Re: Is GCSE (England) Maths is of same level as Matric (Pakistan) level Maths?
Peace InformedConsent
I am a Maths tutor in my spare time and GCSE Maths along with A'Level is what I really enjoy teaching. Through the years I have noticed why people tend to believe that O levels are harder than GCSE's really the fact is they are not really harder.
The perception that teachers have of teaching a subject is in terms of scope that certain topics are being covered and that certain styles of syllabus are more onerous than others on this, but GCSE's although they are going in to increasingly fewer topics, they are in fact trying to focus more on application and analysis and less on memory work.
The Pakistani education system is therefore more compatible with the O level style of learning, because up until the recent past the English style was also focussed on memory, the education authorities realised that an enhanced memory of the topic is all one needs to do a certain subject. GCSE on the other hand has made certain areas easier to memorise only so more abstract thinking can be prompted for assessing the level of intimacy a child has with the subject at hand. Teachers therefore think that subjects are getting easier, but on the flip side subjects are also getting more abstract and thinking critically is getting better. Skilling to enhance greater skills will make children into managers and being expert in a topic yet being unable to think outside the box will make specialists who will need managers to direct them. This is only a general rule not a hard and fast one.
The idea to pass a GCSE subject is to understand it, to pass Matric or O Level is to revise it. I love Maths and really encourage others to learn Maths for their own benefit and it can be learnt at any time. Since GCSE's prepare for A'Level and hence Degrees, it is important to know at what level the student is at, Matric often falls slightly less than GCSE not because of content, but because of that depth of applied forms of questions required and hence lowers the level of comparability.
In English maths books you will see many questions for Maths phrased as Jim, Sally and Sarah did so and so to find how much they owed la da da, but in Pakistan text books I tend to see lines and lines of sums straight forward sums. Number crunching is perhaps the least interactive of the Mathematical domain, measurement and testing being the highest. The questions in UK exams are as if we are taking the concepts of Maths and applying them to solve real problems, which is not really seen in Pakistan.