New Maths Specifications

As it's a mere five years since the last new A Level maths specifications came out the QCA are clearly in dire need of updating their syllabus. Accordingly they're now in the consultation stage for a new curriculum to begin in 2012. This means of course that uncompleted A Levels will come to the end of their shelf-life at this time. Hopefully that won't affect me. But I was interested to see some of their recommendations.

1) They want to abolish the non-calculator paper. I think C1 is great. You learn how to do a lot of manipulation of formulae and a lot of arithmetic in your head. Differentiation, integration, surds, quadratics (factorising) can all be easily done without recourse to a calculator. This, surely is good for fast, flexible thinking and for confidence. The down side is that it does mean C1 can't be that challenging - you can't really put radians into it for example, even though conceptually radians is a piece of the proverbial. The same goes for basic trig. Trig would be better introduced in C1 rather than stuffed into C2 (which is I think around 35-40% trig, all told).

2) They are trying to bring it down to four modules again. This is not a bad idea. The current A Level maths six unit system is complicated and contradictory, though it is flexible for people with different specialisms. It also throws up anomalies. For example as it currently stands maths is the only A Level where you can do 4 AS modules and two A2 ones - which I am doing, because in addition to C1,C2,C3 and C4 I took S1 for AS and am doing M1 for A2. M1 is an AS module. So I'm only doing C3 and C4 as actual A2 Levels. The situation can be reversed - Pure Maths AS is two AS modules and one Further! And you can also do AS modules in Further Maths (you could do FP1-4 and S1 if you hadn't done it). This leads to anomalies in the awarding of grades - the A* grade is only awarded on the basis of C3 and C4.

Four modules would simply take us back to where we started in the 90s with the equivalent of P1 and P2 - ie the four Core modules collapsed into two again. This is probably where this idea dovetails with the abolition of the calculator paper.

3) There are going to be no formulae to learn. This strikes me as disastrous. It makes an expecation of zero knowledge on the part of candidates - and this is an advanced qualification we are talking aobut here. The authorities do not view knowledge as important, but expect candidates to problem solve. Well you can only solve problems if you know how to approach them - which strategies you know of to use. I think the motivation for this is clear dumbing down, or as the QCA write, to "provide students with equality of opportunity and a common basis for progression.". Hmmm. An advanced qualification should be for people who are advanced in their knowledge and understanding of that subject - it should not pander to political ideas of equality, and believe me the QCA does just that. In the questionnaire I answered yesterday I was asked whether the new specifications promote gender and race diversity, or whether they were discriminatory against disabled people. For crying out loud, why is even pure knowledge infected with this leftist rot?

4) They want slightly to change the balance between pure and applied. This probably isn't a bad idea. Right now applied is 33% of AS and A2, but they would like it to be more flexible, up to 40%. With fewer papers I don't know how they will do this, except by weighting, although the QCA do suggest that they might allow certain exams to be longer - this would be an excellent idea. At the same time they think the pure content should be kept the same. So without changing weightings or lengths of exams or indeed mixing up applied content into pure modules, I'm not sure how this will work.

5)There is a lot of guff on the QCA site about being more stretching. They conceive it as using longer, less structured questions. This is clearly an excellent idea, where possible and where practicable. I don't know if they just mean in Further or in Core maths as well.


You can go and look all this up for yourself at the QCA website.