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  3. The familiar sounds of an early English summer are with us once again. Millions of children sit down to SATs, GCSEs, AS-levels,

The familiar sounds of an early English summer are with us once again. Millions of children sit down to SATs, GCSEs, AS-levels,

admin2013-03-27  92
问题     The familiar sounds of an early English summer are with us once again. Millions of children sit down to SATs, GCSEs, AS-levels, A-levels and a host of lesser exams, and the argument over educational standards starts. Depending on whom you listen to, we should either be letting up on over-examined pupils by abolishing SATs, and even GCSEs, or else making exams far more rigorous.
    The chorus will reach a peak when GCSE and A-level results are published in August. If pass rates rise again, commentators will say that standards are falling because exams are getting easier. If pass rates drop, they will say that standards are falling because children are getting lower marks. Parents like myself try to ignore this and base our judgements on what our children are learning. But it’s not easy given how much education has changed since we were at school.
    Some trends are encouraging—education has been made more relevant and enthuses many children that it would have previously bored. My sons’ A-level French revision involved listening to radio debates on current affairs, whereas mine involved rereading Moliere. And among their peers, a far greater proportion stayed in education for longer.
    On the other hand, some aspects of schooling today are incomprehensible to my generation, such as graps in general knowledge and the hand-holding that goes with ensuring that students leave with good grades. Even when we parents resist the temptation to help with GCSE or A-level coursework, a teacher with the child’s interests at heart may send a draft piece of work back several times with pointers to how it can be improved before the examiners see it.
    The debate about standards persists because there is no single objective answer to the question "Are standards better or worse than they were a generation ago?" Each side points to indicators that favour them, in the knowledge that there is no authoritative definition, let alone a measure that has been consistently applied over the decades. But the annual soul-searching over exams is about more than student assessment. It reveals a national insecurity about whether our education system is teaching the right things. It is also fed by an anxiety about whether, in a country with a history of upholding standards by ensuring that plenty of students fail, we can attain the more modern objective of ensuring that every child leaves school with something to show for it.
According to the passage, with respect to educational standards in Britain, ______.
选项 A、no authorities have ever made a comment
B、no one has ever tried to give them a definition
C、no effective ways have been taken to apply them
D、no consistent yardstick has ever been used
答案D
解析 本题是细节题。根据文中第五段第一句、第二旬可知，有关标准的争论一直争执不休，对此也没有权威的定义，由此可知，D选项符合题意。
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