3 A Levels or 4?

Many universities are giving offers based on an EPQ plus 3 A levels.A EPQ is now considered a more useful indicator than a fourth A level.Many schools - good independent schools ( with a good track history of Medics,dentists,Vets) are now recommending their pupils do three A's only.
A levels are harder this year .You cannot compare against previous years.Schools are all giving very mixed advice and I think it will be very difficult to interpret which are the best applicants to choose for these prospective university places.

OP - at the end of your post you asked about getting into a competitive course at a good university. There has been a lot of speculation on Mumsnet about how the new A levels will affect numbers of courses taken to full A level. The fact is that there is no evidence on that, only speculation. I strongly advise you to look at the UCAS point scores for successful applicants to courses of interest to your children. The Complete University Guide has them in an easy to access format. You probably need to subtract points for an AS taken to A2, and perhaps a similar number again for the odd ABRSM grade 8, but at least based on the recent data, that leaves many courses where the average number of points left cannot be achieved with AAA. That threshold of 400 after correction is a good indicator of the true level of competition. The tops of league tables for a few subjects have uncorrected averages over 600 - you can also ask how you would get to that or it equivalent with whatever portfolio of A level, EPQ etc your kid is doing. My view is that it is this sort of data that should be used as a basis for answering the relevant question "how does my child look like an above average applicant". Never forget that offer standards published on uni web sites, or what you hear from older kids, represent minimum levels for taking someone who has already been assessed against a highly competitive pool. They should never be thought of as a target. On what planet is aiming for the bottom a plan for success? The first reply from simbobs I think represents a common confusion: "no university expects 4 A levels". They do not put that on their web sites, but at the top their field of applicants is heavy with people doing 4 or 5 and completing them, and that's the real pool of people from which they are selecting to make their offers.

Who knows what will happen to those average standards of achievement once we have had several years of data under the knew system (I think the points calculation is going to be different too). Meantime, aiming high is the way to go. DS is in school where everyone is expected to start 4 (5 if further maths taken). Dropping to 3 might be sensible post offer in the light of the offer details. I'd avoid a school that does not allow more than 3 from the start.

In short, focus on the level of competition based on the data, properly interpreted.

you can with carefully selected candidates with slightly worse results at A level.

But this presumes that you can accurately carry out this "careful selection" i.e. you can work out what qualities in a candidate will lead to success on the degree course.

Moreover, a typical course might have 1500 applications for 250 places. It's already pretty time consuming making offers, even without interviewing or assessment beyond UCAS materials. Assessing 100 or so candidates in enough detail to carry out "careful selection" would take perhaps 2 hours of academic time per candidate, i.e. 200 hours = 5 working weeks of one academic. This would be prohibitively expensive, even if we assume that the results of such a process would be useful. Right now it wouldn't make that much difference, because students from "deprived" backgrounds often aren't applying for the top courses or don't have basic prerequisite subjects needed for top courses. (It's unrealistic to think that e.g. Engineering could drop A level maths requirement.)

Agree with Ricardian that rates of non-completion are often relatively high amongst kids coming in with lower grades and with no prior history of university education in the family, despite many initiatives and lots of support for such students.

No, you cannot get there with a candidate raised by wolves, regardless of the 'g' score, but you can with carefully selected candidates with slightly worse results at A level.

I don't disagree. But as I'm sure we all realise, there's a wealth of complexity to be unpacked "carefully selected". Because the more careful that selection becomes, the more you're ending looking for Emily Thornberry, who may have been "raised on a council estate" as she doesn't stop telling us, but her father was deputy secretary general of the UN (or whatever it is). That's the problem with the myth of the grammar school as engine of social mobility: it was quite good at providing a boost to people who were either the children of distressed gentlefolk or whose parents were people who would today be middle class (stalwarts of the WEA, houses full of books, etc). The careful selection will end up looking for interview skills (ie, "my parents are middle class"), cultural capital (ditto) and school reports (ditto, I think, although I have no evidence).

