What were "good" O level results in 1987?

[Tanaqui]

Does anyone have any data on how O level grades back then correlate to GcSE grades now?

I am aware that it obviously isn't a clear comparison, but maybe just in terms on what % of children got an A, B or C?

Year 11 ds wants to know how well I did, compared to how well he might do!

Feel very old as 87 was the last year of O levels!

Have tried google, but get lots of newspaper dumbing down articles and would rather something a bit more accurate.

Thanks.

Tinkly :(

The careers advisor I saw at school told me to become a cartographer! I mean there's nothing wrong with cartography but it was not along the lines of anything I had said I was interested in. I was just good at both art and science and that's what her rudimentary crap system came up with.

I got 5 As, 2Bs & 5Cs in 82/3/4. Oh, and 1 U - general classics.

From 1963 to 1975 O level grades in my neck of the woods were numerical 1-9, with 6 or above a pass and 1 the highest. From 1975 to 1987 they were letter, with ABC pass and DE fails. A CSE grade 1 counted as a pass. GCSEs then came in.

I reckon the original GCSE grades mapped roughly on to the post 1975 O level grades, so a C was originally an old 5 or 6, when it first started. Grade inflation is pretty serious though, as boards have abandoned any notion of a fixed percentage getting a certain level. In 1988 about 42% of pupils got A*-C - now it is 69%. I reckon it is not a bad rule of thumb to say that B or above now gives about the same proportion of kids attaining it as the fraction who passed in 1988 at C or above - 42-43% in both cases. So in my book a B or better at GCSE matches an old O level pass in terms of proportions of kids achieving it. It’s not what teachers or politicians want to hear of course.

I got 3 As, 3 Bs, 1C and Art GSE in 1978, then C, C, E at A'level in 1980 as I made a bad choice and did Maths (the E)...crap career and university choice advice after that...hopefully my DD will be guided more successfully!

My uni offers for Economics in 1981 were BBC for Cardiff, BB for Birmingham and CCC for Liverpool.

My insurance offer to do physics at Liverpool poly was two Es.

And my O levels were BBBBCCC so not exactly sparkling.

Olevels were only sat by about 20% dcs who would have gone to grammar school if they still existed in the 80s. Nowadays GCSEs are sat by everybody so you have to think would an C achieved by the top 25% still be of the same academic standard as an C achieved by everyone today. It's also interesting how they needed an A grade. A lot of schools also want an A or A GCSE to study maths Alevel a B is seen as a poor grade. Also only A-C grades were considered passes at O level anything below that was equivalent to CSEs

CSE grade 1 was equivalent to a C at O level.

I remember reading that in the first year of GCSEs 1988 40% got A-C. Now it's 70%.

Also the majority of universities only accepted O levels. CSEs were ok if you wanted to go to a polytechnic

Scholarship pupil at selective girls' school.

I am one of those statistically rare people who got all A's (1985 for O levels, 87 for A-levels). Including the Add maths and A/O French I did because I did the O-levels a year early, I have 12 O-levels at As, 4 A-levels at As, and 2 S-levels at 1s.

I will add to the 'freak' accusations by saying I was year-accelerated, so I was 14 when I did my first O-levels and 15 when I took the last ones.

Oxbridge first, PhD. Am now a primary school teacher!

I was the first year to do GCSE's in 1988. It was a shambles. I was top set for everything and almost top of the top at that. Teachers were unaware of syllabuses, schools were merging ten a penny, teachers retiring, the notion of coursework was a mystery. No-one really know what they were doing.
I got 2 B's, 5 C's and 2 D's.
It still rankles that improvements improved so drastically year on year for the following 20 years. There's no way each generation of 16 year olds was so much brighter than those gone before.

I got 8 in 1976, 2 As, 3bs, 3Cs. I was not considered university material. I went to grammar school.

My DH got straight As at the local comp and AAB for A'level and went to Oxford.

I know a lot of people 5 or 6 years older than me who went to quite famous boarding schools like Ampleforth, Malvern, who got 3/4 O'Levels and flunked A'Levels who went into stockbrokibg, army, PR, successful family firms, etc, who have done exceedingly well. The chartered surveyors who perhaps got DEE have probably made most money.

Are young people perhaps better qualified and less well educated? All those who dud quite badly in my era can write quite well unlike the alpha students I come across now x

1986 got bcc to do dentistry at A levels, medicine required BBB

When I did o levels 1984 8-9 was standard for academic pupils at my comp( was a grammar before)
I got 2 A's 6 b's and a in German, anyone you got 7+ a grades at a level would pretty much get an Oxbridge offer which then was generally either AAB with the A in desired subject occasionally ABB, however if you passed the entrance exam the offer would be EE, if you did not get EE you could not get grant.

I did Scottish standard grades in a big comp 1986 and got 4 As, 3 Bs and a C. I was towards the top of the class but not the top.

In Highers the following year I got 2 As, 2 Bs and a D. In Sixth Year Studies I got an A and a B.

I got 1 A , 5 Bs & 3 Cs in 1987. 9 passes was considered very good. No one go straight As although we did have couple who got 8 As & a B & went on get As at A'level.

at you not being considered Uni material. Wtf?

I think you may be right about young people today. One thing that gets me going is the lack of care taken over handwriting. And general written communication. I notice fb friends from years ago, be they academic at school or not, can ALWAYS put a decently-written sentence together. My dd's generation seem very slapdash in this regard, with poor grammar, bad handwriting and general sloppiness in grammar and spelling. Sorry to sound a bit like a Daily Mail editorial, but it's certainly true in my experience. And less "well educated" too: I suppose if they need to know something, they just Google it, whereas we had to research it by reading, which was more time-consuming and harder work.

In my bog standard comprehensive of 240 pupils per year, in my year of O levels and CSEs in 1981, the best result was a boy who got 8 As and 1 B, my friend was the next best with 6 As and 3 Bs, then me with 4As and 5Bs. Then lower results down from that.

Of the 240 of us, 30 did A levels and 4 of us went to university, another 3 to polytechnics or colleges of higher education. So about 3% went on past A level.

At least 20 left at Easter, Easter leavers who were sixteen before Christmas, taking no exams at all. It was a whole different world.

no one unless UTTER geniuses got all As. NO ONE

Hardly anyone got firsts either. Every man and his dog gets them now

My offer to do Physics at Leicester in 1983 was BCD. These days it's AAB.

I was offered BBC ( I think) to study geography at Birmingham in 1987, but didn't quite get the grades. Only the top one or two classes in a year group of five classes did A-levels.

I got loads of o- levels ( over 10!) Did some maths early. I got a mixture of As - Cs. I think that was fairly normal. Good grades were As and Bs, but it was unusual to get all As. My brother also did AS Mathis (scholarship) exam which was higher than an A level, I think.

This is interesting.

I got 5 A's and 4 B's in 1981 - grammar school.

My DD is doing GCSE's ATM, and they certainly don't seem easier at all

I went to a good girls' grammar school in the 70s. The brightest girl in our year got 9 As at O' level and was reported in the local press as it was considered unheard of. She then got an unconditional offer of 2 Es for A level from Oxbridge. My best friend (who got 6 As and 2 Bs) was offered 3 Cs at Barts to do medicine. She actually got ABC and sailed in. Can you imagine that nowadays for medicine?

Tinkly, I'm with you.

I got a string of 'A's in 'O' and 'A' levels from a crap comp and Technical College.

If I had had a bit of self-belief and, to be honest, a bit more cultural capital, I would have been an academic.

I still, in my mid-40s, think of that as a life I could have led.