK schools, but private schools within the UK can opt to do it as well. Apparently, it is a more challenging qualification with a better syllabus. Stupidly enough, UK state schools cannot choose to do the iGCSE, they have to do the GCSE. Way to close the education gap, Gove.