Theoretically, could everybody pass GCSE Maths?
Posted by graxry@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 29 comments
This isn't me asking whether 'is everyone smart enough to pass'. GCSE grade boundaries are based on a distribution, so a fixed percentage of people get every grade. If say, every student doing Foundation Maths got 90+%, would they all pass?
Purple_ash8@reddit
It’s easier to get a C in Higher than Foundation. I wouldn’t recommend Foundation for any but those who genuinely struggle with maths. It’s almost always better to do Higher (or at-least Intermediate, in the days where that was a thang).
dbxp@reddit
I don't think GCSEs are aggressively graded on a curve, they just adjust the grade boundaries a little to adjust for how hard the paper was
HistoricalFrosting18@reddit
How do you think they know how hard the paper is? They don’t send each question to maths teachers to give them difficulty scores out of 10.
Flat-Alternative1615@reddit
They do tend to follow similar trends each year, yes. The only instance in which I can think of an outlier is perhaps the 2023 exam season.
TSC-99@reddit
I don’t think a lot of people would pass year 6 maths, let alone GCSE
Suspicious_tuna@reddit
I tried twice, got a D twice so decided that's what I was supposed to have.
PigHillJimster@reddit
I don't know what it is like now but I was in the first year to do GCSEs after they replaced GCE O Level and CSE.
We used the School Mathematics Project books that were colour coded according to the stream you were selected for.
Yellow books for top stream, Red, Blue, then Green.
You were entered into the exam according to what book range and stream you had studied, so only those who had studied the Yellow books were able to get up to A grade. I was in the Yellow stream.
If you studied Red books you could only get up to B grade I think, and for Blue, you could get a C maybe? I am not sure about the exact boundaries for the lower streams.
I don't know how likely a Green stream would have been to fail to get at least an E.
Traditional-Idea-39@reddit
GCSE maths is full of useless content (I say this as a maths PhD student and tutor!), but what it does do is teach people the ability to reason logically. Of course, not many people are going to remember the content years later, but given some revision time I’d hope that most people could pass.
Obvious-Water569@reddit
Absolutely not.
Maths was never my strongest subject - I managed a C but it was a struggle.
If I had a lot of time to revise and practice I could maybe get that C again (or wahtever BS numerical grade they give in GCSEs these days) but the thing that would get me is the maths we don't use every day.
For example, I use basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division most days. But algebra? Trig? Using a scientifiic calculator? Forget it. It's those kind of problems where I'd fall on my face.
That's coming from a bang-average maths student. There are a shit load of people worse at maths than me.
So no. Not everyone would pass a foundation maths GCSE. Not by a long shot.
Round_Caregiver2380@reddit
I know they use numbers now but I think they went to G when it was letters. I'm sure there aren't many healthy people that would fail to get a G or whatever it is in numbers.
Knowlesdinho@reddit
I work with numbers and I don't think I could pass GCSE maths.
I recently had to prove I'd passed GCSE English by doing a test and honestly there were things in that test that I'd never heard of.
Fortunately there were some refresher materials that I could review before the test that I was humble enough to go through.
iamabigtree@reddit
No. Because your premise is wrong. They aren't based on a distribution.
EdmundTheInsulter@reddit
Not all people could pass, not everyone has the capability.
Bantabury97@reddit
I believe it's something like the top 60% determine the pass mark? The boundaries move because of that, I believe.. meaning you'd never get 90% of the country passing.
Again, I think because I can't remember fully, one of the maths tutors at work explained it to me in September and I've slept since.
mrdibby@reddit
When Maths is one of the few subjects that you can get 100% of an exam correct, it seems hard to process that you can determine in advance even without consideration of ability, that some percent must fail.
That_Organization901@reddit
I actually don’t think so, which is kind of mad really.
I think that if everyone gets a grade of 70-100% then there would be some sort of investigation into how it happened and if there was cheating involved.
Weirdly, maths exams have a lot of English in them to explain the question and what is required for the answer. This isolates a lot of second language speakers and functionally illiterate students (I work in post 16 and these are more common than you think), dyslexic learners.
