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

Thank you, your post has given me hope. My DS got 3 Ds in his A-levels last week. It was a big shock as predicted BBC but is taking up a foundation course which leads to his degree of choice. If his Ds had been fails he wouldn't of been given this chance. He has reflected a lot over the past few days and is determined to make a success of University. I will show him your post 😊

No, A-level grading and GCSE grading works based on comparable outcomes whereby roughly the same proportion of students gets each grade each year. This was introduced over a decade ago to counter grade inflation.

It has been slightly messed up by covid, but we are supposed to have returned to roughly the same grade distributions as 2019 (it hasn't quite worked out like that). Grade boundaries are set to achieve the correct grade distribution. It's not possible for 100% of candidates to get an A if last year 60% got an A.

noone, including the government uses the TAG/CAG of 20203/ and 2021 for data analytics.. they're essentially void data and shouldn't ever be considered "true" data

Yes but we're now back to comparable outcomes.

Well, this might be the case for some exams in the IL. But if the questions were particularly difficult in 2023, then how is it "fair" that student A in 2023 gets 65% and a C, when Student B sat.an easier exam I 2022, gets 88%% and earns an A+. They aren't demonstrating the same level of knowledge/depth and breadth of learning.

Student A may well have been masked "what's (6^3)/3? And student B might have only been asked what's 6+3 and been allowed a calculator.

How are they making exams exactly the same difficulty across ALL subjects, year on year? How are they able to apply the same grading criterion to subjective subjects and objective subjects?

They dropped their already low requirement of BCC to do law(!) to CCC

What's the issue with that? I got one B, Cs and Ds in my GCSEs, didn't do A levels and got a first in my law degree.

For a start there isn't "an" actuary exam. From memory, I think it's 13 separate exams taken typically over 4 or 5 years, at an average of 3 or 4 per year, so basically similar or maybe even harder than A levels as most people would only have a few months to prepare and revise for each sitting, certainly not 2 years!

And no, I don't think they'd make the actuarial exams easier if everyone got 95% - why would they? The Institute of Actuaries (or whatever it's called) aren't interested in limiting numbers of qualified actuaries (unlike the BMA who wanted to limit the number of doctors!) - they just want people of a good enough level to pass their exams. That's their only criteria - good enough or not good enough.

Same with my accountancy exams a few decades ago. The pass mark was a fixed 50%. Some years more passed than average, some years fewer passed than average - they didn't mess around with pass marks - you just passed or failed based on 50%. Again, it was in no one's interests to increase the pass mark to fail some people some years who'd have passed in other years. (Though I believe it was said that if you were "close" to the pass mark, i.e. 45% or above, they'd review the paper automatically to see if they could justify finding a few extra marks to bring you up to a 50% pass).

Same with Uni exams - I believe it's mostly a 40% pass mark - it doesn't wildly change from year to year according to the distribution curve of marks. Although, again, there may be some "tweaking" of standardisation etc where marks generally are uplifted or downgraded according to the whole cohort results (i.e. also known as fiddling!).

It was still "bell-curved" AFAIK

@llamajohn

Well, this might be the case for some exams in the IL. But if the questions were particularly difficult in 2023, then how is it "fair" that student A in 2023 gets 65% and a C, when Student B sat.an easier exam I 2022, gets 88%% and earns an A+. They aren't demonstrating the same level of knowledge/depth and breadth of learning.

Surely it's incumbent on the examining board to actually produce exams of similar standard of difficulty each year? I understand you'd never get perfect comparisons on different papers, but surely with good oversight of the question setting process, they could make a better job of them being comparable than ending up in your example where there could be differences in difficulty of over 20% for someone of equal ability just based on the easiness/hardness of the exam. That seems to be verging on incompetence on the part of the exam question setters if there are such huge variations in difficulty.

Because it's on a curve people! As exams are not identical year in year out they curve the results so there are different boundaries every year. If it ranges from A star to U they work that out. E may be a pass but no one is pretending it's a good result.

