Modular GCSEs to be scrapped
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Your support makes all the difference.Modular GCSEs will be scrapped from September next year, Education Secretary Michael Gove has announced.
He attacked the "culture of resits" that had resulted from allowing students to keep taking modules until they achieved the desired grade and claimed that courses were not giving students a "deep and rounded" knowledge of subjects.
Mr Gove said pupils would now sit final exams taking in all the modules of a course.
He told BBC1's Andrew Marr Show that other countries had more rigorous examination regimes and schools here needed to catch up.
He said: "We have to look at what's happening to exams and to curricula across the globe.
"One of the things that's happened, unfortunately, over the last 10 years is that other countries have had more rigorous exams, they have had curricula more relevant to the 21st century and we've got to catch up.
"In the last few weeks we have seen the exam boards make a number of mistakes which I think are heartbreaking for the students who are sitting exams and who are given the wrong questions or the wrong facts.
"So we need change.
"One particular change which we are going to implement this week, which will start in 2012, is we are going to change the way GCSEs operate."
He attacked the breakdown of courses into "bite-sized pieces", saying: "The problem that we had is that instead of sitting every part of a GCSE at the end of a course, bits of it were taken along the way.
"Those bits could be resat. That meant instead of concentrating on teaching and learning you had people who were being trained again and again to clear the hurdle of the examination along the way.
"That meant that unfortunately less time was being spent developing a deep and rounded knowledge of the subject."
He added: "I think it's a mistake and I think the culture of resits is wrong. I think that what we need to do is make sure, certainly at GCSE, that you have a clear two-year run."
Exams watchdog Ofqual has recommended that all the individual modules that would be taken before the end of the course should now be sat together, he said.
"It won't start in September of this year because obviously we don't want to disrupt things in mid-flow.
"But from September 2012 all new courses will be taught in a way which means all the modules will be taken at the end."
Spelling, punctuation and grammar will also be marked in courses with a "sustained section of writing" including geography and history "to ensure that we prepare people for real life and university".
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