Dear All
Since my original email to you about the Chinese GCSE, there has been
some discussion on the forum and I have had a number of emails from
people off-forum aswell.
There seems to be a prevailing view that whilst results have been good
this year, it is still an enormous effort to get students through the
GCSE - a much greater effort for both teacher and student than for other
foreign language GCSEs.
It has been suggested that representations should be made by teachers to
Edexcel, QCA etc to address this. However, in order to put together a
document to give weight to your views, we do need to use the forum to
collate exactly what we think about the examination. I have agreed to
put together your responses via the forum.
The questions seem to be:
a) Is the exam set at the right level or is it still too difficult?
b) Should the level of difficulty of the Chinese GCSE be a matter of
looking at contact hours per GCSE and saying it takes a given number of
hours to get the average child a C in GCSE French or German, therefore
whatever level of Chinese the average child reaches after the same
number of contact hours of Chinese, then that should be the level at
which the GCSE is set?
c) Is the problem more to do with how the exam is marked and grade
boundaries than the actual exam itself?
It would be really helpful if as many of you as possible could respond
to the above questions and add any other comments you think are relevant
and then once this information is collated, we can take things forward
as a group.
Best wishes
Katharine
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Katharine Carruthers
Brooke House
Ashdon Road, Saffron Walden
Essex, CB10 2AA
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