It's Scheiße, merde and mierda from me! 💩 💩 💩

The explanation lies in the number of native language speakers who sit GCSE languages and unsurprisingly score highly thus skewing the spread of marks
This total spread of marks is then divided up into segments (I can’t remember the mathematical term, but I was never great at maths!) corresponding to the final grades, so it’s obvious if you get a number of candidates scoring 100% or close, it pushes the grade boundaries up.
I used to mark both German and French and to my amusement also taught a boy who got the highest GCSE German mark in the country that year. No credit to me- he was bright and bilingual He went to to do brilliantly at A level also, I suspect with one hand tied behind his back.
I absolutely agree with you and it made my blood boil as a MFL teacher.

nanna8

Here you get extra credit for getting a foreign language qualification at VCE ( our version of A level ). It helps get you into uni, extra marks. One of my daughters got an almost perfect score because she had German as one of her subjects.

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That's interesting.

Here you get extra credit for getting a foreign language qualification at VCE ( our version of A level ). It helps get you into uni, extra marks. One of my daughters got an almost perfect score because she had German as one of her subjects.

I can see why this looks odd. The boundary itself does not mean French is harder than English, but for a pupil choosing subjects, seeing nearly 90% required for a grade 9 does send a pretty clear message.

There is also a wider issue here. If a student look at those numbers he will thought that a language is a risky choice when they could take another subject with a lower grade 9 boundary. That looks counterproductive when schools are already trying to encourage more pupils to study languages.

Well, I know I’m biased, since I was good at languages and rubbish at physics, so if I’d taken that at (then) O level I’d have struggled to scrape a bare pass.

Again I’m probably biased, but I do think the sciences are generally harder than modern European languages. I’d make an exception for anyone having a go at Mandarin, though…