Exam recap

Lying beside my cereal bowl this morning when I stumbled wearily and blearily downstairs at 10:30am, was a newspaper section, the front page of which dealt with teacher's and pupil's comments on the Higher exams so far. You already know my thoughts on exam preparation supplements so I wasn't really expecting much of the article.

It covered the three big Higher level exams so far, English, Maths and Physics, all of which I actually did, with comments on the difficulty and fairness from both teachers and pupils. I agreed with the bulk of the article but the section on the English exam was rather odd. The pupils, in their comments, mentioned several times that the drama questions were well suited to Othello, apparently a popular text for Higher English classes. I agree with them on that point but the main text focused on the poetry questions and how they were apparently too specific. There were indeed a couple out of the four questions available that seemed to be written for a single poem in particular but here's the question that I did:

Choose a poem in which there is effective use of one or more of the following: verse form, rhythm, rhyme, repetition, sound.
Show how the poet effectively uses the feature(s) to enhance your appreciation of the poem as a whole.

Now, other than that annoying bit about "enhancing your appreciation" which is added on to questions purely so that I can show "personal engagement" with the text (no, I don't know what it means either and yes, it does sound vaguely naughty), the question is a godsend. You just try to think of a poem that doesn't use at least one of those.

I'll admit that the prose questions were a little bit too subjective but those were hardly touched upon. Again, I agree with the overall assessment of the close reading as being fair, but I can't stand it when there are complaints that it's "not interesting to teenagers" or some such nonsense. There must be hundreds of thousands of teenagers in Britain and I always resent being pandered to as part of some demographic. And I actually found the passages quite interesting. But that's just my opinion.

Moving on, their take on the Maths exam was, by and large, the same as mine and that of my class. There were a few too many questions that ended in strange fractions which often threw me off a bit but there you go.

At the time, I thought that the Physics exam was easier than the past papers we'd been doing though I put it down more to extra practice than reduced difficulty. It seems, however, that there have been accusations of the heinous crime of "dumbing down" in the past few years as the number of pupils taking Physics has been dropping. This is what really surprised me the most as in our year of about fifty pupils (not counting those who will leave after the exams) there will be ten doing Advanced Higher Physics, an annoyingly large number for my Physics teacher but a surprisingly large one given this national reduction.

Anyway, I have to find new ways of starting paragraphs, instead of "word/short phrase comma topic". And the interesting thing about this little article wasn't really the actual opinions and thoughts expressed but just how close those thoughts were to those of my own and those of my friends. It serves to remind you (oops, that should be "me" if I'm going for the whole "personal engagement" malarkey) that, even if you feel very isolated in the exam room and all you're concerned about when you come out are what your friends got for question 10, there are thousands of people up and down the country in the exact same situation. Which is scary and reassuring at the same time.

On a completely unrelated topic, I've done a post for the MacTake (I have to call it "the" MacTake or Skippy will beat me) and may well start writing there regularly.