I suspect that if you admitted to university based on people's parents passing a simple exam you would get the same results, because the parents willing to take the exam are the parents whose children currently succeed.

That can easily done in 66 weeks,

That assumes you're willing to sharply contextualise first year exams. Oxbridge don't fail many people out after the first year, because the cohort is so strongly selected (and has other properties, like low first in family). Elsewhere, even in the RG, rates of non-completion because of failing the first year are distinctly higher. Are you willing to contextualise the first year exams?

Ricardian.

'Assume, and I'm not sure I think this is true, but arguendo, that there is some reified general intelligence that (a) predicts academic ability and (b) can be directly measured. This is the "let's pretend Cyril Burt wasn't a lying charlatan" position. That would mean that we could compare on this scale, which we may as well call g, two eighteen year olds, one of whom had been educated at Eton, the other of whom had been raised by wolves in the manner of Romulus and Remus. Suppose we determine that on our measure of intelligence, the latter is "more intelligent". How much more "intelligent" would they need to be in order to have a better chance of success in an MBChB programme than the former?

My answer is "they're disproportionate likely to fail, given realistic assumptions". Because the best predictor of success in exams is success in exams, and the idea that universities can fix in 66 weeks of teaching (in the case of the typical 3 year level 6 qualification) a deficit which has occurred over the 14 preceding years is farcical. Or, more crucially, can fix in the 22 weeks of the first year those self-same 14 years, such that the student passes the first year exams. BTECs provide Level 3 qualifications for people who can't take exams, but when they arrive in an environment where passing exams is the sine qua non of progression, they fail.'

The above is very much a reductio ad extremum argument.

I would say that schools like Eton are fantastically good at teaching students to dot the i's and cross the t's, to make sure an able but far from brilliant candidate can access the higher grades. I would say that an AABB from an ordinary school is probably the equivalent of AAAA from Eton, and that the former candidate would, on average, fare at least equally well in a university setting.

The reality is that, given small grade differences, it is maybe two years of teaching that need fixing, not 14. That can easily done in 66 weeks, assuming the candidate is motivated to do so. When I was at Cambridge (many years ago), I do remember the majority of the candidates from rough schools who had very ordinary A levels did just as well as those from the best private schools with the normal requirements (all A's as was then and a couple of S levels, or admittance via the entrance exam).

No, you cannot get there with a candidate raised by wolves, regardless of the 'g' score, but you can with carefully selected candidates with slightly worse results at A level.

From what I can work out, the factors that lead to bright kids who underachieve are so much bigger than bad advice from school. There was an American study on gifted kids that found the overwhelming reason for those who dropped out of high school was the usual: family & personal problems. Schools can't fix society's bigger problems.

I kind of agree that importing skills is deplorable. Braindrain of the developing world, and all that. But then, there is a valuable industry for places like Bulgaria & Cuba, to train up kids from developing world to go work in high income countries.

One nice thing about using AS grades is that they are empirical (especially linked to the contextual data sets)

My honourable friends likes to joke, do they not?

AS exams are taken within nine months, and until very recently started being taken within three months, of starting the course. They are massively biassed towards those that had a smooth journey through GCSE, and because they currently count as 50% of the A2 they make A2 grades hugely slanted towards those able to do well in the first six months (ie, those who didn't have to change institution and started with strong GCSEs). So a student who has a smooth journey through GCSE and the first few months of Y12 will have a better chance of an A at AS, and every point UMS they get over 80 (on AS-standard work) is a point UMS they can get under 80 at A2 (on A2-standard work) and still get an overall A. The whole system massively, massively benefits the middle-classes.

Anything that involves unusual timescales (like Oxbridge and the Med schools) or travelling to interviews will cut out kids who might really shine but have been dealt a bad hand from the start.

I don't disagree. But if you remove interviews and switch to pure A2 grades with a sprinkling of module UMSes, do you think that would be better?

