Read this.

[teejay100000]

www.cps.org.uk/cps_catalog/why%20can%27t%20they%20read.pdf

'Could some of today's instructions be considered as spoonfeeding examiners?'

I am sure you would want to believe that your own children are examined using a fair system and objective measures. In the past it was impression marked. Sadly, as is evident on this thread, some people get hung up on very minor details i.e. they might give a gifted student whose spelling was a bit erratic (like Shakespeare) a D purely for that reason.

I am grateful that examiners of my students and my own children have to justify their marks using comments from a mark scheme. Now, if I suspect that an examiner has got it wrong I can request a script and check their marginal and summative comments against the mark scheme. Where there is a discrepancy (and examiners are much more likely to be harsh than generous) I can request a remark.

The system is now transparent and accountable and as 'objective' as possible to ensure fairness and accuracy as far as possible. There are estimated grades, statistical checks, checks of a significant sample of each examiner's work, training for examiners.... In the past it was opaque. If an examiner decided you were an E you were an E. They could make this decision if they didn't like your argument, if they didn't like your writing style, if they didn't like your school (now you don't know what school you are marking) or indeed if you were female (it is now well known that the marks for girls were massaged for years to make it appear that boys were more intelligent).

When my father did A Levels God knows how many years ago he failed his English outright even though he was well known to be a gifted scholar. He had to wait a whole otehr year to retake and got a grade A. He is a professor of English in HE by the way, a published poet and critic. He kindly gives the examiner the benefit of the doubt and says he was 'trying to be too clever'. I suspect he had a rogue examiner or an examiner who had gone slightly bonkers on approaching his or her 300th script (I know what that feels like!). That couldn't happen now or at least it could be rectified.

Also, there are different statements for different grades or bands. So, yes it makes sense that an A grade or Band 4 essay is going to demonstrate a 'cogent argument' for example but what about the difference between D and E. Well for D there might be 'an argument emerging'.

As I said I found it helpful to know that essays with no supporting evidence at all would fail regardless of how well they were written could not achieve higher than Band 1 (i.e. fail.

There has to be accountability and measures to ensure fairness. As is evident on this thread one person's perception of what is good is different from another's so you have to refer to measures in black and white which help you to arrive at your mark.

As for your reports about declining standards, as I keep saying, twas ever thus. There's so much evidence that examiners and tabloid newspapers were saying the same things in 1972, in 1952 and way back, centuries ago. Pre-Dickens it was thought that education would send women mad because they weren't biologically equipped for it and that education would lead to rebellion. For some reason and its evident in other fields too people like to or feel the need to poor scorn on the achievements of people who come after them to assure themselves and everybody else of their own superiority.

It's a horrible human quality that so many people bemoan others the advantages and praise that they themselves received.

Some of the comments on this thread which amount to why bother educating the masses at all when they should be perfectly happy cleaning our boots are pre-Dickensian.

Very good point about the accountability and transparency of the marking schemes. I didn't realise the benefit of this. You are right that it is open and can be challenged which is very important to maintain fairness.

I agree with you that this pre-Dickensian view of education is wrong. There was a time when many people left school at 14, we don't want to go back to those days.

You have made very good points about English A-level not being dumbed down. But I don't think that all the stories of dumbing down are due to the need for the older generation's need to feel superior. Even the exam regulator Ofqual has said that science GCSE has been dumbed down.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article5983661.ece

Subjects like physics have suffered. Employers are worried because not enough of our young people are being educated to a high enough standard in subjects like physics. There are many physics teachers who think that physics has been dumbed down. Riven's son's teacher said it was a tragedy the way physics had been dumbed down. There are also some teachers on MN who think that RE has been dumbed down. There is also Chris Woodhead who says that dumbing down has occurred. Even Tomlinson said that there was a "silent revolution" that was eroding the national curriculum and narrowing the range of subjects being taught. We also have the tragic situation where modern foreign languages are no longer as important as they were, with Labour removing the compulsory aspect.

But, as I keep saying, such anecdotes (Riven's son's teacher) have been around for ever. I refer you back to the Tomlinson report. There is no objective measure of standards because the papers are so different but there are lots of measures put in place to ensure quality since Tomlinson.

And my response is partly so what? So what if there are more A grades? So what if there are more people passing. Why is this not a good thing? If it weren't happening the same people on here would be scandalised and the tabloids would be screaming 'Standards not improvng after 13 years of Labour government'.

This is one of those no win things.

