How can a REALLY low percentage still be a "pass" at A level?

[Birmingbacon]

I was looking at the grade boundaries for A levels after noticing schools saying things like "97% of our A-levels were a pass" (which sounds great on paper)

But if an E is a pass then the percentage which gets you a pass is shockingly low.

Here are a few:

full list here if interested
https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/Support/Grade-boundaries/A-level/grade-boundaries-june-2024-gce.pdf

Pass (E grade) in A level Maths - 18%
Pass (E grade) in A level English Lang - 25%
Pass (E grade) in A level Biology - 23%
Pass (E grade) in A level Business - 29%

etc etc, all similar.

Am I crazy or should you need at least 50% in order to 'pass' an exam? Even to get a C in maths you only need 43% it just seems a very low bar

But presumably their predicted grades (on which Uni places are offered) were a lot higher than Us and Es. That student must have had a few "bad days" for the exams themselves as they must have been working at a higher standard during the course itself for the school to give estimations of higher grades. Do you happen to know what their predicted grades were?

Oh wow! I always thought a C or above was a pass, but maybe my parents just gaslit me into that to make me work 😂 (didn’t work, pretty sure my grades included a D and a U).

Perhaps students unlikely to get more than 50% in an A level exam shouldn't be sitting the A level and there should be more appropriate courses/exams for them? Maybe A/S levels as an alternative.

The exams aren’t designed for people to get 90%+ in the time available to answer.

And yet plenty do get over 90%!

Yes, because the exam is broad enough to allow it.

@Birmingbacon I don’t see why this is difficult to understand.
The required pass mark is reflective of the difficulty of the content, surely you can see that?
If the content was easier the pass mark would be higher. If the exams remain rigorous the pass mark is necessarily lower.
They haven’t been conjured up in a vacuum so someone picked the pass mark out of thin air.

But if all the students were getting 95% in actuary exams, they'd make the exam harder or the pass grade higher.

It's set at 50% because it's hard, and they don't want the majority to pass, as some way to distinguish them A-levels do the same, except you know if someone has a "low pass* or a "high pass "

A-levels are perhaps harder as the student is often studying 3-4 subjects, rather than "just " actuary exam

And also, this is why things lie T-levels and BTECS exist. But SO MANY people think A-levels are the best or only options. Same goes for uni. Like all anyone talk about is uni this, uni that...it's not the only option, but people see it as the default "may as well do your degree " option, which is partly why young adults do poorly at uni, because probably 60+% shouldn't even be there.

Many exams have been dumbed down over the years.🤷‍♀️

When I was a kid and E was not classed as a pass. Surely even if you were blind guessing you might manage thirty odd percent?
For me I always thought C was a pass. Anything lower you may as well not have fucking turned up?!

You would actually be surprised at how low the grades are that universities will accept.

Other than Oxbridge and medical schools, universities are so desperate for students that they will accept much much lower grades now.

DH and I work for HEIs. He works at a reasonable, middle of the road uni (not top, but historically well-esteemed) and volunteered to do clearing. They dropped their already low requirement of BCC to do law(!) to CCC. And then there is room for manoeuvre on that if the student comes from a deprived area.

A law lecturer we know at the same university has said that they're really struggling with the quality of students (struggling to get them even a third!).

I don't know how old-school you are, but an E was a pass 36 years ago.

No they really haven't. That's such a lazy assumption that insults the work kids do today.
Separately, no-one HAS to do A levels or further study. I have no problem with a perhaps more rigorous "pass" or fail at that level. But at GCSE, kids have very little choice. There are few alternatives paths and very few post 16 options without a traditional GCSE in maths and A English. There are actually some alternatives, like functional maths and science but few mainstream schools offer them. As long as we are compulsory testing fish on their ability to climb trees, the pass mark should cover the widest range possible so that adolescents do not get an overwhelming message that they are failures.

I think you are thinking of O levels, where a C was considered a pass.

At a level A- E were always passes. (Just E was a crap pass. I have one) Because only the brighter students went onto do them. You needed C or above at GCSE to get on to the A'level course.

However GCSE it is all about the C and above. (Or whatever the equivalent number is these days)

However exams don't really suit everyone. I am dismal at them. So for a little of students other qualifications a better.

You're wrong. I got mostly E's. I went on to uni. Did well in my degree and follow on job. Went on to complete a MSc and another BA. Got a distinction and a First, won an award for academic achievement and had my research published.

If those E's had been a fail then this wouldn't have happened.

Wow ok, I’m not even 36 years old 😄 my parents definitely made me think it was a >C or nothing! 🫣

It isn’t reflective of the difficulty of the content they make the boundaries based on what percentage of the cohort they want to get a U and what percentage they want to get a B etc etc.

so the exams could be dumbed down every year but we will never know as they always fail the bottom X% and always award an A to the top X%

It’s not about how hard the content is. It could just as easily be each generation getting stupider (learning less, worse teaching, worse concentration, etc) for example as anything else. (I’m not saying that’s true but it could be. We don’t know.)

Haha! Me too. Well 2 Cs, a D, and an E.

But I got a 2:1 at uni, a masters, and a post-masters professional qualification, all of which secured me a professional role at a very prestigious university.

I have always been perplexed by grade boundaries in the UK. (I am not from here originally).

Where I come from (when I was at school, no idea what it is like now)
A+ = 85%+
A = 80 to 84.9%
B = 70 to 79.9%
C = 60 to 69.9%
D = 50 to 59.9%
E = 45 to 49.9%
F = fail

Some discretion at grade boundaries existed.

Things have changed over the years - I had an offer of CCC for my first choice uni back in 1990 - I am not sure anyone would be offered that now, at least before clearing. My friend got into a music course just by playing cello...

It was a lot more remarkable to get straight As back then. But far fewer people went to uni, you didn't have to be in some form of education or training after 16 (and UCCA and PCAS were still separate.)

A-E were all passes, but plenty of people only really counted A-C, even then.

I thought that wasn’t the case with A-levels - the pass mark is set based on the difficulty of the paper each year, but it is theoretically possible for 100% of candidates to get an A star if all of them get 83% or higher (or whatever it is) that year. Unlikely, but possible.

They don’t have a set proportion of people getting Us, Es, Ds etc. Which is how the proportion of As and A stars is rising.

Yes, if you plotted scores on a graph against pupil numbers, you should get a bell curve distribution. It's then easier to assign grade boundaries that are reasonably broad. If you raise the pass mark to 50%, you squash the grades A* to C over a smaller score range and it's harder to differentiate grades.

Some unis take E grades.

E has been a "pass" grade since the 1970s at least

It was bell-curve marking/boundaries back then as well. So if you got a B or higher you were in the top 25% (or whatever it was) of your cohort.

I'm not sure how they set the boundary between E and U though.

University offers rarely went lower than CCC, but some polys took lower (depending on the course).
The exception was an EE offer - essentially an unconditional offer, as 2 A level passes was the minimum to matriculate then. Mainly used by universities which had their own exams (ie Oxbridge) or which interviewed (which many did back then)

3 C grades. We are not allowed to predict less than their target grade. Their target grade is never lower than a C, despite coming into 6th form having scraped 4 Grade 4s at GCSEs. They are apparently ALL going to get at least a C grade in an academic A level...

Don't get me started!