To think that the education system is mad

[Applebun]

What is the point of A levels, when you don't need the grades anyway.

Everyone I know this year who did A levels, told me that if they didn't get the grades that they needed, the University still offered them a place anyway.

Eg the Uni says you must get ABB to get into the course. The student got CCC. The student was offered a place in the Uni anway.

I was talking to my colleague about it. He said that he got really bad grades in his A levels, way lower than what was required to get in, and the Uni still let him in to the course straight away.

The point then is - what is the point of A levels at all.
The Unis want paying students to go to their Uni to keep them going. A lot of them let any student in, no matter what grades they get.

So why make students go through the farcical system of A levels?

Actually think universities deliver very good value for money given that the purchasing value of that £9K is now worth about £5K in today's money .

As to applying aftyer results:
Other European countries mostly publish their exam results much earlier in the summer - in June time so there is time to apply for a Sep/Oct start.

In Australia they start univeristy in Feb/Mar with exam results published in December

Some other countries start university in January. In fact in the UK we have a number of programmes that start in Jan to cater for international students who want to apply after they have their results to avoid the whole UCAS madness

We would need to change our A Level schedules if students were all to apply in the summer. There is really not enough time when results come out in mid August. Or we would need to change the normal start of the academic year for university to January maybe

What’s the point of a degree? People just spend 3 years of their life doing a degree. They aren’t really going to be failed because the lecturer wants to keep their job

Why would they need to apply in the summer. They wouldn't need to apply in the summer.

In republic of Ireland for examplw, there are no predicted grades.

Students apply to Uni between March to May.

They receive results in August. The uni course that they applied for earlier, accepts them if they have receive the required exam results

Can I ask when you last went to university? The education system has been very modernised . Lots and lots of universities offer courses that have strong applications to work, they offer modern methods of teaching and so many ways of learning .

I am not sure about school but many universities have really inoovative ways of teaching - including flipped classroom, virtual and augmented reality, gamification, personalised learning platforms, service-learning, fieldwork and study abroad, collaborative learning, interdisciplinary teaching .

Yes I used CHATGPT to give me some of the names but I only included them in the list above if I could think of specific examples of this sort of teaching at my university

Universities stopped giving a 'chalkand board' learning experience decades ago or at least the ones that had to work to teach the students

I have worked with too many graduates from "top" UK universities to have overmuch reverence for their abilities these days. (Before I am accused of sour grapes, I was raised and educated in another country.)

I wasr assuming you meant that student should have their results when they apply to make it simpler, which to be fair most other countries manage

I had to look up the Irish system as I was not familar with it. I can see now that you mean that Irish students don't receive conditional offers before they get their results. They just apply early but the universities accept their applications in batches based on their actual results in August

This would not stop the practice of offering students places at a lower grade than advertised though? I appreciate they probably don't do this now in Ireland , we didn't in the UK until last year, but they could if they found they were in financial difficulty and needed more students (I am not sure how HE is funded in Ireland)

This idea would make applications simpler so is not a bad idea but I don't think it would help with the real issues affecting UK universities at the moment

I have never heard of Universities in Ireland offering student places at a lower grade than average. I went to uni in Ireland

It definitely doesnt happen as much as it does in the UK

Have you worked with many graduate from universities from other countries? I am not being difficult, I am genuinely interested to know if they are better than similarly aged UK graduates. Without that comparison it is difficult to know if it is just a UK thing or an age thing.

As I have already said, it has only really started happening in the last 2 years in the UK, and has been particularly evident in the data this year . The reasons for this are all in my prevoius long post and they are primarily financial and based on the decisions made about how to finance education leading to a looming financial crisis.

If the Irish system is state fudned the iniversities probably have some sort of number cap and reliable income so they don't need to do this. The UK never did it either unti they needed to, ie last year and particualry this year

Higher education has been degraded and diluted over the years. It has now finally been monetised.
Sadly you cannot get what you pay for, because you need the ability in the first place.
It is the same with state education. As it is provided, the consumers, whether parents or pupils, now feel entitled to demand things rather than being grateful for the free provision.