The length of some questions and the rest in general also takes out a load of learners who can’t concentrate for that long, even if they have access arrangements to combat this. So that’s adhd and anxiety.
Dyscalculia would absolutely ruin your chances of hitting that 70%. Learners with scribes regularly run out of time due to how much harder it is to work with a scribe.
Most of these issues aren’t even known at 16 so most arrangements aren’t even available for learners. Lots of people also never got on with their maths teachers so didn’t engage and don’t know what most of the terms are.
And then some people are just having a bad day.
What I’m saying is that, if you are an exam body, you are expecting to see a sort of standard deviation in the results. You expect to see failure because of all the reasons above and many more outside factors. If you don’t see that then, in your opinion, something has gone wrong with the test.
Think about this: the Chinese legal system boasted of having a 99.8% successful prosecution rate. How suspicious does that number sound and it’s not even 100%!?
So could they? Well almost all learners are able to pass past papers due to the questions and grade boundaries set, as well as being in an environment with arrangements that allow for equity in the test.
Would it be allowed? No.
graxry@reddit (OP)
So the papers are set such that you're expecting a certain level of failure.
Another hypothetical, if there was a sudden uptick in maths scores for all students, do you think the papers would become more difficult in turn such that the same spread would apply (which includes all of the factors you mentioned)?
That_Organization901@reddit
They do raise and lower the scores depending on the exam board and the results they get.
In 2023 for example, English language paper 1 was on ‘The Life of Pi’, which was a very popular book and film. The results were obviously very good and that meant the grade boundaries shifted up, meaning that the score for a grade 5 in 2022 was lower than a 4 in 2023.
graxry@reddit (OP)
I think this clarifies things.
I made this post because of multiple headlines (in summer) reading ‘180000 students fail maths’ or something. A lot of those people are people who are taking post secondary qualifications, which inflates the number, but it seems as if the proportion of students who fail is constant.
From this, it seems the purpose of GCSEs is determining the ability of the ‘average’ student, rather than setting a standard to which all students should reach.
Outrageous_Ad_4949@reddit
If every student did the same on a test, with they all score the same? Yes.
graxry@reddit (OP)
Not if they all did the same, if the gap between the highest and lowest scorers significantly shrunk
Outrageous_Ad_4949@reddit
The Uniform Mark Scale is used to ensure fairness across generations, not to set a certain percentage of failure. They're doing a statistical analysis of the distribution of scores to compare to previous years, but in a hypothetical situation where everyone scored more or less the same, in the highest decile, they'd all pass. In reality, the suspicion of fraud would be too high and they'd have to take the exam again.
chillichangas@reddit
Theoretically yes, practically no. While grade boundaries are published for historical comparisons so you can compare them yourself it would be a safe guess that all papers are marked first then the results are flattened so that the top top marks are given 9s and and absolute bottom marks are 1s with a majority falling into the 3-6 range
Orange-Squashie@reddit
As someone with epilepsy, no lol I couldn't pass an exam. Glad I didn't have to do my gcse's (covid)
ThePumpk1nMaster@reddit
Genuinely interested to know how epilepsy effects maths. Is it as in you couldn’t get through the duration of an exam or there’s actually an inability to do maths?
Orange-Squashie@reddit
I suffer from absence seizures, it's not that it doesn't affect my ability to do maths, it affects my ability to do an exam.
The stress and anxiety of having an exam triggers seizures, the stress and anxiety of potentially having seizures triggers more.
It's a common theme that epileptics struggle very much with exams.
PM-me-your-cuppa-tea@reddit
I would assume there's some mitigation in place for when the curve is too close to grade on a curve. It'll be built into some policies that rarely get pulled out.
But alongside that would probably be built in something about an investigation, after all the point is that there's a really predictable spread of grades so if that didn't happen then why was that, was the paper leaked? Was the paper marked correctly? Were the questions correct/appropriate etc?
ImpressNice299@reddit
This sounds alarmingly like a maths question.
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