B & C A level grades were ‘RG’ worthy in 80s? What’s changed

[Peverellshire]

Why are required A level grades so high now? Is it easier to get an A or A star now compared to early to mid 80s? Well A star wasn’t a ‘thing’ back then but…

In past B,C,C and certainly A,B,B enough to get on relatively prestigious courses at top universities, so what’s changed?

I did my A-levels in the early 90s. I did STEM subjects and knew a lot of people who went to do medicine or dentistry with As and Bs and pharmacy with Cs. There wasn’t any where near as much competition for places or the sort of hoop jumping needed for those courses now. You needed a bit of work experience but not loads and no BMAT/UCAT etc.
I don’t believe we worked anywhere near as hard as my dc did for their A-levels or GCSEs. I can remember standing outside our first biology exam while my friend furiously read my region notes for an entire topic he had skipped. He’s a consultant psychiatrist now. It’s inconceivable that any of my dcs medic friends woulda have been that lax.
I can’t speak for maths because I didn’t do it but my dc did chemistry, biology and physics at GCSE that I did at A-level. The English is a much higher standard than I did. Maybe it’s false memory but I can only remember a few people doing hours of revision for months and now that seems widespread. It would be interesting to check out the Letts Revise from around 1993 and compare to the current equivalent.

I tried but failed to get into medicine in the 80s. I remember travelling to a couple of interviews on my own - including my first time in London, on the tube etc. I didn’t get any prep at all at school for the interviews, no mock interviews, no direction to guidance, obviously no Internet, not even a chat with the careers teacher. School in a small town and the careers teacher directed girls to be secretaries or work in the shops and boys to the local industry. Half the children left after GCSEs. A levels were very much text book and class notes and that was it. If you had a rubbish teacher you were pretty stuffed. No revision classes or study groups. No marking schemes.

This is an excellent point.
I feel I was very fortunate to have been born when I was. Yes, there were still lots of very rich kids at University with me, and a significant proportion of my peers were doctors' children and grandchildren, but there were plenty like me too - bright, working class young people who were the first generation of their family to go to University.
Had I been born a bit earlier I probably wouldn't even had the opportunity to do A levels, never mind go to University. Had I been applying more recently, the debt would have scared me and I couldn't have competed against most medical school candidates now. In my day my 4 As and 2 special papers were unusual, even amongst students from the best schools. And my 10 As at O level made me worth interviewing in the first place. But I had no work experience as I didn't have those kind of connections and no extracurricular achievements to speak of. I didn't really even have any hobbies except Guides and walking as those were virtually free. I had never been outside the country and my University interviews were the first time I'd ever visited any of the cities I was applying to.There was no money in our family for hobbies or travel etc and I wasn't a well rounded, socially adept young person at all. I was just clever. And motivated. Nowadays I would be one of many with a string of A stars at GCSE and A level but with absolutely nothing else to commend me. I doubt I would have got into medical school now, which would be a shame, because even if I say so myself, I was bloody good at my job. You don't need all this extra stuff to be a good doctor, but obviously for any course where supply exceeds demand they have to differentiate somehow and you are right, it does disadvantage less well off students. I don't think contextual offers counter that anywhere near enough.

Partly grade inflation, partly kids being spoon fed the right answers to get top grades - the curriculum has little opportunity now for independent thought and analysis.

but my dc did chemistry, biology and physics at GCSE that I did at A-level.

I don’t think you can compare the syllabus for science subjects. My DD is studying stuff in biology that the knowledge of which didn’t even exist when I was at school. Or in physics things that were still the sole purview of university research departments. It isn’t harder than what we studied, it is just science has moved on. Sciences operated in a different world then. And computers had nowhere near the computing power they have now. When my father did his maths A level he had to use a slide rule and log tables.

Grade inflation and more international students. RG unis rnt the b all and end all plenty of non RG that are fabulous unis.

I had 5 interviews & got my travel expenses reimbursed for 4 of them because we were poor! It was the first time I'd travelled long distances on my own - I loved it 😊

in 1980's BBB would get you into medical school ( BBBBB/ BBBBC in Scottish highers) and probably BBC in most, dentistry was BBC and BCC would get you in mostly. I did Dentistry at RG with BCC then D and E were still proper passes and a fellow student had BBD ( D was in Maths)
AAB was standard at Oxbridge and if you passed entrance exam EE

My offer for St Andrews for English and French was BBC in the early 80s. I actually got ABB and there was talk of deferring and applying for Oxbridge but I didn't want to do that. My first choice of Durham turned me down - most likely because as a state school kid I didn't have O level Latin. (I had been warned this was a possibility!)
My cousin's son had an offer from St Andrews of AAA in 2016.

