PROS and CONS to the GCSE Curriculum

You may have heard some of this common information before, but to help share my perspective, here is some information I'll share with you.

 

As GCSEs are generally well recognised exams across the UK, many employers can look at someone's GCSE results. However, one survey suggested that 70% of employers believe there is too much focus on grades in our current education system. So this comes to the conclusion. What are the main pros and cons to our system?

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PROS

1) Our current curriculum can provide a wide range of academic skills to develop. With a broad diversity of subjects to study, students can pick which ones they're most interested in continuing to learn about. Some examples include Geography, History, Drama, Music and French.

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2) They are well recognised exams - due to their well known recognition, they are highly respected and people have relied on them for a great many years.

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CONS​

1) They are noted to be 'out-of-date' exams - since the first GCSEs were taken in 1988, they are some kind of reformation from the previous O Levels. Therefore, some may perceive them as 'pointless' due to the fact that the age of 16 is no longer the mandatory age of finishing full time education like when the times of O Levels were.

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2) Revision pressure can cause from a small to a considerable amount of stress onto students - of course it is different among many students, however, at least 15% of students have reported experiencing 'high test anxiety' according to the Guardian. Several other students have reported feeling stressed about their GCSE Exams, including 73% of people (on a survey of mine) on the GCSE subreddit believing that teachers' and students' mental health are not being taken care of as much as it should be. Also, on another survey of mine I sent onto the GCSE subreddit, a concerning 43% of those who took it found the exams pretty stressful themselves.

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In conclusion, even though I do support the fact that exams can be important for academic purposes, I have overall written this blog to speak up about how pressurising our current curriculum is, the removal of coursework, inequalities and the need for more vocational assessments (particularly those who do not want to take an academic pathway). We should keep traditional exams, but as the Labour Government have stated, we need to "broaden the curriculum" and reduce the amount of exam content so we do not pressurise future generations.