Bringing Revolution to Private Tuition

Damn! How will we make a living?
According to a PhD study the effect of study on a students gcse grade is next to none existent. Even in maths, the subject in which tutors make the biggest difference, the effect is only to raise a student by one fifth of a gcse grade, meaning there is only a 20% chance of an individual course of tutoring not being wasted.
Of course, that study deals with tutors of varying quality, including unregulated tutors who tutor to earn a little tax free money. The government is talking of regulating the private tuition industry. This will probably push up the cost of a private tutor, but will also probably mean you can be more sure that the tutor you hire is qualified, experienced, checked and paying their taxes.

January A – Level resits are no more. There is effectively only one opportunity to take A2 exams, unless a student is to retake an A2 exam and miss a year of their life.

Many universities allow credit transfer, so that a student can transfer from one University to another, having completed a year of study successfully and not have enrol and start a course from scratch.

Why not A – Levels? CIE – Cambridge International Exams – have an A – Level sitting in November. If a student arranged to sit an A – Level module exam in November with CIE, and a pass in that module were accepted towards an A – Level with some other exam board, it would give students two opportunities to sit A2 exams where there would otherwise only be one.

In fact, UK exam board do allow transfer of credit in limited circumstances. The gate is open for students to push it.

A – Level resists are no more – almost. It used to be possible to take an A – Level module exam five times. Some students would take the first A – Level maths module exam, C1, in their GCSE exam year, and could then retake it twice in their AS year (January and June)and twice in their A2 year. Up to 50% of students would retake at least one A – Level module exam.

There are no January module exams any more, so that same C1 exam can only be retaken twice, and most other module exams can only be retaken once.

Most universities do not take into account the number of A – Level resits a student takes. Some take resits into account to decide between students when courses are full -London School of Economics, Imperial College and Cambridge. Some Universities take resists into account only when applying for specific courses – especially medicine – and some universities (Edinburgh, Birmingham, Sheffield and University College London) do not consider students retaking entire A – Levels.

Students at University retaking exams in the first second or third year of their Degree are penlaized often as a matter of policy. The grade for an individual resit may be capped at a pass, and even the class of degree awarded may be classed for resits in year three.

Is this fair? Probably. It costs a lot of money for someone to attend University. Medicine especially, is an intensive course and students taking resits every year are less likely to pass. If they can be weeded out at the A – Level stage, they can be free to look at better options, more likely to suit them. They may also be induced to work harder, so that they they pass their exams first time and avoid the need for resits.

Many schools recommend a certain model of calculator and some will sell you one, making a handy profit for the school, but the model of calculator is not a choice a pupil should have made for them.
The calculator most recommended by schools is the Casio-83ES. This is a natural notation calculator and displays a calculation on the calculator screen to allow it to be easily checked. Square roots are simplified and displayed and answers are given in terms of pi in many cases.
Like all Casio calculators, it will tell you that -3 squared is -9 and 20+10% is 20.1. Both of these are incorrect but many people believe it because they think the calculator cannot be wrong. Simple four function calculators like those found on mobile phones and old fashioned calculators that use reverse polish notation (rpn) do not have this defect. Neither do many calculators made by sharp, whose calculators have all the functionality of Casio calculators.
Casio do however, produce probably the best calculator in the world – the casio FX-991ES PLUS. This is the calculator I recommend to all my students. It has all the natural notation features of the Casio-85ES and also has quadratic and simultaneous equation solvers built in, and a general equation solver which often makes it unnecessary to rearrange equations to find the solution. I reckon for the average student it makes a difference of 5% in the calculator exam, and costs from £13 on amazon.
Believe it or not, this calculator is exam legal, accepted by all exam boards. It does not perform symbolic manipulation, like simplifying x(x+y) – that would rule it out for use in exams.

My host conducted some sort of security scan and found what looks like a couple of hundred false positives for malware.
This happened minutes after I finished an upgrade.
You would think their antvirus software would be the very latest. Not so apparently, because they classified dome files ad containing malware that had not changed for years.
If anything good came out of this, I discovered that the PHP version in cpanel, showing as 5.2.17 has been upgraded to 5.4 but this can only be accessed through some a configuration file, which I will try and edit tomorrow.