Yet more record A level passes: it's bollocks, isn't it?

[kyser_soze]

Kidss now go straight from GCSEs to AS levels to A levels

And this differs from my having GCSEs, end of year exams for my lower 6th which were the same format and length as real a-levels (with similar pressuer to get high grades as well, especially if you were chasing a uni place), mock A's in November for UCAS grade predictions, followed by the real thing in May/June.

THis whole 'there's so much more pressure on' stuff is nuts - the big additional pressure on kids are the SATS.

 

[editor]

Well, you get individual stories like that and you also get individual stories about how incredibly hard people work and how they achieve great things.

Just for the record: at no point have I suggested that kids don't work hard for their A levels.

Thank you.

 

[rutabowa]

suggesting that exams may possibly have got easier isn't the same as saying "all kids nowadays are stupid and lazy and will never amount to anything".

 

[kyser_soze]

Just out of interest, and this for a-levels, what % of the marks are potentiall awarded/taken away for bad speeling and grammer? I know that it was an issue when I did my A's back in the heady days of 1989...

 

[JHE]

It's unfortunate that the 'debate' about exam results gets so polarised.

One 'side' says:
- There's been some 'dumbing down' of some syllabuses
- Changes in assessment methods and 'modularisation' of A levels have made getting better grades easier for some students
- There's been grade inflation in at least some subjects

The other 'side' says:
- More students want good exam results. There's more competition. Students have become more conscientious
- Schools and teachers are under increased pressure to get good results. Teachers have become more conscientious, at least at teaching to the exam, spoon-feeding and developing students' exam technique
- Students who will not pass are discouraged from sitting the exams - so of course the pass rate has risen


These explanations are obviously not mutually exclusive. I think both lots are true.

 

[rutabowa]

It's unfortunate that the 'debate' about exam results gets so polarised.

One 'side' says:
- There's been some 'dumbing down' of some syllabuses
- Changes in assessment methods and 'modularisation' of A levels have made getting better grades easier for some students
- There's been grade inflation in at least some subjects

The other 'side' says:
- More students want good exam results. There's more competition. Students have become more conscientious
- Schools and teachers are under increased pressure to get good results. Teachers have become more conscientious, at least at teaching to the exam and developing exam technique
- Students who will not pass are discouraged from sitting the exams - so of course the pass rate has risen


These explanations are obviously not mutually exclusive. I think both lots are true.

that sounds about right

 

[treefrog]

teachers are under more pressure and so become more single minded and effective re: teaching to the exam.

they're passing at the same standard - but whether they have the opportunity to develop real understanding is in question.

I think this is the opinion of pretty much every secondary teacher!

The prevailing Government attitude is to cram 'em full of tested stuff, and leave no room for real understanding. It's sad but, believe me, a Biology A-level paper is in no way "easy"...

 

[spanglechick]

Just out of interest, and this for a-levels, what % of the marks are potentiall awarded/taken away for bad speeling and grammer? I know that it was an issue when I did my A's back in the heady days of 1989...

depends on the subject, but little to none, except in eng lang.

thus not penalising dyslexics etc. the exam is a test of the subject. clarity is essential, to show meaning and understanding, but a student's ability in say, geography, shouldn't depend on their ability to use apostrophes correctly.

there is, absolutely, imo - a need for a literacy standards qualification - to indicate to employers ability in grammar, punctuation and spelling etc. But it's completely fair to seperate that from subjects.

 

[spanglechick]

I think this is the opinion of pretty much every secondary teacher!

The prevailing Government attitude is to cram 'em full of tested stuff, and leave no room for real understanding. It's sad but, believe me, a Biology A-level paper is in no way "easy"...

yup. it's been a while since i taught a level, but i can tell you that the skills required to gain a B or above in GCSE english today is daunting even for me as a graduate and teacher. but i wouldn't put money on any of my english class who got their results last year still having those skills now.

 

[skunkboy69]

I'm sure all the students feel so proud when they read all these headlines.Maybe they just shouldn't bother and all work in Mcdonalds.If my son gets all his grades I'll be over the moon regardless of what the mediawhores report.

 

[JHE]

Maybe they just shouldn't bother and all work in Mcdonalds.

Nah, you need a degree for that now.

 

[untethered]

This whole debate is meaningless outside the context of what the exams are supposed to be for.

If they're for discriminating between students with varying degrees of academic ability to facilitate admission to appropriate university courses, they're clearly failing.

 

[untethered]

Nah, you need a degree for that now.