I think that it used to be more dependant on your school/teacher as to what resources were available to you. Nowadays there seem to be more resources, a lot of it free on the internet such as Youtube videos, but revision guides (like CGP) can still be unaffordable to those on the lowest of incomes.

I remember some teachers in my schooling years (70s and 80s) who'd just lazily hand out a "reading list" and expect you to buy them yourself or borrow from a library, to read yourself as "homework" which was never checked nor marked. Obviously the kids with "engaged parents" did better because they'd usually get the books bought for them, and the "latch key" kids typically did badly because they weren't even encouraged to use the town's library (probably not even members), so they basically had no resources to learn even if they wanted to.

Other teachers were the exact opposite and "spoon fed" even back then. A couple I vividly remember handed out a copy of the syllabus at the first lesson which they made us stick in the front of our exercise books, and then diligently worked through the curriculum, section by section, handing out either text books for just a few days at a time to look at a specific section, then a different text book for another section, etc - the text books were absolutely ancient and probably just what they'd found in the back of the store cupboard! If they couldn't find a good enough text book for a section, they'd do handouts. For homework, they'd hand out past exam questions, some from exams many years earlier (I think the earliest was around 1965!). They'd also go through the marking scheme and read out examiner's comments. Really "old school" teachers, but fundamentally they "taught to the test" and "spoon fed" the pupils, so it's really nothing new. But it really was a lot better for the disenfranchised pupils as they had no need to buy or borrow books.

@NowZeusHasLainWithLeda

I can relate, in the 80s my paltry ABB was the highest in my sixth form year!

@Zwicky ..I studied so hard for my alevels,as did my peers.
Full on from Easter onwards.
My DD and her friends seem to be doing very little in comparison.

when I did my O and A Levels back in the 70s (WJEC), we were told that the grades weren't awarded for getting a set number of marks because it was difficult to guarantee that the exam would be of a similar difficulty each year. Rather, the A grade was awarded to the top 10%, B grade to second 10% etc. So one year you might get an A grade for 95/10 and another year you might get an A grade for 85/100, if that was the highest mark anyone got.
They should go back to that system - it's inflation proof.

PS - got into Goldsmiths to read French with BBC.

I got a BBB offer from Bristol for languages was high compared with the other RG universities I applied to which were mostly BBC.

This thread shows a dispute about whether maths is easier or harder now - to me it definitely seems more difficult, at GCSE/O Level anyway. Any maths teachers who can comment?

so glib to say grade inflation - in 1987 I worked reasonably hard for BBB, but nothing like DS does, and I spent zero time going through old papers and working through the Examiners' reports, which he has done for all papers from the last 3-4 years. It wasn't a thing then, but now it is standard, so yes more students are getting the higher grades but they are better taught, and they are writing better answers.

In 1984 I got ABBB (the third B was ‘general studies’, which was compulsory), got offers below this level from all 5 universities that I applied for and ended up at a RG university (although I had never heard the term ‘Russell Group’ back then).

I also got a prize for best A level results in my decent comprehensive school.

Something has obviously changed since then!

I think it's just different.
My DS is doing some things at A level now that I did at O level but there was stuff on his GCSE that I had no clue about.
I don't think you can make direct comparisons really, so much has changed. I certainly don't think that GCSEs and A levels are easy now but I think the current grading scheme probably needs looking at. The change to 1-9 at GCSE is probably a step in the right direction.

It's still done that way, hence how the successive govts of the past few decades have conned voters into thinking education standards are rising by tweaking the grade boundaries so that more and more students get higher grades!

Unis do it too. Last Summer, my son only attempted half of one of his end of year exams, it was in two sections, half marks for each section, so his total mark should have been limited to 50%. When the results came out, he'd been awarded 78% "after moderation", so over 3/4 of the total marks for answering only half of the question! Ironically, it's for a Maths degree!

Grade inflation, student inflation (increased numbers), university inflation.

Some of it has been beneficial in terms of making it easier for bright kids to go to university. But Tony Blair didn't understand maths IMHO. He argued (on the basis of the status quo) that more students should go to uni because they would earn so much more. Not taking into account that more students would mean more competition so salaries could go down, that those with science/computing/some law degrees have mostly out earned those with arts degrees, and that increasing university costs (which he introduced) would put off working class families afraid of debt.

I find it interesting that one of his sons has made a fortune out of sorting apprenticeships.