When I did A-levels in 1980s the first thing the HT told us what that 10% of us would fail, try not to be in that 10%.

Foundation year courses exist to help those who got low A-level grades to build up their skills to then start the degree proper.

Some students don’t always suit pure exams, many uni courses include group work, practicals, assessments not just exams.

Some people can excel in their A-levels/degrees but not necessarily apply that skill into real life work

Well the fact that everyone single child I know (mainly children of my friends obviously) got AAA or better, tells me that the exams aren't what they used to be.

Back in my day, I think it was the top 5% got a grade A. There was no higher grade. An A was an A. I got into Oxford with BBB, let's just put it that way!

Kids now with AAA are honestly not the brightest. It's normal.

For GCSE and A level, yes, but for other professional body exams, Uni modules, etc., they don't work that way. There's no "need" for x% to pass - if every applicant was crap at a particular exam within actuarial or accountancy exams one sitting, they'd all fail - likewise if everyone was brilliant, they'd all pass.

It's inevitable when the grades are based on x% getting A, y% getting A, etc - that's how the grading is set up, so it's no surprise. It's exactly how it's intended. Whether the intention is wrong is a different matter - I'd say it is wrong, but the educational establishment think otherwise. If the grades are set so that 10% get A, then the top 10% will get A* even if they're poorer compared to previous exam seasons.

In which case Ds and Es are really not good in any way 'legitimate' pass or not.

Exactly, which is why Unis specify grades for acceptance onto their courses.

And why employers and professional bodies also often specify particular grades have to be achieved in certain subjects - pretty typical for a numeric/finance professional body to stipulate A level grade C or above in Maths in their minimum entry requirements, likewise with employers in their job application specifications. Certainly my old firm required a C grade in A level maths as minimum for trainee accountant positions - those without, either who didn't do A level Maths or got a grade D or below were automatically rejected.

What happened when alevel a star was xpcreated as im assuming it jusr remaned so
A star was old A
A was old B

So my CDD would be morel ike BCC?

Anyway during A /S modular exams (which i did a couple as a test) the percents required were fixedat
80%+ A
70% B
And downwards
But on the modules i did i got 70% in the subject i ended up woth a D in and over 90% on the stats exams but got a C.

I think generally A/S would have been a good idea as you would know how you are getting on relistically.

Also worth considering all subjects are not equally hard (as a third of students cant even pass gcse maths and likely noone taking foundation paper would take the subject.

A grade E is a description to denote where along the grad boundary you achieved.

If companies or universities want higher achieving candidates, that's what they ask for. It's not that hard to comprehend.

Well said 👏👏👏

My grades weren't good enough for Footlights College Oxbridge, only good enough for Scumbag College, with the grades many on here deem failures, yet I still got a degree and chartership.

Not done any research but I’d place a C at circa 50%

An E is definitely a pass and before the current obsession with high uni offers and A and A star it wasn’t unusual

DCs sixth form college is in the top 10 in the country. By no means did everyone get AAA. This cohort area very bright lot but the lazy ones didn’t achieve top grades and we still don’t design education to properly serve nervous examinees.

There needs to be a big range of 'pass' marks because in England people do so few subjects at A level. In Scottish Highers you need to get a ~50% to pass (Highers have always been normalised to a bell curve so there hasn't been the same grade inflation there has been in England) and that would be awarded a C grade. But we do more subjects in a shorter time frame so we still get the differentiation of results. So AAAAA is equivalent to 3xA star, CC would be roughly the same as EEE at A level using the UCAS tariff. And we can apply to University with those results in hand and get unconditional offers while we do either more Highers or a different qualification (historically called SYS, now called Higher Still) which is equivalent to A levels.

But no employer or University will favour the E over an A or B so I don’t really understand your argument? Yes an E is technically a pass but it’s a very poor one.

You simply can't compare.

You can only compare students to their age cohort and in actual fact their year.

I know people who got As in their various public exams before the existence of A*

I know/knew their actual grades. As the grade didn't exist so the boundary didn't exist you can't compare.