12th July 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The education secretary, Michael Gove, has announced that he wants to reform the current A-level system to better prepare students for university. He has suggested eliminating modular courses in favour of end of year examinations, claiming that this is more academically rigorous than sitting an A-level in 4 or 6 individual units.
Gove has said that he thinks sitting exams at the end of the two year A-level course, rather than in bite-size chunks throughout a student’s A-level, will revive “the art of deep thought”. For similar reasons he wants to eventually move away from AS-level exams, taken in the first year of a student’s A-level, which were introduced by the Labour government in 2001. However, Gove added that exam boards in England and Wales would still be able to offer the AS-level/A-level combination for the foreseeable future.
This comes on the back of universities complaining that first year undergraduates are not sufficiently prepared for further study after their A-levels. Students need to “hit the ground running”, and should not have to undertake a 4 year degree, or attend catch-up tuition due to being unprepared by A-levels.