Name: I-levels.
Age: Due for launch in September 2015.
Appearance: White, with black bits.
Ah. This must be some hotly anticipated new Apple product? Nope. It's a rather tepidly anticipated new exam paper.
I see. Why has it got a silly name? The I stands for "Intermediate", which is the modern way of saying "Ordinary", which put the O in "O-levels", which was the old way of saying "GCSEs".
Sorry I asked. Basically, there has been a leak of a soon-to-be-published consultation paper written by the exams regulator Ofqual. It says we should take almost all the coursework out of GCSEs, mark the final papers on a scale of 8 (ultra-boffin) to 1 (hamster), and call them something different. "I-levels" has been discussed.
Ingenious. Also: why? Oh, well that's where it gets complicated. Education secretary Michael Gove thinks that exams need reforming, you see. He doesn't like coursework, and he wants marking that not only separates the wheat from the chaff, but the stoneground organic from the merely wholemeal. Hence, more grades.
Isn't it a bit odd to make the top mark an 8? Not if you want to leave room for a 9 and a 10 one day.
Ah ... Clever. And is all this a good idea? God knows. Basically, education secretaries just like reforming things. They take it in turns to modernise and traditionalise the system, which always suits some students better than other students, but makes life miserable for the teachers who have to implement it while being paid less than, for instance, journalists despite doing something both more difficult and more important.
You sound rather jaded. It comes over me now and then.
Perhaps Gove's plans will be a big success? Oh, these aren't his actual plans yet. They are just proposals drawn up by Ofqual, and they reject some of Gove's favourite ideas, such as ranking students in relation to each other, having quotas for each grade, making school caps compulsory and the phased reintroduction of inkwells.
Does he really want to do those things? The last two are just Whitehall rumours at this stage.
Do say: "Have these proposals been leaked in order to find out what people think of them without having to absorb any criticism if they're not popular?"
Don't say: "We don't comment on speculation."
