Tim Streater wrote:
In article , Harry Davis
wrote:

SteveW wrote in
:

On 04/12/2013 11:45, Mark wrote:
On Tue, 03 Dec 2013 18:38:06 +0000, news
wrote:

On 03/12/2013 14:45, Dave Baker wrote:

"John Rumm" wrote in message
...

GCSE exams are divided into two tiers. I've only seen the higher
tier (more like O level standard) questions. Maybe the
aforementioned tests are like the lower tier (c.f. CSE).

I haven't seen the tests referred to, but the GCSE higher tier is nowhere
the standard of the 1950s O Level, which required knowledge of how to prove
Pythagoras's theorem and do some differentiation. GCSE higher tier today is
not much more advanced than the 11-plus.

Hmmm, when I did O level maths in 1961, we didn't do any calculus.
However, I did my O-level maths a year early, and then did the
Additional Maths O-level a year later. That had a lot of calculus in
it.

That agrees with my recollection (I did both those O-levels in 1963) but
it's worth bearing in mind that at that time the syllabuses/syllabi
differed markedly from one exam board to the other.

--
Mike Barnes