4th September 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
It’s the start of another academic year, and we’ve been inundated with new requests for tutors. It’s actually a great time for us because the students coming to us now are pretty much all thinking long-term, which means that a) they want to be patient and wait for us to find the perfect tutor for them, and b) they take the time to fill in their course details thoroughly, so that we can do a more precise tutor search.
It’s been interesting to read the continued reaction to the A Level, and particularly the GCSE results over the last week. Anyone would think that the A*/A grade boundary has been shifted to about 95%, and that people who should have got an A have actually ended up with an E. I’m a big fan of the BBC in general, but a report on their website last week was ridiculous in the extreme. It stated that some English GCSE students had received a whole grade lower than the one predicted (I wasn’t aware that you could get a B and a half nowadays), and that dozens of teachers had expressed their surprise at the decrease in top grades on the Guardian website (dozens!).
A friend suggested that qualifications should start coming with the year in which they were taken as a qualifier of difficulty; it seems obvious that a GCSE grade in 2011 has less value than the same grade 20 years earlier, given that the proportion of top grades had increased year-on-year until this August. I’m not sure if that’s the best solution because it seems to be introducing complexity where it’s not necessary. A better solution seems to be to make sure that we get the difficulty and grade boundaries right.
So what do I think? Well for starters my opinion is that the increase of grade boundaries is due largely to politics. Michael Gove has decided to reform the education system, and has lamented the dumbing-down and ‘retake culture’ that has happened over the last few years. I think that exam boards have tried to react to this in an attempt to maintain their market share. Of course, it seems like too little too late. Is this unfair for the students? I really don’t think so because we still have one of the highest proportions of students getting the top grades of any year, it’s just lower than last year which was the record. Let’s be honest, it’s not like the examining boards have identified someone as a 2011 A* student, and awarded them a D instead in 2012.
Something does occur to me however, and that’s that if we assume that every generation is as intelligent as any other, and so fix grade boundaries, it means that we’re not actually judging whether our education system is improving, but actually just asking schools and students to compete with each other, with the winners getting the highest grades. This means no measure of improvement, and a struggling school will always be seen as a struggling school if it improves at the same rate as every other school. I’m not sure how to solve this problem, and one could argue that this is exactly the reason for the ever (until now) increasing GCSE and A Level grades, because the school system has improved, and students are more intelligent. However, as a tutor, it’s difficult to believe that the average standard of English and Maths has improved in the last 10 years.