AT last the latest education minister has realised that the GCSE exams are too easy compared to the old GCEs.

I have been reliably informed by more than one student recently that one or two subjects can get pass marks through coursework alone and some subjects even offer multi-choice answers.

Students (and some teachers) will obviously say their exams are hard, but having never sat an old GCE paper they of course have nothing to compare them with anyway.

There have been programmes on TV in the past in which students who have been predicted A* pass marks have done GCE exam work for a few weeks and then sat the appropriate GCE exam and all have failed miserably to even get a pass mark, mainly I think because they have had to use their brains instead of relying on calculators and computers for the answers.

Coursework is all very well but it’s just a matter of finding the relevant answers (usually from their computer) and copying them down or printing them out.

If you presented the majority of students today with a paragraph of words and asked them to punctuate it in their own handwriting they would not know where to start. And as for writing a job interview by hand, the spelling mistakes alone would let them down without the help of a computer spell check.

Students today are certainly no cleverer on the whole than they were 30 years ago but have just come to rely on modern technology instead of using their brains, which is OK until there is a power cut, and after all, not all jobs in the workplace rely on computers to solve the problems which can arise.

HEATHER LEWIS, Chandler’s Ford.