I don't think exams are easier based on what I did in the late 90s

But going through old papers and examiners reports just shows how much they are taught to the test.

although I had never heard the term ‘Russell Group’ back then

The Russell Group was set up in 1994 as a group to lobby parliament for their own interests. But when I applied to university there were a lot less universities as there was still the split between university and polytechnic with two separate admission systems. Most ‘non-RG universities’ were still polytechnics.

Not a maths teacher, but I did a maths degree, as did dd1 who's just finished. So this is entirely anecdotal, and opinion.

GCSE: Yes, I think it now is harder to get the top mark. The GCSE papers I did were easy, and the grade boundaries weren't that high either. I'd have expected to get 100% on any paper I did, and I used to do practice ones in about half an hour without really concentrating. I did the maths early as did all my set and only a couple didn't get an A (top) grade.
The new GCSEs look harder to me because they have deliberately put questions in for the level 9 students, and some of the things that were on the syllabus for A-level when I did it are now on the GCSE.
I suppose those perhaps the question is whether it's harder to get a grade 7 now as an A back when I did it, and I really can't answer that one.

A-levels a few thoughts:
I did maths (and further) A-level in 1994. I would have expected to get 100% on the single maths and on the pure further papers. The single maths papers I could complete in just over an hour-they were 3 hour papers, and that was without me trying to rush as two hours sitting and checking was dead boring.
We did practice papers for years back, and although there was a clear difference in difficulty when you compared the papers from the O-level cohorts to the GCSE cohorts, I didn't find any A-level papers that I couldn't do and get pretty much full marks on.

My brother did maths and further four years later when modular came in. He wasn't as good as me at maths, but reckoned to be close. There were two things that I noticed. One being that he was totally thrown by using a method from a different module. He could not combine them at all.
The other thing was he commented that papers from my year were totally inaccessible to his year. He (and the others) tried them and weren't managing to even attempt a lot of questions because they didn't know where to start. I had a look and saw that his papers were completely leading them through the longer questions. Whereas I might have had a question that said: Solve this integration.
His would say: Show that f(x) = g(x) using this method. Now using that show this bit and then show that bit. Then finally using this show that integrate f(x) dx = answer.
So they didn't have to think for themselves which way to do it as long as they could repeat the method. You could say that means that it's testing the maths rather than working out which method, but I'd argue that part of the maths is working out which method, and it also helps with understanding having to work out which method is best.

Anyway, fast forward to when dd did it:
When I first saw what she was doing I thought it was harder, and I didn't know where to start on a lot of the questions. But when I started looking at it, I found that it was a mixture of me having forgotten what was at the tips of my fingertips when I did A-levels and methods/names having changed. I'm reasonably confident that if I put my head down and went back over it, I could get back up to doing it fairly quickly. Whenever dd did ask for help, although I normally had to read up on it, I could do the questions fairly easily and show her despite not having done it for 20 years.
Dd also could do my era papers, with a few queries about names/methods that have changed.
I think sometimes the name changes make them see more inaccessible. I remember one parents evening, the teacher saying that "circle theorem" was something a lot of them struggled with. I sat there thinking "wow! Circle theory was something I found really difficult in the first year of my degree". When I got home I discovered it was what I'd called "angles in a circle".
What I do think is harder now is the length of the papers, because they've got 3x 2 hour papers, and they looked more questions too to me. Dd didn't always finish the papers, and I do admit she's a slow worker, but they certainly aren't going to get anyone finishing in 1/3 of the time like me. I'd reckon I would have finished, but not necessarily had much spare time for checking or correcting. And that does make a huge difference. It means when you know a question hasn't come out right you have to make decisions to check what's wrong or move on. You are less likely to pick up errors and you've also got a panicky feel as time goes on and you're still working.

So my conclusion is that they did get easier, possibly a lot easier, but now I think the difficulty level is similar to when I did it, but the timing makes them a bit harder.

And as for degree, dd's specialism in maths was very different to mine, but I'd say what she did in the first year was definitely comparable to what I did. So from that I'd assume A-levels are similar level.
The difference is that she had to pass all her exams with 40% whereas I only had to pass overall. And as I was very one sided and algebra (university style) and analysis were totally a closed book to me (interestingly dd found the same subjects hardest, which i hadn't told her), then I'm not totally sure I'd have passed overall. I got nearly half my marks on one paper that I was particularly good at. But I'd effectively ignored the subjects I couldn't do and concentrated on those I could; dd didn't have that luxury. We got the same degree level, but I think she actually had it tougher than me and did better.