Providing better education on admission processes, and funding for interviews (I intend, once my children have finished at Camford, to write up the subtle "you're all middle class with affluent parents, aren't you?" blocks on admission) is not hard, and is much easier than trying to change the system to remove the problems.

Telling comp schools to get the John Osborne (or do I mean John Braine) shaped chip off their shoulder would help. Speaking as an RG lecturer who had tried to get engagement from local schools, it's pretty depressing, and the schools themselves are a large part of the problem.

as selective schools predict high so get their pupils offers to top courses

Some may. Some don't .

I have been called insane on another thread as my Ds's school does not give out predicted grades pre UCAS , whether A2 or equivalent. (assumption - because they do not want anyone (neither pupils nor parents ) trying to muscle in and get too high predictions.

Any decent school, which has a fair number of pupils going to good universities will not compromise their reputation , surely ?

I'd love to know which these independent schools are which over represent their 6th form cohort. (and the resulting success)

I heard that anybody can get onto any university 1st yr course in the Netherlands.

No, this is not correct. Anybody who did the appropriate school leaving VWO course at grammar school can enroll on a university course. However, only around a third of pupils go to grammar schools and do the VWO. I would say that a passing grade on VWO is above C grade at A levels. So it's true that most courses cannot select based on scores at VWO, but the spread in incoming students level is akin to A star to B at A level i.e. not that wide.

While students can be thrown out after the first year there is big pressure not to do so in many subjects, to maintain sustainable student numbers and hence staff levels.

BTW pupils are filtered into three streams in Holland at secondary school level. The child of a professor/doctor/lawyer is almost certain to be in the grammar school, university track, school. The child of a non-EU immigrant working for minimum wage will almost certainly be in the least academic track, from which it is virtually impossible to enter university or polytechnic. I think that Holland has worse social mobility than the UK.

Medics anyway need to travel to placements. If they can't get to an interview, how are they going to have resources to travel to placements?
That comment explains why more than 1/4 of Med students are from Private schools
Gotta be rich to become a med student.

Medschool
What I'd like is the school careers / academic service to be properly funded again and schools to be accountable
there will always be social inequality
but the purpose of state funded education is to try to get the best out of everybody

anything that makes the playing field less level than it has already been is a "bad thing"

the UK has relied on importing skills for many decades so has become very lazy about training up its own stock
which makes the referendum outcome even more concerning
either way, getting the best out of what is already here should be a no brainer

sorry, xpost.
So you want NO interviews?
I have one colleague who favours that, just select the top academics and dispense with interviews. It would save us a fortune in staff time, that's fair enough.

Why believe that top academics = good situational judgement or good person to person skills, or ability to problem-solve when presented with new situations?

Medics anyway need to travel to placements. If they can't get to an interview, how are they going to have resources to travel to placements?

You need to say what you want instead TIP. I don't want to pick it apart, but really, what would be a fairer system? Babies doled out to random parents? What?

There are different definitions of equality or equity, but the best ones may be those that have to do with a minimum access to quality of life combined with minimising distance from bottom to top, rather than trying to pretend that bottom can ever have equal opportunities as the top.

Ricardian
The Universities are not at fault here.
The fault is that schools are not accountable any more and school careers staff are often utterly carp.

Schools that are geared up to getting kids into unis give them good advice about subjects from year 9 onwards
They give them opportunities for interview and work and extra curricular experience.

Schools that are not geared up utterly let their brightest kids down.

One nice thing about using AS grades is that they are empirical (especially linked to the contextual data sets)
Anything that involves unusual timescales (like Oxbridge and the Med schools)
or travelling to interviews
will cut out kids who might really shine but have been dealt a bad hand from the start.

If we move back to interviews and individual tests, it will be like the state selective schools in London who get the sharp elbowed rather than the sharp brained.

Universities are under huge pressure to widen participation at the same time as the government is ripping accountability and comparability out of schooling.

