Tim Streater wrote in
:

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.

My uncle did calculus for his maths O Level in 1957.

It was only very elementary, just powers of x if I recall correctly. I
don't know which board he did.

Apparently the JMB maths O Level had syllabuses A for grammar schools and
B for secondary moderns. Presumably the latter was followed only by a
small percentage of pupils at secondary moderns, this being before CSEs,
when most would have left without any academic qualifications.

Here is a B paper from 1968 with questions requiring both differentiation
and integration:

http://www.burtongrammar.co.uk/categ...ol-exams/1968-
maths-o

I think O Levels may have changed significantly even in the early period,
because when they were first introduced in 1951 they were meant just for
the 'top 20%', and then later a figure of 40% was used.

Did you get percentages or had grades come in by 1961?

Harry