Fortunately, Hamburger University is quite liberal in its admissions policy.

http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/career/hamburger_university.html

 

[Threshers_Flail]

It's unfortunate that the 'debate' about exam results gets so polarised.

One 'side' says:
- There's been some 'dumbing down' of some syllabuses
- Changes in assessment methods and 'modularisation' of A levels have made getting better grades easier for some students
- There's been grade inflation in at least some subjects

The other 'side' says:
- More students want good exam results. There's more competition. Students have become more conscientious
- Schools and teachers are under increased pressure to get good results. Teachers have become more conscientious, at least at teaching to the exam, spoon-feeding and developing students' exam technique
- Students who will not pass are discouraged from sitting the exams - so of course the pass rate has risen


These explanations are obviously not mutually exclusive. I think both lots are true.

Yeah this sums it up for me as well. As part of group of students who had their results today, I have mixed feelings about the quality of the qualification. I say the content is just as challenging, but that the means to pass an exam have become far easier.

Actually a fair few people who I know got straight A's in their exams I know aren't that intelligent (imho), their just receptive to being "spoon fed" by their teacher. University, with its individual learning, is a far better judge of intelligence.

 

[_angel_]

yup. it's been a while since i taught a level, but i can tell you that the skills required to gain a B or above in GCSE english today is daunting even for me as a graduate and teacher. but i wouldn't put money on any of my english class who got their results last year still having those skills now.

We never got taught any English grammar, especially not at GCSE. I have my English assignments still under the bed from nearly twenty years ago. It would be interesting what an English teacher would make of them now. I got a grade 'B'.

 

[aqua]

Is the 'pass' mark lower than it once was?

no but the method of assigning grades has changed

once upon a time only x% of the cohort could have an A, x% a B etc

now it's anyone who scores above say 80% (or whatever) gets an A, it isn't limited to how many people can have A grades

which is much fairer

 

[aqua]

not only have the methods of teaching changed (and more research has contributed to our undestanding of how people learn, what type of learner we are etc), but we also have a system were students with dyslexia aren't shunned but helped

it's a totally different system now

 

[untethered]

which is much fairer

Perhaps we should have six prime ministers, 3000 MPs and 250 players in the England football team.

 

[aqua]

Perhaps we should have six prime ministers, 3000 MPs and 250 players in the England football team.

so you don't think that you should be marked on YOUR performance?

 

[_angel_]

so you don't think that you should be marked on YOUR performance?

I think the old system of the top x % getting an A is fairer. It shows who really has done better.

What if everyone got 80% or more? The grading system would be defunct.

 

[untethered]

so you don't think that you should be marked on YOUR performance?

Not necessarily.

If you've got an easy exam and you need 80% to get an A grade, it's a meaningless exercise.

The purpose of these exams, as I surmised above, is to distinguish between candidates, not to demonstrate that the vast majority of them are broadly similar.

It may be less "fair" (whatever that means) but it's far more useful to effectively rank the candidates than to establish whether they've met pre-determined standards.

 

[Nemo]

Kidss now go straight from GCSEs to AS levels to A levels.

This. Last Spring/Summer was the first since 1995 when I didn't have a whole load of exams to sit. In between whiles, I must have sat the best part of 100 exams. Such massive numbers of exams lead you to be greatly practised in showing yourself to your best advantage in exams.

Beyond that, I certainly wouldn't say that A-levels are easy. I admit I didn't find most of them outrageously hard, but I have a good memory, a fair level of self-confidence, and tend to work best under pressure; all things which make me good at exams. Nevertheless, some of the A-level papers were challenging; particularly the synoptic unit in A-level English, which probably rates above my degree finals as the hardest exam I've ever taken. There are many reasons for rises in A-level pass rates, not least that, as far as I know, the exams are still taken by less than 50% of each age group (which presumably weeds out a lot of people who either don't want to take A-levels or don't have the ability). Add to this the fact that the pass-rate counts everyone who gets an 'E' (40%) and above, and the statistics suddenly don't seem so unlikely.

 

[Nemo]

If you've got an easy exam and you need 80% to get an A grade, it's a meaningless exercise.

As I understand it, it's not a case of getting 80% in any exam however easy; the raw mark on a script may be adjusted if that year's exam is easier or harder than the mean.

It may be less "fair" (whatever that means) but it's far more useful to effectively rank the candidates than to establish whether they've met pre-determined standards.

They're school exams; they're not there to recruit for the Indian Civil Service.

 

[untethered]

They're school exams; they're not there to recruit for the Indian Civil Service.

No, they're just there to recruit for the trivial business that is university admission.

