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.

Post Blair era began in 2007. He was elected PM in 1997!

I meant that Blair was 1997, and I meant post-Blair election, sorry for any confusion

Sorry, I’m not following:

“Some dc at his grammar only passed 2 A levels in both maths subjects“

It might mean some children at his school only passed 2 A levels (fair enough)
but I don’t understand “both Maths subjects” if FM wasn’t available.

Applied & Statistics. I have A levels in both, but I did Statistics for fun & to keep my hand in with maths during my gap year. Some boards did them as 2 different A levels, some did a pure core with applied or stats as an option, but it was the same A level

Oh, thanks.
Was Applied just Mechanics or did it include Decision Maths, too?

It sounds as if DH’s three Maths A levels weren’t as unusual as I had thought.

@mcmuffin22 lots of firms filter by A level grades. They won’t get round to evaluating other qualities. They are not filtering by uni so much but A level and GCSE grades say a lot.

In my day, maths A levels were Pure and Applied and some dc just did the two.

They didn't have decision maths in the early 80s!

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.

As a retired academic I have to agree. As an undergrad I worked my ass off to get a 1st because there was no chance of getting postgrad funding then without it. Not in humanities. As for the undergraduates I subsequently taught some of them were semi literate by my standards. I don't know how they ever made it to university. Now 50% of them get 1sts. There is something wrong there.

The exams aren’t easier, but how students are taught and how they access information has changed. Back in the day if you didn’t understand something your only options were to ask the teacher to explain it again or read the core text over and over in the hope it would sink in. Now if they don’t understand something they just go onto YouTube where some excellent communicators will explain it using whizzy videos (Big Manny is a brilliant example of this with his ‘keepin’ it real’ chemistry experiments or as a funny skit (such as Richard Franks explaining the plot of Romeo and Juliet using Gen Z language). The quality of teaching and resources has also changed, and pupils often have access to iPads and laptops to help them learn - learning is just so much more accessible these days - and that’s no bad thing.

The proportion of top degrees has risen sharply since tuition fees were introduced and raised in the UK. While universities deny intentionally lowering academic standards, regulators and researchers note that market competition for fee-paying students, student satisfaction pressures, and changes to assessment methods have coincided with a massive increase in "first-class" and upper-second-class degrees.

I’m sorry it’s got ridiculous now. The only two late 40/50 year olds I know with firsts are truly exceptionally intelligent people who have gone on to have stellar careers.

Then this year I hear 8 or so kids of friends and acquaintances who all have firsts despite getting Bs and Cs at a level and frankly being extremely average academically. Their friends and girlfriends all have firsts too. So something is going on!!!

It might not have been examined at A level then but it existed. 😉

In the 80s I did a related course as part of my Maths degree, called ”Graphs, Networks and Design.” It was a third year course and relatively easy - as were the decision papers in the A level.

While I was taking it I wrote to my local council asking to change the sequence of the traffic lights on the road I lived on, using what I had learned. They agreed with my suggestion and the lights have operated like that ever since.

Huh?

There are six possible A Level grades, A*-E (obviously U is ungraded), so any 2 of those grades would constitute a third of the grades (2/6 = 1/3).

What precisely is wrong with 1/3 of students achieving 1/3 of the grades? What is baffling you?

That would be true, @TheCompactPussycat , if equal numbers of students got each grade, but they don’t.

Edit - here’s some information from Ofqual.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/infographic-a-level-results-2024/infographics-for-a-level-results-2024-accessible
(MN keeps removing my magic link. If you can’t trust the website gov.uk….)

When I was as at university every student potentially being awarded a first had a viva vice exam (as did some close to boundaries and just fails). They would never have the time to do that with all potential firsts now!

Have you ever heard of the normal distribution curve?

The proportion of top degrees has risen sharply since tuition fees were introduced and raised in the UK.

(I wrote it in my post at 12.09.)

I have read that at least some US exams are graded to follow the Normal distribution, but our A levels aren’t.

Some already have an entrance exam.

Maybe we need to reintroduce S levels? They could be pretty tough. I got a first from Oxford in 1988 but failed the S level in that subject in 1985.....

Going back to what I said upthread about the narrowness of teaching in some subjects these days - when I was at school we did have drop in sessions but they were not for remedial catching up but for discussion more generally - questions like what is history/ what do we think about the official secrets act in a democracy/are there any common identifiable causes to a rebellion etc. Good prep for the Oxford general paper and for university interviews more generally.

No, because most schools don't let pupils onto the FM course unless they're already working at 9/A/A* level. It's a "self selecting" group of elite students.

I taught my first A level class in 1998 and my last in 2024. The content was drastically reduced over this time, but the number of high grades increased. Work ethic of students broadly the same across the decades, but their general curiosity and knowledge of anything outside their own bubble diminished over time.

@JuliettaCaeser You need to look at the history of universities to see how the number of firsts awarded has increased like topsy. My DH graduated in 1974 when the majority got a 2.1 or 2:2. All perfectly employable as engineers and DH with a 2:2 made plenty of money with his own company. The one person he’d recalls with a first went in to be an academic. Several of DHs friends founded and ran businesses and they made much more money. A first didn’t seem to make much difference to anything.

By the 1970s, we had moved on from the 22 universities of 1950. We had opened universities like Essex, Brunel, Surrey and Kent and widened the sector. Firsts were still around 1:100 degrees though. Now we have 150 universities I think (someone will have an accurate figure) and some courses award 40% firsts with low tariff entry. Most employers take this with a pinch of salt though and know a degree from the top flight universities is probably more rigorous and the dc are probably better at independent learning. However the content can be good at many universities but dc are given a lot of assistance to do well and they are not always the best in the workplace as their problem solving is not always fully developed. Employers then feel they need to put in a lot more effort into getting them up to speed.

The % of firsts is just as daft as the % of A levels at the top two grades. The degrees don’t compare and some of the A levels don’t either.

Why the need for entrance exams? Is it because of grade inflation?

What can they offer in terms of extracurricular activities, maybe? Sport, Music, Drama etc.If you got AAA in mats, physics, chemistry whilst getting to grade 6 in an instrument or captain the first 11 or netball or something.