I think you have it in one..

What irritates me somewhat though is that in the minds of students snd parents, this somehow becomes the fault of universities, many of which have delivered a great deal with decreasing resources

I don't disagree that the higjer education system need an overhaul in this country particularly its funding model and maybe also its aims within society, but the vitriol spouted at HE institutions that on the whole really have done the best they can with what they have been given is pretty dispiriting

How could you study a maths degree if you hadn't studied maths A-level?

I think you are muddling different things, so there is a little validity in what you say, but not a lot.

The system changed under Tony Blair with the aim of 50% of school leavers going to university. This didn’t increase the percentage of British children doing worthwhile degree subjects at prestigious universities. Instead, many more children started doing degrees of little or no value to their future career prospects. Today, in 2025, only about 25% of the job market is for jobs that require a degree. In crude terms this means that half of graduates are going into jobs that they could have got without a mountain of university debt.

The growth in the university sector, alongside the growth in both domestic and international applicants has created a university education industry that has arguably devalued the qualifications they offer. They are all chasing the best students and trying to justify ludicrously high fees for the quality of what they actually offer. It’s noticeable that many middle ranking universities now indicate their offers are for very very high admissions grades. I haven’t carried out this exercise, but I imagine that if you were to add up the number of top A level grades purportedly required by universities up and form the country it would be far more than the number of domestic students being accepted onto the courses. It therefore suggests that their grade expectations are out of whack with reality.

All that said, A levels are worthwhile preparation for university and university courses are largely predicated on the expectation that you have taken and passed them. 25% of the job market is for graduate jobs and therefore there is still a significant need for graduates. Other routes have always been available. The choice offered to sixth formers in England is one thing I think we are really good at. Alongside A levels, there are BTECs, T levels, apprenticeships, diplomas and NVQs.

It's a different system in Ireland though, with minimal university fees, so I presume universities are funded by the government. And therefore there isn't the same pressure on then to accept students with lower grades just to balance their budgets. I also understand that there are fewer university places which makes it more competitive.

My friend and I both had offers for UEA at ABB. I got in with AAB, she got AAC, same number of points to the offer but different grades, and lost her place. But it's a very competitive course with 10 applicants per place so they can afford to be picky.

Money money money 🎶

It used to matter but now people pay to go to uni they need the money so they accept because they need bums on seats.

Bums on seats = money in the coffers.

I think the whole system needs overhauling, going to university for the sake of it should not be an option.

The Irish school education system maintains breadth over depth, with compulsory English, Maths and Irish. This is more common internationally than the English system, which expects children to reach an acceptable school-leaving standard in compulsory subjects by the age of 16, instead of 18, but then allows them to specialise in their last two years of school (either by doing A levels to prepare them for university or by doing vocational subjects).

I’ve taught in a lot of different educational systems. Broadly, the Irish SLC is pitched at a similar level to Scottish Highers, above the American High School Diploma, below APs, above GCSEs and below A levels. This traditionally meant that the first year of a degree in Ireland, Scotland and the US covered ground already covered in the last year of school in England. With wider participation in English university education, many English universities are increasingly teaching students from those systems anyway, so there is actually room for English students with good GCSE results, who just missed out on the expected A level grades, to thrive on the university course they were offered a place on. You can see this particularly well in Scotland, where universities accept A level students and Advanced Higher students into the second year of their degree courses if they achieved superb results.

My daughter wants to be a photojournalist. The uni she wanted to get into gave her an offer of BBC and she got in with a BBB. She doesn't want to come out with a bunch of debt, but she beeds a professional qualification to get one over all the "citizen journalism" that prevalent now. Her second choice gave her an unconditional offer, but the setting isn't as prestigious nor well-known, and I suspect they were struggling to fill places.

