With a third of A levels being at A or A star and presumably the proportion to increase how are universities going to select students for high status competitive coiurses?

[mids2019]

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/aug/14/students-squeezed-out-university-courses-bumper-crop-top-a-level-grades?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwdGRjcATtEpdjbGNrBO0ShXBkb2YFZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMzUwNjg1NTMxNzI4AAEeF2JA4R42PnBId2QTWTFQ95frB8yvf0pY8AzajXUe5PVrefFR3aDd56drkKc_aem_LR9dNpZoutWCESSQrZoh5A#Echobox=1786725857

Oxbridge can use interview and additional tests in selection of students but where does this leave other universities? Will other universities such as Durham need to introduce their own interviews or tests to stop applications becoming a lottery?

I have looked at some of the Oxbridge rejection threads and there are many unlucky applicants with perfect grade profiles at GCSE and A level.so have we reached a point that the perfect 'grade A' student does not hold the prestige it once did and you are now just one of many.

I think we need to introduce an A star star grade as we have to accept grade inflation is a thing so we just need to accommodate to make university recruitment (and employment) make sense.

I find it all quite baffling. How can a third of students get A / A star? I know this gets said a heck of a lot but 30yrs ago only a handful of students got A grades and you most definitely didn’t need all (or any) A grades to get into good universities.

If they are taught well enough and study hard enough they deserve the grade.

Schools focus much harder now. Students too. Parents pay for tutors.

Higher attainment is a good thing, for our society.

im not sure about the ‘grade inflation’ argument. The exams aren’t easier. What has changed is the students who are taking A levels and how. There are many more post GCSE qualifications like Btecs, IB etc, so those choosing to take A levels are self selecting. Subject choice is now more likely to be what they are already doing well in, and there is more variety in exam subjects. And schools are teaching to the exams. Also remember that there is a difference between getting an A at A level and getting ALL As at A level. Only 2.2% got all A* this year.

It's not a third of students, though ... the differences between subjects are quite marked .

This issue is not about A-level grades IMO. It's about fairness and perceptions of fairness when people are competing for scarce resources eg an Oxbridge place, especially if the rules or goalposts seem to change eg private school doesn't seem to buy white males from wealthy families quite what it did in the past.
Also, on average, at population level, A levels are not the issue either. The issue is the pathways and training for all the other young people so that everyone has a chance to make the best of themselves

There are loads of tests already like UCAT or LNAT. They are a nightmare, cost attached, need to book early, some kids need lifts etc - it’s all making stuff more exclusive and inaccessible. There isn’t that much of a need to differentiate further in the top 25 per cent of the population. Employers will be looking for different things and have their own tests they can invest in.

Plenty of other top universities use additional tests to discriminate- agree with the poster who said these are difficult to get booked, Pearson need to seriously improve the offering here.

But it’s a whopping great big headline grabber to talk about increases in the top grades - unless you consider a rise from 28.3% to 28.5% a notable increase?? Even the bbc headlines it as “top a level grades edge up” when it would be far more sensible and accurate to describe them as “basically the same as last year”.

Some subjects and institutions are basically a lottery already (and many have been for decades). I personally know all A grade students with all the extra curruclar amd relevant work experience etc students who didn't get to do Medicone/Vet Medicine /Dentistry or Physio even when they applied, sometimes twice.

And then you have universities as popular as Exeter and Nottingham offering food courses in clearing with really big requirement drops too.

Employers will definitely need other ways of discriminating between students post graduation too.

OK so looking at the actual figures, 28.3% of students got A & A* a wopping 0.1% increase on last year and up from around 25% in 2019. Before the covid inflation happened.

You do realise that they also change the grade boundaries every year so someone who got 76 marks may one year get a A and another get a B. So they can alter how many students get which grades. This happens after the papers have been marked so teachers can only roughly go off previous year's grade boundaries.

Before anyone asks I've no idea how they decide what % of which grades they are willing to give out each year.

If you want to have a look at the figures you can see them here.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/a-level-results-2026-6-key-trends-in-this-years-data/

I agree, A perfect A grade has lost its prestige. The same with a First class honours degree. They used to be rare reserved for top academic work.

Everyone applying for medicine has to do UCAT to help differentiate between candidates. Universities also use LNAT, TMUA and other tests for other subjects as A levels are not sufficient for identifying promising candidates (both grade inflation and not giving a good enough picture of potential for some)

Which of course is nonsense. It is clearly grade inflation,

Every year people say ‘students study sooo much harder and get taught sooo much better’ which is an insult to all the very hard working teachers and pupils of yesteryear.

So true! Standards have dropped and some teachers don’t have the ability to teach to such a high standard anymore.

I would be interested to see the same graph from 1990 onwards. Google reckons 16% of a-levels were graded at A in 1998 and 11% got straight A’s.

I got straight A’s and it was unusual in the 90’s. I was one of a handful at my grammar school.

The offer for my course from my university was ABB. ABB would be no where near enough for that course now. A quick good suggests it’s now A*AA.

I think young people now work just as hard and deserve all their successes but let’s not pretend grade inflation isn’t a real thing.

Young people do work hard, but somehow the standard of teaching dropped, which has meant pupils are no longer learning at the same level as they were in the 20th century.

It would be interesting to give modern students past papers from 2000 1990 1980 down to 1950, well, 51 I suppose, but even more interesting to do it in reverse, though impossible of course! The changes in the papers are well known: the topics are more elementary and predictable, you don't need to structure your proof yourself, there's minimal manual computation, but you do need to decode from text much more, and translate repeatedly into and out of concrete examples, which is more accessible to most people and a drag on purely abstract thinkers.

It clearly makes sense to optimise for "messy modelling" type skills because those are the types of maths we need really widely in modern life. We need humans who can identify what the math means, and how to apply it to a messy real-world constraint. Applied mathematics like statistics and software engineering is what we're doing most of. We don't really need to spend a lot of time hand-computing nowadays.

It's not an insult to anyone. You're being oversensitive, I'm sure you worked hard too!

On what basis do you say “somehow the standard of teaching dropped”?

When the comprehensive system was introduced, and when the government introduced the National Curriculum and Ofsted, teaching standards dropped.

If your sole basis for assessing the relative difficulty of A levels is the grade awarded, then you must think Further Maths is a piece of piss given 60% get an A or A star.

Is FM a piece of piss?

SImple

they do additional tests - ucat for medicine
https://www.ucat.ac.uk/
tmua for maths
https://esat-tmua.ac.uk/about-the-tests/tmua-test/

in addition for maths there are maths and further maths a levels

really bright kids often do more than three a levels - I did five a levels and one as back in the 1990s and quite a few now do four or more.

Ah so it’s been all much worse since the old days.

I’ve got a lot of relatives who are / were teachers, some from both before and after national curriculum introduction, and while they have plenty of negative things to say about a lot to do with schools, I’ve never once heard them say that teaching standards have dropped. In fact they often talk about how much better a lot of the methods are now. And from what I’ve seen of how and what my kids have been learning, teaching standards seem to be quite a lot higher than what I or my husband remember from our 80’s / 90’s grammar schools.

Hahahaha this old chestnut!

The rot really set in when they scrapped the dunce's hat.

No one wants to admit it, doesn’t make it not true!

I have a relative who taught A-Level Maths and Further Maths. In the 1990s he found that the candidates applying to teach A-Level Maths at his Sixth Form College couldn’t answer the maths questions given to them as part of the interview. Their understanding of Maths wasn’t as good anymore. How were they meant to teach pupils if they couldn’t do the maths themselves?