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Katharine In my opinion, it is all to do with grade boundaries now. The exam is fine, but the grade boundaries are unrealistic and warped by the high level of native-speaker entrants. The depressing thing is that all this was put quite forcefully at the meeting with the exam board/QCA last year (hosted by the British Council) and still nothing has changed. Mary -----Original Message----- From: Katharine Carruthers <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 11:41:48 +0100 Subject: [MANDARIN-CHINESE-TEACHING] GCSE Chinese > 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 > -- > > Katharine Carruthers > Brooke House > Ashdon Road, Saffron Walden > Essex, CB10 2AA > > This message has been sent through the Bedford School email Server. > The views expressed are the views of the individual sending the message > and not necessarily the views of the School. > Any misuse should be reported to [log in to unmask]