UK News 24-08-2001 Five Year-Old Passes Maths GCSE who: Six year-old Arran Fernandez what: Passed GCSE maths two days before his sixth birthday where: WATFORD when: June snippet: "I was nervous while I was doing the examination but not so nervous when I got the results," says Arran Fernandez in The Mirror today after finding out that he achieved a grade D pass in his maths GCSE. "My parents were confident I would pass but I wasn`t so sure." But these mature comments come not from a teenager but from a boy of six, who sat his two mathematics exams just before his birthday in June this year, making him the youngest child to pass a GCSE, grabbing the record from Rajaei Sharma, who passed IT aged six this time last year. Arran says he wants to be a lorry driver when he grows up. But alongside him in several of the papers today are comments by Jeffrey Robinson of the Oxford and Cambridge examination board, who says the results are "fixed" so that kids can get a C grade knowing almost no maths at all. Candidates in 1989 who took the maths paper "would have had to score 65 per cent to get a C-grade," says The Independent. "That had been reduced to 45 per cent last year." "Everybody is happy because the results get better," says Mr Robinson, making his parting shot into retirement, "but people who took the exam 12 years ago and got a grade C may be a little miffed." [... more]

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