Maybe the Unis should kick off rather more loudly about the changes

Talkinpeace you're absolutely right - and good point about predicted grades and clearing. I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense to predict high.

You know full well that academic discrimination is not what I'm talking about.

Its social discrimination.

I realise you think you're the only person who had thought about this, but strangely, a lot of us have, over many years.

Assume, and I'm not sure I think this is true, but arguendo, that there is some reified general intelligence that (a) predicts academic ability and (b) can be directly measured. This is the "let's pretend Cyril Burt wasn't a lying charlatan" position. That would mean that we could compare on this scale, which we may as well call g, two eighteen year olds, one of whom had been educated at Eton, the other of whom had been raised by wolves in the manner of Romulus and Remus. Suppose we determine that on our measure of intelligence, the latter is "more intelligent". How much more "intelligent" would they need to be in order to have a better chance of success in an MBChB programme than the former?

My answer is "they're disproportionate likely to fail, given realistic assumptions". Because the best predictor of success in exams is success in exams, and the idea that universities can fix in 66 weeks of teaching (in the case of the typical 3 year level 6 qualification) a deficit which has occurred over the 14 preceding years is farcical. Or, more crucially, can fix in the 22 weeks of the first year those self-same 14 years, such that the student passes the first year exams. BTECs provide Level 3 qualifications for people who can't take exams, but when they arrive in an environment where passing exams is the sine qua non of progression, they fail.

Universities cannot provide a crash course in the cultural capital, drawn in the widest sense, that people who have already succeeded in education have. Apart from anything else, universities aren't staffed by trained teachers and the methods of teaching and assessment are aimed clearly and centrally at people who have a track record of being taught, and arrive with the associated soft and hard skills. Your local redbrick's engineering department doesn't ask for A Level Maths and A Level Physics at Grade A just as a selection criterion, a quest for something correlated with g, they ask for them because on day 1 of the course you will need to use the skills and knowledge, and on day 2 you will have to learn more, building on them.

So what do you want us to do? Lower the entry requirements? Lower achieved entry grades are the single best predictor of failure, which is why Oxford and Cambridge have the lowest non-completion rates, by far. Yes, I'm aware it isn't that simple, because those grades are in turn proxies for other thing; that's rather my point, I think.

The solution that's creeping towards reality is foundation years, and they are now integrated for funding (you can get SLC funded as they are notionally Level 6 courses) and for progression (if you do a foundation year, you only need to progress into the first year, rather than gain competitive admission, so the bar is much lower).

But I suggest that before we all stand on the barricades with a chorus of "Can you hear the people sing?" building in your chest that you look at the completion rates both of foundation years, and (agreed, we only have one cohort to go on) degrees undertaken by foundation year students. Neither looks great, I'm afraid, and the people gaining for foundation years are often people with good A Levels in subjects X, Y and Z who want to do a degree which requires X', Y', Z'. In other news, those 60% of OU humanities students who already have a degree in something else do rather better than the remainder of the cohort who don't.

What else do you want us to do? Lower first year progression requirements as if that is even possible? Reduce degree content? What?

Making universities responsible for the ills of the education system, and society more widely, is confusing the tail with the dog. Yes, it's appalling that some children receive sub-standard education in schools (although I'd take some convincing that's entirely the schools' fault) and it's tragic that some children are very badly supported by their parents. But claiming that we can fix this, either by messing about with admission processes or by messing about with admission criteria, is just magical thinking. It's hard. A lot of us in universities are very keen to fix it, and don't spend all day raining empty sherry bottles down on the heads of the poor. If we had a solution, we'd implement it.

Medschoolrat
Of course exams & interviews & aptitude tests are discriminatory... the point of interviews & aptitude tests is to to take all the kids over a certain academic threshold & score their other skills relevant to the course.
You know full well that academic discrimination is not what I'm talking about.
Its social discrimination.
Which is wrong.

