8th September 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A Level passes rose again this summer, going from 97.6% to over 98%. Inevitably this will reopen the debate as to whether students are genuinely improving, or whether it’s simply becoming easier to pass the exams.
The great difficulty in judging this comes because there is no absolute measure of student success. We’re all compared to our peers, and so, theoretically, the A Level grade that any one student achieves should only be seen as an indication of where they lie in relation to their generation, and not to A Level students 10 years ago, or to A Level students 10 years in the future.
We’ve written before that the overwhelming feeling among our tutors is that exams have become easier. Even tutors who have just graduated (so only took their A Levels 3 years ago), feel that exams now are easier, and older tutors are certain of it. However, simply looking at the difficulty of the exam papers is probably a bad way to judge the difficulty of A Levels, because it’s not what’s in the papers, it’s the way that they are marked which decides a student’s grade.
If we try not to consider the subjective opinion of our tutors (that exams are more difficult), and instead approach the debate from a different point of view, it becomes more and more difficult to support the government’s conjecture that students are improving.
Consider that 30 years ago a small proportion of each generation actually went to university, fewer than 100,000, and that now nearly 500,000 people win a university place each year. Although it may be convenient for the government to suggest that the average standard of undergraduates has remained constant, it’s fairly obvious that, in any school year, the best academics attend university. Those not continuing to university 30 years ago, in general, were considered to not be academically good enough. What this means is that the top (and only) 100,000 people taking A Levels in 1980 were spread, relatively equally, across the grades A to E. Of course, the top 100,000 people this summer achieved only A and A* grades.
What has happened is that has university has become more popular among less academically gifted students, these students have pushed up the grade boundaries for more gifted students. Obviously a large chunk of the students who have now been encouraged to go to university are from state schools, and that is a government initiative which is to be commended, but it has also offered a ‘free-ride’ to students who probably shouldn’t be continuing academic study.