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?

So 2001 some 19 per cent of A levels were a grade A and in 2022 over 34 per cent got an A or A*.
Also I suspect there are many more international students now who have have had far more rigorous STEM education so can nab all the top STEM courses. A friend of ours is a polish cleaner and returning to Poland where she says education is better and her daughter will now be behind.. wake up people.

I got straight As at A Level (in the days before the A* existed). I didn't work particularly hard. Many of my peers who worked harder got less good grades.

"Working hard" should not be conflated with "doing well".

"Working hard" should not be conflated with "doing well".

Why not?
Surely a good work ethic is something to be admired?

I meant to add that she is one of those people that only does well because she works hard at it. She isn't naturally extremely bright. She would have done less well if she hadn't worked hard.

And it stood her in good stead when she did her degree, because she had trained herself into good work habits.

BCC (& some were offered BCD) for a STEM course at an RG university in 1982. The same course asks for AAA* now.
A friend did medicine at Birmingham in 1980 on an offer of CCC.

I think it's things like this that have warped the grading system. I guess over time there have been different initiatives to address the grading and now it's really skewed so there is no real comparison. In the late 1990s there were load of courses available and it was still tuition fee free. From my experience as well there was a drive to get people back into education as well so there very various access courses too (so people not having standard grades as such). Those heady days when the government cared about people!

Yes, of course. But you can work hard and not do well. Equally you can do well without having worked hard.

In the context of this thread, it's perfectly possible to get top grades without working particularly hard. It's also possible to work extremely hard and not get top grades.

The exam system decides that the people who "deserve" top grades are the ones that get the most marks, not the ones who've worked the hardest.

@Phineyj

My students have past papers, markschemes, examiners' reports (those are gold dust!)

We had those when I did my O and A levels in the 80s, a couple of our teachers basically "taught" by them, handed out the syllabus at first lesson and we worked through it, homeworks were typically questions from past papers, and I definitely remember some teachers reading out examiner's reports after mock exams when they went through the papers. With some of our other teachers, we literally never saw an exam question until the mock and they never even handed out a syllabus let alone mark schemes, etc.

I think it's always been down to the teacher as to what resources they preferred using.

It's certainly a real shame that "adult" education such as being able to do GCSE and A levels at your local college by evening classes has all but disappeared. If I remember rightly that was under Blair's watch. Both myself and OH did evening classes for GCSE and A levels as late as around 1998 but both our local colleges seemed to "convert" to concentrate on 16-18 year olds in the early 00s and neither do evening classes fo GCSE and A levels anymore. So if you're an adult and want to change career or whatever, I'm not sure whether you've any options these days, other than expensive private colleges.

It's certainly a real shame that "adult" education such as being able to do GCSE and A levels at your local college by evening classes has all but disappeared. If I remember rightly that was under Blair's watch. Both myself and OH did evening classes for GCSE and A levels as late as around 1998 but both our local colleges seemed to "convert" to concentrate on 16-18 year olds in the early 00s and neither do evening classes fo GCSE and A levels anymore. So if you're an adult and want to change career or whatever, I'm not sure whether you've any options these days, other than expensive private colleges.

I'd agree with this - I'd love to take a welsh GCSE in evenings.

I think also they've change 16-17 old access to GCSE to do re-takes - it's maths, English and often one other subject rather than a fuller range that once existed.

Also changes to university funding have meant Open University course have got much more expensive for students. The OU did sound warnings when it was being talked about but the government funding changes still went ahead.

Actually, I agree with this. Effort does not necessarily equal achievement. In my daughter's case it did.
Very bright people don't need to work as hard, but less bright people do, and not all of them are A/A* students.

Effort does not necessarily equal achievement.

While I do think internet resource and study guide are a huge help - DS has had several subjects with no subject teachers for months and in some areas years.

We can help being well educated, able to spend small fortune of study guides, and have internet access many of his peers don't have this. We haven't managed to access tutors in the area doesn't seem to be many and they are expensive.

In those subjects it taking more time and effort to maintain or get decent grades than ones he has a good teacher for or had minimal disruption when there's been changes in teaching staff.

Some local universities do offer lower intake grades for students who stay on at sixth form but I'm not sure that adequately accounts for disruption to teaching or the system they offer traveling between schools for different A-levels. DS is heading to college but that will cost over £50+ a month to get him there and some of his peers don't have that as an option.

I think it hard to argue that some students don't have bigger hurdles to get to good grades and as teacher shortages start to bite in more schools I do wonder what effect this is going to start to have more widely.

Apologies for not having RTFT, but it also applies to degrees, back in my day only a small percentage got firsts and a lot got 2:2s. Today, so many kids seem to have firsts (which is great, not knocking them) and the 2:2 is virtually obsolete.

Yep, my son got a mark of over 70% on an exam that he only did half of, so in "real" terms, he couldn't have got more than 50%. He wasn't given his "raw" mark, only a "moderated" mark, so presumably lots of others did badly on that exam too and they inflated everyone's mark so that more got into the "first" mark range!