I think most will be going for 3 A levels at the schools I know and many schools not even offering ASs. With the new specs it is actually quite difficult to teach AS alongside A level in some subjects so unless you are offering separate AS classes (which smaller 6th forms will not do) it is easier not to offer. Some ASs are not offering the first exam till 2018 either - ie it is over 2 years so students wont be able to drop from 4 to 3 in year 13. I actually feel rather sorry for the new intake for sep 2016. Plenty of specs still not accredited, textbooks not finalised or available, content looks huge. I am a Head of Dept and have been unable to finalise my spec for September yet due to all the aforementioned problems.

Ds is doing four A Levels in humanities subjects. He says it is not too arduous. He started four with the intention of dropping one but enjoys them all. He also says that atm (obviously now changed) loads of people are retaking modules in U6 so are in effect doing 4 A Levels in terms of number of exams.

My bugbear is that it is a shame that so many drop the "difficult" A Level at the end of the first year for fear of not getting a top grade. So droves of kids at ds's sixth form college start a language with enthusiasm, but drop it even if they are enjoying it because it is easier to do well in other subjects. Back in my day - yada yada - there was no "I must get an A (make that an A* for GCSE) or I'm doomed" worry.

Of course exams & interviews & aptitude tests are discriminatory... the point of interviews & aptitude tests is to to take all the kids over a certain academic threshold & score their other skills relevant to the course.

Maybe we could go for a random allocation system, no matter how well or badly you did in school you just get a job randomly allocated to you: binperson or doctor. What would the advantage of that system be?

I heard that anybody can get onto any university 1st yr course in the Netherlands. But then students have to prove themselves in exams or they're kicked out. I bet they end up with fairly privileged-background kids succeeding like the UK has.

I don't think Universities can afford to impose extra exams.

indeed but the Sutton Trust found that with the low predictions kids could not even apply for the top courses or be on the radar of the top unis

and the over predicted kids often get bumped into courses on clearing that other better qualified kids should really have been on

selective schools predict high

The students still have to get the grades

lower achieving schools predict low

Which is what adjustment is for.

Interviews and aptitude tests are discriminatory - they cut out thousands of kids who do not go to schools that are geared up to them
the good thing about using AS was that it was a level playing field

tests do not put kids off, they cut kids out completely

GCSE results based offers are a retrograde step
as GCSEs are basically rote learning nowadays and are taken in subjects that kids hate as well as those they want to continue

predicted grades are another problem as selective schools predict high so get their pupils offers to top courses
and lower achieving schools predict low so cut their kids out of opportunities
(see Sutton Trust reseaech on the subject)

the Universities are going to have to change the whole way they do admissions

No, they're not. Most university courses make offers to those who have predicted grades in the correct range. The minority of courses which are highly selective (medicine, top universities) already use academic record/predictions as a filter and then select primarily by interview and aptitude tests.

A relatively small fraction of courses currently use AS level results significantly in their selection procedures. I suspect that these will mostly move to looking at GCSE results instead of AS (in combination with predictions, school reference, personal statement etc), as they would have done until the 90s. For most students looking at AS v GCSE gives in any case roughly the same picture.

I'm not in favour of dropping AS, and not in favour of the speed of the changes (without proper trials) but I don't think it will make that much difference to university admissions. With a few exceptions - I agree that Cambridge adding entrance tests may put students off and I'm against it. (Oxford of course already has admissions tests for many subjects.)

DD did 5 at AS and then 3 at A2 plus an EPQ
the brightest kids at the college did 7 AS and 5 A2
the norm is 4 and 3

DS will be doing 4 subjects when he starts in September and then dropping one for the 2nd year
we think

but as the whole thing is unclear at the moment its really scary

the Universities are going to have to change the whole way they do admissions
or bring in loads of extra exams - which will entrench advantage even more than it is already

such a retrograde step and so badly thought out without empirical support.