Some things change, some stay the same: WJEC O Level English in 1951

WJEC, the exam board which awards Eduqas qualifications outside Wales, has a big birthday this year.  We’re 70 years old. Established in 1948, the Welsh Joint Education Committee has been setting and marking exams ever since. 

To mark the occasion I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what English assessment was like all those years ago so, with the help of colleagues from our Research department, I tracked down the papers and examiners’ reports from 1951, the first year of O Level. (A note for younger readers: O Level was an assessment at 16 replaced, along with the Certificate of Secondary Education, by the GCSE in 1988.)

In 1951, the chief examiner was William Hadley, Senior English Master at a grammar school in London, although the papers themselves had been written by William Witts who, the report notes, had sadly died before they were sat.  As there were only fourteen examiners, as opposed to the several hundred we employ now, there is space to name all of them in the report.  Out of these, only five were women!

In some ways the O Level English papers look quite familiar.  After all, however English language teaching changes, we’ll always need to find ways to assess candidates’ reading and writing skills.  And, like now, in 1951 these skills were assessed only by exam.  There was no coursework – and back then no assessment of Spoken Language either, of course. 

Paper One

The first paper assessed writing.  Candidates were given a number of topics from which they chose one, and were given an hour to write 500 to 600 words on it.  So far, so familiar.  However, what was required here was an essay, and the subjects specified reflected this, for example, A defence of the thriller type of novel, play or broadcast and Noise – pleasant and unpleasant. Candidates could also choose to write about an interesting outdoor hobby (such as bird-watching, fishing or star-gazing – but not, they were sternly reminded, a game).  Personally I would be interested to see some of the predictions made about schools of the future, but would perhaps not be so excited to read about Fogs.

The chief examiner was pleased that “the general level of competence … was higher this year” and “thoroughly bad work was not as noticeable as in some previous years”.  However, he noted sniffily “the general mediocrity of much of the work” and that “there were comparatively few scripts of outstanding literary merit”.  However, although the tone of the comments does date the report, some of the specific points will be all too familiar for English teachers today: “too many examples of ‘sentences’ without finite verbs” and “the punctuation was of the ‘hit-or-miss’ variety; there were commas, commas everywhere”, for example.  Mr Hadely also notes that some candidates’ essays had clearly been prepared earlier – although perhaps this possibility should have been foreseen when setting the 1951 Festival of Britain as a topic (unsurprisingly, the most popular choice).  

Again not unsurprisingly, the essays on Noise were “frequently dull”.  However, the best were “imaginative, but related to fact” and, as now, those which were “lively, personal, and amusing” were particularly welcomed.   For Fogs some candidates chose to write “a thriller story with a foggy background”.  I would have thought that such responses would have come as something of a relief to examiners, after numerous “dull accounts of the causes and effects of fogs”, but this was apparently not the case.

Fishing turned out to be the most popular outdoor hobby and, as now, “genuine delight in the selected hobby raised the level of writing” of candidates, regardless of their overall ability.  For the topic of new industries in Wales, few mustered the same levels of delight and some, Mr Hadley notes sternly, included “old industries, such as quarrying in North Wales and tinplating in the south”.

Paper Two

If the writing tasks look broadly familiar, Paper 2 was anything but. 

The first question, which was compulsory, required candidates to summarise a passage about the effect of radio’s role in broadening the “musically interested person’s” familiarity with classical music in between 130 and 150 words.  This task the chief examiner thought, “should not have presented great difficulties as the selected passage was so perspicuous”.  However, for many it did.  Many relied too heavily on the wording of the original; others neglected whole paragraphs, or did not read carefully enough.  Some wasted time by completing several preliminary drafts; although the nature of the tasks we set now is different, certain issues persist.

Candidates then had to choose three from a further five tasks.  Interestingly, there was no indication of the marks available, nor any advice on how best to allocate the two hours given for this paper.  From my perspective, some of the questions look more challenging than others – but that’s probably because of the nature of my own school experience.  Perhaps with the increased emphasis on the teaching of grammar outlined in Kirsten’s recent blog, today’s candidates wouldn’t agree.

One question asks candidates to add a main clause to each of six subordinate clauses to complete a complex sentence, and in each case state the kind of subordinate clause and its relation to the main one.  Then they are required to write sentences which contain examples of various grammatical features, for example an adverbial phrase, a gerund or a complement.  Apparently these tasks were popular and well done, the “commonest errors” being “the failure to recognize the Adverbial Clause of Comparison … or to underline the required example” in the second part.

Another question required candidates to explain and illustrate the meaning of six expressions (including an act of vandalism, to throw up the sponge and stoical fortitude).  Here understanding sometimes fairly subtle differences in words’ meanings was key (“vandalism was [wrongly] identified with hooliganism”).  Candidates then had to correct the punctuation in seven sentences.  Here, sadly, “comparatively few show[ed] any real understanding of the principles of punctuation”. 

Again in the next question – where candidates had to rewrite in eight sentences a sequence of phrases taken from Pickwick Papers – the chief examiner noted “the poorest versions showed not the slightest conception of what constituted a sentence”.  The second part gave list of words.  Candidates were required to explain what effect the addition of the prefix “re” had on the meaning of the word (for example, lax to relax) – another exercise assessing precise understanding.  This is clearly still a key skill, albeit not now tested in this decontextualised manner. 

The final question, labelled as “comprehension”, is the one which superficially at least bears most resemblance to the present GCSE.  The text concerns a new by-pass being built straight through the middle of a school field; however, the questions focus on the meaning of individual words, summarising parts of the text and selecting “two good examples of alliteration in the passage”.  I think we all know modern day students who would relish a little bit of feature-spotting like this!

So, a lot of things have changed, in particular the way in which we assess candidates’ skills.   However, a lot has stayed the same. Most of the skills themselves are still tested in the GCSE exam.  Similarly, for a minority, some of the shortcomings – errors in spelling and punctuation, not reading the question or the text, time management – persist.  That said, today’s senior examiners would in the end probably go along with Mr Hadley’s final comments, although perhaps less grudgingly: “Writing and spelling were probably as good as could be reasonably expected; there were certainly few cases of serious illegibility”.   They would certainly agree that there is still “ample evidence of much careful teaching”.