In a previous blog, I compared the experience of the new GCSEs to that of Titanic and the iceberg on the horizon.

It is now the sequel. We are at the exams. And I feel we may suddenly have been thrust into Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

Students have sat, in our case, two English Literature exams and one maths exam. After each exam, I quizzed and questioned the students, and when I finally got hold of the paper, I scrutinised the potential for things to go right and the potential for things to go drastically wrong.

The student testimony is always hard to decipher. The exam paper was too easy. The exam was too hard. The exam paper was just right.

At the back of my mind, I am decoding what the student really means. “Too easy” means they didn’t really understand the question properly. “Too hard” means they struggled and didn’t write enough. “Just right” means I have no idea what they did in the exam.

But even after seeing the exam paper, the sad fact is that I, and other teachers, will not know what really happened in the exam until we see how it has been marked.

That leaves plenty of time for us to worry.

Human potential

For years, English teachers have had to deal with the foundation and higher argument. It is a very difficult decision to make. With one thought, you limit a student’s potential in the exam. We agonised over the process, but we had experience of the exam and how students typically performed.

The removal of the higher and foundation papers for English has been an excellent thing, in my opinion. Now, a student’s wings are not clipped and they can achieve any grade. We deal with human beings: everybody has the potential to do the unexpected. That’s why a foundation paper can be a limitation if we want to increase the academic potential of students.

Maths teachers will feel they have clipped the wings of some students.

Our students felt the first maths exam was easy. The majority of students bounded out of the exam feeling happy and confident that they did well. Based on that exam, there will be teachers wondering if they made the right call. That decision will continue to haunt them again and again until the results and then, sadly, somebody will ask why they entered them for the foundation paper and not the higher paper.

The teachers will have to live with those choices in meetings, inspections and performance management reviews.

The wrong questions

That’s not to say the English teachers have escaped; that the iceberg for the maths department is more imposing than that facing the English department.

The problems with some of the English exams papers have been well documented. We all make mistakes and, equally, we strive for perfection, but the exams papers are written well in advance of the date the exams are sat, and some of these could/should have been amended. A list of several corrections on an errata is starting things off on the wrong foot.

The GSCEs, for the majority of students, represent the biggest thing they have done in their lives so far. We all stress the importance of exams, so it is no surprise that students are twitchy and nervous. If we start by telling students there are errors on the paper, we add to the worries.

The questions then made things worse.

There is an unwritten rule in education. Nobody really talks about it, but it is there. It is simply: success has got to be seen to be attainable by all. If you work hard enough, you can achieve some level of success. Students trust exam papers on that. Teachers and schools trust exam papers to follow that rule.

Some of the exam questions suggested those writing the papers forgot that rule.

Our school studied Romeo and Juliet. The question given, and the extract used, stumped our less able students. Why?

One: the extract featured two minor characters who feature briefly in the play and never return.

Two: the extract featured the same line repeated several times, so students had less text to analyse compared with the other texts they could have studied.

Three: the focus of the extract was not one of the key themes.

Fears for the future

Our strong candidates would be able to take all those different things and weave something marvellous and insightful. Yet our less able students were confused about why the examiner picked these two characters and why the examiner picked this bit, with the constant use of repetition and every little use of figurative language. And why this topic? Why didn’t the examiner pick Romeo’s hatred at the death of Mercutio?

An exam should allow a student to do his or her best. Had my students studied a different Shakespeare play, then I think this might have been the case. In my opinion, the exam paper was not suitable for all students. It isolated a large part of the national cohort. It broke the rule of exams.

If my first blog was about Titanic, then this second has to be Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. We are mid-trilogy, left with a gloomy, unsettled and dark feeling. Here’s hoping that Return of the Jedi on results day will show us the Force is with the teachers and students, not with the dark side of the unseen powers behind the new GCSEs.

Chris Curtis is head of English at a school in Derbyshire. He blogs at Learning From My Mistakes and you can find him on Twitter @Xris32. This is part two of a series of blogs from the participants of Twitter’s #teamenglish.

The illustration is by David Parkins.

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