From where I'm standing, university places are a scarce resource that need to be allocated according to ability. The current exam system is decreasingly helpful for that purpose the further up the ability scale one goes.

 

[Agent Sparrow]

my sister's just had her results. i had a look at her biology and geography papers. they seemed just as hard as they were when i took them. teachers are much more focussed on the syllabus and exam technique now.

Yup, this is my suspicion. Exams aren't actually getting easier, but the teaching is becoming better at getting more exam focused.

 

[Wolveryeti]

It's a farce worthy of the Communist Ministry of Truth. We looked at past papers and I always remember the earlier ones being really difficult. Some of the ones from the 1980s made me boggle.

The way they were marked when I did mine in 2002 was ridiculous, as well. I did 3 out of 4 questions on a maths paper and I got 100% in that paper, based on being in the top percentile of the sample that did the exam (based on whatever arbitrary percentage they want to see get As 100%)

 

[Tokyo]

It's a farce worthy of the Communist Ministry of Truth. We looked at past papers and I always remember the earlier ones being really difficult. Some of the ones from the 1980s made me boggle.

Hmm - the tests from the 1980s will have examined a rather different syllabus, and were probably looking for different things, which *could* explain the difference in apparent difficulty - you'd been taught to the 2002 papers, and I suspect that someone expecting to sit the 1980s papers would have struggled with the 2002 papers.

Besides, a more difficult paper doesn't necessarily mean that standards are higher. I remember sitting a really tough maths GCSE paper in the mid-1990s, after which pretty much everyone felt they were doomed - only to discover later that the mark required for a grade C was set at 9%, and that for an A* at 48%. No doubt some of the newspapers would have loved the paper, but it was a terrible test of ability for all but the very highest achieving students.

But what this really comes down to is what the exams are supposed to measure. Are they intended to measure the approximate level of knowledge you have on a subject (or how well you can express it, or your ability to analyse new data, etc) - or are they intended to measure your ability relative to other students in your year group?

If it's the former, then provided standards genuinely are comparable - which is difficult to prove or disprove - then an increasing proportion of better grades isn't a problem (the greater difficulty in distinguishing between the best students might be).

If it's the latter, then the old system with a fixed percentage receiving each grade would be better.

What I'd enthusiastically endorse is the increased percentage of passes. Provided someone has studied the course, what's the point of simply saying they have failed? Much more useful to give some indication of performance.

 

[pennimania]

One thing though, and this is something I do know about.

Art and Design GCSE, and A level, are MUCH harder than they were about 10 years ago,

A teacher speaks.

Oh, wait a minute, it's only art.

 

[laptop]

no but the method of assigning grades has changed

once upon a time only x% of the cohort could have an A, x% a B etc

now it's anyone who scores above say 80% (or whatever) gets an A, it isn't limited to how many people can have A grades

which is much fairer

Not strictly in theory.

The idea used to be, as I understand it, that the spread of marks was plotted and A grades were awarded to those whose scores were a certain number of standard deviations from the mean, and so on.

If the distribution of marks stayed constant from year to year, that'd be the same as what you said - a fixed percentage got an A.

But the Flynn effect says that the distribution didn't stay constant.

And, yes, a fixed mark threshhold is much fairer - given properly standardised marking.

And, given the Flynn effect, a fixed mark threshhold is also utterly useless to the élite universities, whose need is to use grades to ration places, not to be fair.

 

[laptop]

This is very interesting - a trend towards enabling the student to show what they know, perhaps.

Off the top of my head and a half bottle of wine:

Ah, yes, this could be the sign of the Thatcher revolution backfiring.

Older readers will remember that one of its major successes - over years of battles and strikes - was subduing the teaching profession and making education (hippy 70s concepts of offering kids leads to self-fulfilment) illegal, while enforcing training for the Needs of Industry.

But her overarching ambition was to put accountants in charge of everything. Because the hippies had dissed them for being boring.

So she did. And they accounted.

And thus the real purpose of the exams I sat in 197mumble was not to test my knowledge of physics, but to test my ability to field a bureaucratic or legalistic curve-ball - this fielding quite possibly depending on my ability to grasp an obscure point of spelling or grammar; but the accountants did their job, and started measuring knowledge of physics; and, lo!, they found more physics than the old entrance-to-the-Establishment exams had found.

Certain kinds of questions - for instance, multiple choice with very similar answers - can be very unfair on certain kinds of minds, such as dyslexics. In years gone by many with particular learning difficulties would have left school with no qualifications at all and labelled by others and themselves as thick...

The more I think about it, the more I would be amazed and disappointed if standards were not steadily rising.

See: accountants finding more physics, above. Yes.