She does have a friend who didn't get into her first choice uni, but her friend did get into her second. She's happy about that, because it's in her family's home city, so there's support nearby. My daughter is sad her friend is moving hundreds of miles away, but that's life.

A levels gave my daughter a view into what she'd like to do after school. She did English Literature and History. She liked Eng Lit and is good at writing, but History was a total bitch, so that was taken off the table for uni after year 12. She super proud of that B in History, actually, it was a total achievement, because she really struggled.

She chose Photography because she's super-good at it, and she can still use her writing skills as well. The History A level also helps in a way, because telling a story quite iften means finding context in the past. So I don't think A levels are a waste of time at all.

One of the issues is that the predicted grades made by schools are now based on “best case scenarios” and something like 70-80% predictions are wrong- mostly a case of the student underperforming the prediction- therefore it’s likely that the Uni’s know that a lot of students won’t get their offer grades.

What seems to be happening is that there is now a handful of very very competitive universities ( Imperial, UCL, LSE, St Andrews, Manchester, to name a few) or courses ( medicine) or specific courses within specific universities ( law at Oxbridge and Russell group) where the grade requirements are extremely high and strictly applied, and then a massive amount of spare capacity in the rest of the system where it’s a buyer’s market and in cases the grade requirements are v v low to the point where you have to question the standard of the degree.

There’s also a newish trend of using clearing to trade up ( whereas it used to be pretty much exclusively for people who had missed offers or decided to go really late) so Unis can’t even count on “firm” acceptances in their numbers as someone who had firmed them in May might trade up in clearing.

Plus now you have all these universal entrance exams coming in for STEM subjects at the top Unis because when 10% of papers are graded A* ( and predictions are prob more like 15%-20%) then you have to differentiate somehow.

Theres definitely a need for reform.

It's still two years of knowledge that they wouldn't have had. Learning shouldn't be about the number you achieve on one day, it should be about enjoying learning new things, demonstrating what you know.

Basically because universities are businesses and, like any other business, they can't run with half their client base. If the course is set up for X number of people, they either get almost X number of people, or they don't run the course for that year, loose money for not running it and royally piss off those students who did get the required grades and were all set to come, and now have to either change their course or pray they get in somewhere else, which might mean they have to go through clearing and might not happen even then.

We're in the position because unis here have seen a massive drop in the number of foreign students coming to the UK to study. They've been allowed to charge overseas students absolutely astronomical fees. Far higher than UK students pay.

Now the unis have found themselves in a mess, because they've got running costs/debt repayments based on the misguided belief that they'd be able to keep ripping off overseas students forever. The only way to manage it now is to desperately try and recruit enough UK students to cover the shortfall. I've got a relative who is a uni lecturer who said that so many UK students have been offered places on her course this year that there aren't enough seats for them in the lecture halls.

Interesting post thanks @bumblingbovine49

If universities are offering places to students who missed their target grades, do you think it's likely that these students will struggle on the course and not complete the degree ie would have been better not to let them on the course if not academically able?

Or, will degrees become easier because too many students leaving would be bad for uni reputation, so uni lowers their standards?

Or, is current situation just a blip and international student numbers will rise again ie fewer places available for UK students who didn't make the grade?

I went to Uni in a different country. The Unis there never lowered the grades to let people in.

What were the entry requirements for your country? You could be comparing apples and oranges for all we know. I would have expected someone from a supposedly more rigorous education system to understand that. In the Netherlands you get a leaving certificate and the requirement is that you have a pass mark, only students who have gained a pass mark at the highest secondary stream are allowed to apply for University. I addition, the Netherlands didn’t abandon the polytechnic equivalent system, so there’s more choice. DD’s bf wanted to study music but didn’t get in, so is studying medicine instead.

I suspect that the Universities are desperate for students probably to make up for the shortfall from international students. The Universities are In a bind, they either relax entry requirements and let more students in or, risk not offering some degrees altogether. It’s the money stupid.