A British State-directed GCSE exam paper in _Physics_ for intelligent 16-year-olds

David Davis

I promised it so here it is.

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-PHY1AP-W-QP-MAR08.PDF

And here’s its “mark scheme”:-

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-PHY1AP-W-MS-MAR08.PDF

As that was fairly hard, I thought you’d like an easier one, to sober up with:-

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-PHY1BP-W-QP-MAR08.PDF

And its agreed answers are:-

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-PHY1BP-W-MS-MAR08.PDF

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-PHY1BP-W-AS-MAR08.PDF

Yep I thought you’d like that. That’s what people are being told that Physics, the Queen, the Arbiter and the Foundation of Natural Sciences, is all about.

I will publish papers BLY2 (a and b), BLY3 (a and b) CHY 2 etc, and PHY2 and 3 etc as soon as I can hack them off.

The “examination boards” don’t exactly encourage individual people to access the stuff. Their sites and acronymic jargon are deliberately designed to obscure rather than to illuminate. You have really to be an apparatchik to get it. AQA does publish a limited range of recent papers on http://www.aqa.org.uk    -     the others don’t.

Scary video

David Davis

This is a bit scary, but hey now! You didn’t come to this blog to be told how nice it is to live under a Panopticon State. This stuff has not been viewed enough for our liking here, so we will forthwith promote it:-

The View from the Bridge

Hello,

I’m David Davis, and I had the good fortune to know Chris Tame for many years in London. Although retired both from active politics and employment, I’m going to contribute a regular log on (mostly) education matters.

This will address what I see as a serious problem, using my daily experience of educating youngsters (which I do because it’s necessary and I’m a scientist and I want others to love science and join me in marvelling like Newton and Faraday, at the work of God’s mind) the ways in which States, principally this one which I know most about, manipulate junk-science nostrums and nationalised curricula, designed and imposed by non-libertarians (I’m being kind there!) to bring about party-political objectives.

Geography, once a noble and hard science, but now in British schools the repository of nothing exccept 60s Marxism, will not be left out. Nor will maths; you will be astounded at what has happened to maths.

That’s all rather a mouthful, but I wanted to see if I could get the essence of the hopefully coming and hopefully regular blog all into one sentence………..er, I can’t. Never mind, there is plenty of material, and my problem will be what to leave out.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!