Now more than half a million teenagers received their GCSE exam results this morning and for many it was very good news. Nearly one in five grades awarded were either "A"s or A-stars. That s a rise of 0.7% on last year. Ever-increasing performance has sparked the now-familiar debate on whether the standards are falling and turned the spotlight on coursework, upon which so much of GCSE assessment is based. Alexandry reports.

Great news for these students in Oxford this morning opening their results. To earn their GCSEs, as well as exams, they had to produce a large amount of coursework over two years, projects, essays, and group work. It's supposed to give a more accurate result of a pupil s ability, rather than simply judging their performance on how they do on a few exam days. But does coursework lend itself to plagiarism and cheating? Is it all too tempting for some pupils to simply copy work from the Internet or to get help from friends, parents, even teachers?

I think the argument that people should be able to do coursework because they don't cope under exam conditions is a weaker argument. And you know when, when we are in this competitive environment for university selection and so on.

The QCA has recommended a number of tighter controls which the government is now considering. It wants to make coursework much more heavily supervised and in some cases cut it out altogether, especially in subjects like maths, but that s not a view shared by the exam boards, which say plagiarism may be a problem, but that's no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.

All this is perhaps a contradiction in terms for the examination board, but in many cases we do overly examine students. They spent a huge amount of time preparing for and executing examinations. I think that adding to the bottom of examinations is not necessarily a good thing. I think that we should be looking as far as we can for better ways to stretch more able students and better ways to give (ur) less able students a chance to really demonstrate what they can do.

Some teaching unions are also worried that the proposals would place an extra burden on their members.

The last thing we want is a general expectation of the headteacher to do a lot more monitoring of individual teachers or indeed, teachers to do a lot more monitoring. I think what has to happen is that the question about coursework has to be tailored such that it is the child who has to do the job.

But the Department of Education has said it is likely to accept the QCA recommendations, using coursework only when it's the most valid way of assessing skills, meaning these students may be among the last of the coursework generation.

But for all the GCSE success, there was also bad news on school standards today, with the revelation that more than one in five primary school children in England are still failing to reach the basic minimum level for English and maths by the age of eleven. Figures released this morning show the government missed its target to have 85% of the expected standard by this year by a considerable margin. The figure for those reaching level four in English tests stalling at 79% of pupils, the same level as last year. In maths, the figures rose by just 1% on 2005 to 76%.

I think it's very interesting the government have tried to bury this result today with the GCSE results rather than announcing them separately. And at the same time they are saying that: we need to make GCSEs much harder because too, too many young people are coming out of school unable to read and write. And what these results tell us is that this isn't about GCSEs, it's about much earlier in the education system and tackling issues there.

plagiarism
The act of plagiarizing. 剽竊的行為

throw the baby out with the bath water
get rid of the good parts as well as the bad parts of something when you are trying to improve it

headteacher
中小學的校長