And as Tomlinson says there's a conflict between the need for standards improve and be seen to improve and a (strange in my view) public perception that only a very small elite are allowed to get A grades.

And how about this for how things have improved.

My mother - at her state grammar school - took the entrance exam for Cambridge, passed and was asked for 3 As at A-level.

The first person she met at her Cambridge college was from St Paul's girls school. She had also passed the entrance exam but was only asked for 3 Cs at A-level.

Could it be that people think standards are falling because state school children (and girls) are getting into the universities that used to be the preserve of the wealthy?

Is this also why heads of famous schools are keen to bash A-levels and look to set their pupils other exams like IBac and International GCSEs? Just so that comparisions between their students and state school pupils can't be made?

(As an aside, the Cambridge entrance exam was scrapped in the 1980s, and the requirement for latin a long time ago as well).

I work with students from a local university and they always strike me as very motivated and able to think for themselves. Interestingly, working with graduates from countries with more draconian education systems and less relaxed cultures is difficult? They are unable to ask intelligent questions and wait to be 'told' what to do....so we are getting many things right in Britain.

We produce many bright, thoughtful graduates who think for themselves!

I have to say from a totally personal perspective I found A levels in 1992 much easier than A levels in 1976. Now this could be in part because of added maturity but also simple things like being able to use annotated texts and dictionaries in the exams weren't permitted in 1976.

Some politicians want to demonstrate that standards are increasing for their own purposes. The new government seems more interested in standards and less interested in targets. There is a problem when the numbers getting A grades rockets. New grades such as A* then need to be created in order to stop exams being devalued. It is similar to the Victoria Cross, if people are awarded it for political reasons rather than real valour, then it begins to lose its value. The problem with so many more A grades is that employers and the public begin to lose faith in the system, they become cynical and distrustful of politicians who may be engineering this to boost their prospects. It also may lead to the quality of education declining in subjects like physics which will harm the country's future. Eventually it leads to the situation where many top schools start abandoning GCSE and moving towards IB or IGCSE because they have more faith in the standards of these exams. This then leads to a two-tier system and the thousands gaining A grades find they are still not good enough to get into many universities. It also leads to the situation where universities are unable to distinguish between the brightest and the bright and have to create extra entrance exams to separate them.

Couldn't this all be solved with a recalibration of the grades?

Just one little niggle about physics. I did physics O and A levels in the 70s. All was by dictation. I didn't understand very much of it at all, but committed it all to memory for the exam days.I was able to prove an equation using calculus without even knowing what calculus was!

IM(limited)E GCSE science seems to be taught with reference to everyday situations, enabling students to relate concepts to real-life, leading to a greater understanding.

Even the short questions on the GCSE exam papers seemed to require a deeper understanding than the papers I sat. Physics teaching at O level/GCSE has always covered gas laws, Newton's Laws, velocity/acceleration, etc. If these relatively simple concepts are being taught in a more accessible way, then perhaps (just perhaps) the higher marks are justified?

claig: You might find this quote interesting.

It's from Prof. Alan Smithers, Director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, ?the exam boards are expected by the government both to make A-levels more accessible and to insist that standards are being maintained over time. It is impossible to do both. The new data suggests that the dilemma is perhaps being resolved by making it easier to achieve any given grade.?

You can read the full article here

A 27 year on year increase in the number of As at A level and and an increase in the proportion of candidates securing the top A grade, rising to 25.9%? Are we to accept that young people over the past 25 years or so are better educated than those who sat their A levels in the 1960s and early 1970s?

If that is, indeed a FACT, then why are so many lecturers being pushed to award higher degrees than work merits and why are university lecturers and employers tearing their hair out at the poor quality of many of those seeking and gaining HE awards?

Perhaps 5candles can answer this one for us!

I should, perhaps, clarify what I wrote, "Your essay was marked taking into account the breadth of your knowledge of the text under consideration, the connections you could make with other similar/relevant works (not necessarily on the reading list) and your understanding of how that author's ideas and experiences affected their work."

This related to getting an A in an A level not achieving an A level. Plenty of A level candidates in the 1960s who achieved Cs and Ds would have gone on to obtain jobs in middle management and worked their way up to do very well in their careers but they would not have been accepted for HE with those grades.

This didn't mean they could never attend a university. They would just have to re-sit their A levels again and again until they got the grades. Obviously plenty preferred not to bother!

5candles asked: When did you sit your A Levels?"

