Stop telling me GCSEs are easy

Aarti Shankar, 16, is about to start her A-Levels. Her dream life would involve writing, listening to music and caring for her future St. Bernard named Bernard.

She's fed up of know-it-all politicians who say GCSEs are being dumbed down.

Is it fair that people who haven't sat a GCSE exams get to decide whether or not they're easy? Every year examiners tell us GCSEs are getting simpler, and every year politicians release a statement about the papers being easier than the last year. I don't agree with them and I can't understand why they think GCSEs are being dumbed down, just because more students are achieving high grades.

I would naturally think higher marks mean a better quality of education or smarter students, so why do they assume that we can only do well because the exams are easy? They must be forgetting that we don't just sit one of these 'easy' papers each year, we sit nine or more. Having just completed this feat myself, I can tell you it was no easy task to study for them all.

"If it turns out that I actually did well, then why can't I be allowed my victory?"

That's why the Conservative plan to create a library of past exam papers from the victorian era to today seems daft to me. OK, so I wouldn't be able to pass victorian exams, but that's mostly because the writing style would confuse me beyond all reason. And do they really think a victorian would get an A* in any of our modern papers, with their emphasis on IT skills? The Conservatives are wasting time and effort on an idea which comes down to trying to compare two things which are not comparable.

A better comparison might be to contrast the International GCSE, which was introduced to resemble O-Levels (which of course were supposed to have been harder than the 'simple' tests that we sit nowadays) with standard GCSEs. I think I have the right to make this comparison, as I sat both, and I can say IGCSEs aren't that different to normal GCSEs. Perhaps they're slightly harder, but any one of my friends could take one – give us some credit.

Like many people, I found sitting my exams stressful. I was under a lot of pressure to revise and I found some papers depressingly difficult. So if it turns out that I actually did well, then why can't I be allowed my victory? If the Government wants to make a claim about today's GCSE standards, I say politicians should take the plunge and do the exams themselves. Then maybe we would listen to their comments about them.

By Aarti Shankar

Photo by Muna Ally

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