@ChristinaAlber I agree with this. My daughter and her boyfriend both got firsts and were well-deserved, and I know of others too. In my year group at a very good Uni with a lot of bright undergrads when I graduated (in Law) in 1990 there were only two firsts and that was considered normal. In comparison with what is standard today I feel a bit dim with my lowly 2.2 which I worked hard for.

@useruser1497207191 indeed, but my point was students can access this stuff directly now online and for free, so it's easier to get round the obstacle of a poor quality or absent teacher.

The poster who mentioned the unseen costs is right though. Some of my students can't afford revision guides. The cost of getting to open days and offer holder days is another barrier.

It's definitely not a level playing field and never was.

Because far more people go to university now-there are far fewer options available post school. So there is a much bigger pool to choose from. Also the selection process is fairer.

@ChristinaAlber Just thinking on from this - and accepting that this thread is to do with A levels not uni degrees, but the same essentially applies - I think most of us (at my Uni in the late '80s) were aware of who the two or three exceptional students were and who would get the firsts (which they did). Many of the rest of us slogged away but came away with 2.1s and 2.2s - which was fine and opened the way into the careers most of us were aiming for.

Not taking anything away from the really hard work of a lot of today's students, good teaching, resourcing etc, but what denotes "exceptional" these days or are there just a lot more "exceptional" students today?

When I was at uni in the early 80s there were hardly any firsts. Apparently in 2021 over a third of degrees are classified as first. It's no longer an exceptional achievement and that is sad.

I got a BTEC Business and Finance at distinction and although I went straight into a work training contract one of my peers got exactly the same scores as me and went to Exeter.

That was 1985

The introduction of A* grades which in effect became thenkld A, A becomes a B etc and the ridiculous belief that 50% of people need to be degree educated and that certain careers need degrees.

Massive, massive grade inflation at A level. Back in the day, an A grade was very rare, especially in arts and humanities.
Ditto getting a First at degree level - hardly ever happened, so a 2:1 or 2:2 was always absolutely fine.

The last O levels prior to introduction of GCSE were sat in 1988 so that cohort took their A levels in 1990. Until the mid-80s state exams were marked so that the same percentages of the cohort got each grade. Around 10% got A grades in science and maths in each subject, and only 1-2% got AAA or better.
Between 1990 and 2010 there was rampant grade inflation. A study by Durham uni assessed this as being 1-2 grades in most subjects and 2-3 grade in maths. i.e. students of equal ability would score 1-2 grades higher if they took the 2010 papers with 2010 grade boundaries than if they took the 1990 papers with 1990 grade boundaries. That is grade inflation. To call it anything else is denial of reality.
The introduction of the A-star around 2010 simply reflected the fact that rampant grade inflation of more than a grade had occurred, so that straight A's was no longer an achievement and no longer allowed highly selective universities to distinguish between candidates.
Covid caused further grade inflation of around two-thirds of a grade (according to at least one exam board). That has now been (mostly) scaled back in England but not in Wales or NI.
Overall a candidate who might have scored CCC in maths and two sciences in 1990 would likely score A-star+AA now. CCC in 1990 was quite sufficient to get onto a science degree at a (now) Russell group uni - as it happens, my brother was offered several courses with those grades at that time.
As regards why grade inflation occurred, there are two main reasons:

1. Several successive governments wanted to increase numbers staying in education, to produce a more highly educated workforce and to keep people off the unemployment statistics; they also had a vested interest in grade statistics appearing to show improvements in the education system. So it was allowed to occur. It was a numbers game. If you want 40% of school-leavers to go to higher education, you have to drop the bar.
2. The information revolution. In the early 90's, if your teacher was crap, you were, frankly, screwed. If your teacher didn't photocopy the mark schemes and disseminate them, you had no way to get them. if they couldn't explain something, there was nobody else to do it. Now, you can download past papers, mark schemes etc. from the exam board, and if your teacher is incomprehensible, there'll be a better one on youtube. The accessibility of information means that a candidate of equal ability, in an equally crap school, can access far more resources now than they could in the 1990s. Teachers would like us to believe that teaching has improved and that students are harder working. These factors, if true at all, place at most a distant 3rd. The same trend has occurred at degree level. Until the mid-90s only about a quarter of school-leavers went on to do degrees, and only 7% of graduates obtained 1sts. Bright people who had worked hard got upper seconds, and were mostly happy with them, because less than 2% of any cohort graduated with a 1st. Now 40% of a cohort goes on to uni and upwards of 30% of those get 1sts, so something like 12%. of the cohort. Whereas 20-30 years ago a first was a rare distinction, it's now effectively what an upper second was back then, and an upper second has become what a lower second was back then - a "gentleman's degree", i.e. something that's obtained if you're either a bit thick, or bone idle. It's again denial of reality to pretend anything else.

I've just looked up the entry requirements for mine and DH degrees at UCL. Mid 90s, I think standard offers at the time were either BBC or BCC, we both got BCD and still got our places.
Just looked up the entry requirements now and it's asking for AstarAA.