A long time before you did.

5candles, might I enquire, simply out of curiosity, how old were you in 1966?

Breton1900, thanks for that fascinating article. I'm not surprised, this sort of thing is happening in so many spheres. The public are like Winston, being fed Big Brother's lies about ever increasing pig-iron production figures. Anyone claiming that the emperor has no clothes is duly castigated.

Which almost brings us back to where we started with the debate over whether reading standards were as poor as claimed in the Miriam Gross's report!

5candles wrote: Oh, good lord. Well, I sort of assumed that A Level historians would be able to work that one out!!

It is shoddy writing and doesn?t say a great deal for the linguistic skills of the examiner. I would also point out that an A level History candidate is not a historian in the generally accepted sense of that term. This is yet another example of the increasing tendency to give tyros inflated and unrealistic status in order to boost their self-esteem.

I recollect that, last year on the various social networks, there was outrage amongst A level candidates who felt they may have been unjustly marked down because they were given the question ??How far do you agree that Hitler?s role in 1933-45 was one of despotic tyranny??

Apparently many of them had no idea what ?despotic tyranny? meant!

At the time, various replies on the TES forum, illustrated some (apparent) discrepancies in teaching now and in the past.

One contributor wrote:
?Well read and intelligent students (many of whom will come from middle class homes with a large number of books etc) will probably have done alright - but those from less educated backgrounds may have been caught out by the English used. I'm not sure that's what this exam should be about.?

To which another replied:
?When I did History A level it involved an enormous amount of reading and research, irrespective of my family background.?

While yet another commented:
?If you're taking history at an advanced level, it's a word you should just know,regardless of the text books.
In spite of that, it's just worrying that you've not acquired the word as general knowledge.?

The inability of so many candidates to understand this phrase is hardly consonant with the claims being made for the general excellence of modern education.

claig: That's right. Too many are accepting this Panglossian view of education!

'but also simple things like being able to use annotated texts and dictionaries in the exams weren't permitted in 1976.'

And aren't again. For GCSE any texts that are allowed in have to be clean. Likewise for A Level. In fact, we have boxes of clean texts that we get out just for exams. I personally look through every page and rub out any marks after each exam.

Don't remember dictionaries ever being allowed. Certainly not in my 15+ years of teaching and certainly not today.

Now that there's a move from coursework to controlled assessment for GCSE dictionaries and spellcheckers won't even be allowed in the work that's completed in schools and colleges.

This related to getting an A in an A level not achieving an A level. Plenty of A level candidates in the 1960s who achieved Cs and Ds would have gone on to obtain jobs in middle management and worked their way up to do very well in their careers but they would not have been accepted for HE with those grades.

Oh, yes they would! A friend of mine was offered a place at York with 2 Cs (OK this was 1971, so 2 years after the end of the 60s) and accepted with a B and a D. I also knew a girl offered a place at Nottingham to study divinity in 1969 with 2 Es.

At the same time, to get into a degree course at a polytechnic, especially in applied science, was possible on the lowest grades. And, for those who did not pass their A levels, the entry requirement for College of Education was 5 O levels, one of which had to be English. You did, however, need one A level if you wanted to teach secondary.

'There is a problem when the numbers getting A grades rockets. New grades such as A* then need to be created in order to stop exams being devalued.'

But I see so much of this as scaremongering. What exactly is the problem? There IS A. As I keep saying from this year to get an A at A2 you have to get 90% on BOTH A2 modules. That's a really, really big ask. And since it's across both modules there's no chance of a student who has, for example, worked really, really hard on coursework and had a lot of help on it and then just scraping A or even B in an exam. To get 90% on both units means you have to be really genuinely very clever.

But as I said earlier (I notice people often just ignore the points I make that challenge their unsupported perception) universities have access to marks as well as grades. So those universities that are in a position to select can select only students who achieve full marks as opposed to those just scraping A. They've always been able to do this so the A* is just a crowd pleaser really. It's just something people can point to to assuage the sorts of fears emerging here.

And then there's universities who set their own admission tests or interview or look at GCSE grades as well as looking for evidence of leadership skills and extra-curricular activities and problem solving etc.

And students themselves are very well aware of all of this stuff. My students absolutely know that they are going to have to work their socks off to get into good universities when they're in competition with kids from private schools (who incidentally suck up nearly half of all A grades in spite of accounting for less that 10% of all school kids). Or, sadly, they recognize the competition and are intimidated by it or unable to compete for financial reasons so opt for their local university instead which itself is therefore becoming more competitive.

