7th September 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The pass rate for A Levels has risen for the 29th year in a row. Reported on the BBC website, the pass rate has gone from 97.6% to 97.8% in the last twelve months. However, the proportion of entries being awarded A or A* star grades hasn’t risen as much as in previous years, with the figure remaining around the 27% mark.
The rise in A Level passes is nothing new, but the real story on results day was the chaos caused by so many students trying to secure a university place before the increase in tuition fees next year. The UCAS Track website allows students to log in and find out whether they have been awarded a university place, and, due to the huge number of students trying to log in, the website was down for most of the day. This led to panic from students uncertain about their places, and a ‘clog-up’ of phone lines for admissions secretaries at universities.
This year there have been 673,000 applications for places at university, and last year only 487,000 people were awarded a university place. UCAS say that 190,000 students are eligible for clearing, largely because they haven’t achieved the required grades for the place(s) they were offered. However, the number of places available through clearing is just 29,400. University applications have risen by 1.3% compared to last year, but a bigger effect is that the number of students taking a gap year has fallen by 40% to just 30,000.