A levels go gender neutral

Agree that the reporting is disingenuous. More girls actually passed:

“However, girls do better across As, BCs and Cs, meaning that around 78 per cent get one of these grades. Only 75 per cent of boys achieve the same.”

schoolsweek.co.uk/a-level-2018-key-trends-results-data/

Just looking at telegraph but not subscribed so only got top bit.

They lead with the usual picture of young women jumping and looking happy (bizarre).

Then boys / girls

"For the second year running, boys are winning more of the highest grades than girls, with 26.2 per cent of girls achieving As or A* compared to 26.6 per cent of boys."

Now you see,I would say that these results are the same. You are never going to get an exact match, this difference while representing quite a lot of children is still as pretty even as you could get.

So surely the headline should be - girls and boys do equally well.

This saying that one or the other "has the lead" when it's so marginal is just setting up some kind of competition / argument etc where there doesn't need to be one.

The Guardian now says nothing in particular about boys v girls in the text and has a bit of info in graphs and near the end.

They are obviously struggling with the write up for some reason.

Clicked the Guardian link and all becomes clear.

The purpose of boys taking the exams is to show how clever they are,and set them up for tough well paid roles in later life.

The purpose of girls taking the exams is to get some great snaps of them opening the results because girls are really nice to look at aren't they.

I agree it's a myth that boys do better in exams.

Girls used to outperform boys at maths GCSE. When they scrapped maths coursework, boys started doing better than girls. It’s the only GCSE where the boys’ pass rate is higher than girls (probably due to boys’ poor literacy).

All this worry that swathes of pupils are submitting incorrect sex ID is overblown - the kids don’t provide this info to the exam board, schools do, from their own databases. If a kid wanted to change sex, they couldn’t do it frivolously by ticking a box for a laugh, they’d have to do it through the school.

So the Guardian started by saying girls were better and has now changed its line? Interesting.

The word “hogging” is awful though. As though girls were helping themselves to something they were not entitled to

The Guardian now says boys are outperforming girls on top grades by quite a large margin.

The trend for girls id'ing as male should also help the boys out.

Oh looms like they've still got more work to do to keep us annoying wimen in our place. But here's an idea - get loads if boys to selfid as girls, if enough do it the results will be skewed. Of course they could just fix the results like they did in Japan.

Despite speculation that boys might do comparatively better this year, thanks to the reformed A-levels’ emphasis on final exams, it’s still the girls who are hogging the limelight with clean sweeps of top grades. - Guardian

Just read the Telegraph article and it's making my blood boil tbh. You can almost hear the sigh of relief that boys have finally outperformed girls. Pathetic.

A few items in this article confused me, but then I am a mere woman so maybe that's normal. The fact that tracking 'gender' will enable exam boards to show whether boys or girls are dominating the top grades. Surely if they want to do this they need to track actual 'sex', the facts are that from now on their data will now show the true picture. If the numbers are so small and it will not make a difference then why do it.

Depressingly, if two papers have come up with that line, it means it’s what the Department for Education is briefing...

The Times at the weekend had a similar article, explaining that although girls had outperformed boys for years in GCSEs and A Levels, that was only because they worked consistently hard (and who wants to encourage that, after all? ) and despite doing worse, boys were actually cleverer, and the new “tougher” exam would prove that. Of course, it didn’t explain why, if the previous exams were such a piece of piss, “cleverer” boys did worse...

YY. Spending three hours sitting on your "just in case it starts" maxi pad was not fun. You can't wear tampons on a "just in case" basis and modern latex-free cups didn't exist. And of course, the cramps when the bugger did turn up and the really unpleasant way that a swollen uterus presses on the bladder, which you really really know about after three hours.

I flooded and bled onto the chair in an exam once. It was a three hour diploma exam. I was an adult. I had to wait until all the other students had left and try to clear up.

Here in the US they solved the problem of girls doing so much better on SATs than boys by removing the sections of the test where the girls dramatically outperformed the boys. In the interests of equality and fairness, of course.

“Where is the evidence that schools aren’t already accepting students without exception? Or is this another imagined slight to the trans community?”

That end bit is BS for more reasons than that. So the A level results come out and 1.2% of candidates identified as non-binary. What does that mean for an individual school? Absolutely nothing. In fact does it even mean the students are non-binary, if they choose not to select a sex/gender? As a teenager I may we’ll have opted not to say as some sort of ill-thought-out protest, not realising there are good reasons for gathering that data.

’Having more inclusive data will help schools create more welcoming environments and ensure every student is accepted without exception.’

Where is the evidence that schools aren’t already accepting students without exception? Or is this another imagined slight to the trans community?

no-one who had periods would have decided that a 3 hour stint on one day was good idea

YY. Spending three hours sitting on your "just in case it starts" maxi pad was not fun. You can't wear tampons on a "just in case" basis and modern latex-free cups didn't exist. And of course, the cramps when the bugger did turn up and the really unpleasant way that a swollen uterus presses on the bladder, which you really really know about after three hours.

When in the real world do people focus hard for three hours at a time? Either you are working less intensively for longer, or you are in a mission-critical job where, if you have to work intensively for more than about 30 minutes at a time, you get very clearly-defined and frequent mandatory breaks.

What I have never got about this is that

if boys on average do better at exams at the end
And girls on average do better with stuff spread over the year

Why not make it 50% on coursework / spread out stuff and 50% on exam at end? Then no-one can argue that it's biased one way or the other.

Interestingly in real life which will serve you better? Sustained performance over time, obviously. That's probably by the by though.

The other point about long exams at the end that I read ages ago was someone commenting that no-one who had periods would have decided that a 3 hour stint on one day was good idea! An interesting point and maybe another reason that girls do better when they can work to their own pace a bit more.

“Looking at the new reformed subjects alone, girls actually performed slightly better than boys,” said Carrie Paechter, a professor of Education at Nottingham Trent University.

www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/a-level-results-2017-boys-beat-birls-top-subjects-english-maths-history-first-time-a7898186.html

And a subtext of thank god, things are back how they should be.

I also noticed the repeated point in the article about how much cleverer boys are than girls.

"However, the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents the UK’s major exam boards, said that the introduction of a gender neutral option would not affect national trends since numbers would be too low to have an impact."

This is a guess.

They need to be clear what they are asking teh students to provide. If it's "gender" then they can all put boy / girl / neither it makes no odds.

This will render the stats iffy obviously. They say it won't be many - how do they know? How do they know how many boys will put girl and vice versa - they will not be able to tell if they're just picking whatever on the day. Many girls might pick boy with an idea it might have a positive impact on their grades...

For subjects with very low male or female uptake any skewing could also be non trivial.

Essentially they have decided to stop bothering with stats based on sex and move to a system with stats based on what people feel like putting on the day based on . How this will be beneficial is anyone's guess.

I did think there was something odd about the supposed 'dramatic swing' towards boys once exams were 'tougher'. I'm sure there's more to it than they're saying.

I agree it's a myth that boys do better in exams. Girls outperforming boys has been 'blamed' on coursework but I'd be very surprised if girls didn't continue to outperform boys now most GCSEs don't have coursework. Then they'll have to find something else to blame...