So standards ARE getting higher. I didn't have to work nearly as hard as my students because I knew I could get into university with grades like BBC. Many of my students attend extra workshops, do extra essays, are in constant email contact with me. That would have been unheard of in my day. And this is all in addition to the fact that they are doing an extra A Level. One more than we did when we took ours.

My point is the stuff about universities or employers being able to distinguish between the bright and the brightest is a load of rubbish. It's scaremongering.

The reality is they are absolutely spoilt for choice. Never more so.

And I come back to the point that up to 200,000 students this year are going to be turned away.

'the exam boards are expected by the government both to make A-levels more accessible and to insist that standards are being maintained over time. It is impossible to do both.'

No, it isn't. Teachers have got better and better. As many of you will remember and some of you are acknowledging teaching when we did our A Levels was truly appalling. You spent a ridiculous amount of time (wasted time) copying off blackboards or being dictated to. Lessons weren't planned. Most lessons consisted of a teacher blathering on about their personal hobby horses or 'class discussion' where if you were quiet or struggling you could sit at the back of the room and say nothing.

My history lessons were so incredibly boring that I spent a good many of them asleep behind my hair and my teacher didn't even notice let alone care. I really can't remember a single moment of genuine learning that took place in that room. You sat down and the teacher talked. There were no checks on your understanding at all.

Now there is genuine support for students. Individual workshops, virtual learning environments. Nobody copies of the board any more. And so on and so on. And students work hard. THey know they have to.

And if they aren't very clever or hard-working or either they fail or get E grades or D grades.

but can all of this really be classed as scaremongering?

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1025835/University-students-need-extra-year-just-learn-basics-maths -science.html

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1079875/Universities-dumbing-77-professors-claim-pressure-award-hig her-marks-increased.html

'If that is, indeed a FACT, then why are so many lecturers being pushed to award higher degrees than work merits and why are university lecturers and employers tearing their hair out at the poor quality of many of those seeking and gaining HE awards?'

But ARE they? I mean are they any more than they ever were? Or are they outside of tabloid newspapers?

And you have to accept that universiites are seeing people that they wouldn't have seen 50 or 100 years ago because then only a handful of people went to university.

What exactly do you think we lose by allowing more people a higher education? This is what you need to ask yourselves because ultimately this is what is making you anxious.

And it's the same anxiety that existed a couple of centuries ago about opening out secondary education. And the same anxiety that existed about education women. Why?

What are you so afraid of?

What can possibly be problematic about more people from a wider range of social classes getting more education?

'I should, perhaps, clarify what I wrote, "Your essay was marked taking into account the breadth of your knowledge of the text under consideration, the connections you could make with other similar/relevant works (not necessarily on the reading list) and your understanding of how that author's ideas and experiences affected their work."

This related to getting an A in an A level not achieving an A level. Plenty of A level candidates in the 1960s who achieved Cs and Ds would have gone on to obtain jobs in middle management and worked their way up to do very well in their careers but they would not have been accepted for HE with those grades.'

No it didn't Breton. This is your perception. You have absolutely no evidence to back it up. As I have been at pains to point out to you there weren't even any formalised assessment objectives or mark schemes in the 60s and none of the questions asked in English A Level demanded any sort of understanding changes to literature over time or by genre. You were required to answer a predictable question on single texts that you had studied for 2 years.

You have no EVIDENCE for anything you are saying and therefore you are reliant on assertion and anecdote. You would fail English A Levels on that basis today.

And your perception that you needed higher grades to get into university in the 60s because Cs and Ds wouldn't do it is again as people like Cecily above have pointed out to you completely at odds with reality.

Oxford and Cambridge routinely offered E grades 20 years ago and now they expect A*s.

Manchester University now expects AAB with an A in English in order to do English. When I was applying to univerities a typical offer would be BBC.

How many times are you going to ignore the facts in order to trot out your prejudices and assumptions?

fivecandles could the reason for universities asking for A grades now be because more candidates achieve A grades than once did?

Erm, I think that was our starting point mrz. More students ARE achieving A grades partly because many more students are sitting the exam than ever before.

And it's worth repeating even though it'll get ignored again that up to 1/2 of all those A grades go to students from private schools even though they make up less than 10% of students.

Nobody ever argued with that fact. What we're arguing about is whether it indicates standards have slipped and whether the numbers are a good thing or a bad thing.