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.

Molière & Racine are actually easier to read than you might expect as they are written in classical French (which is fairly straightforward) and being plays all the language is (obviously) speech so there is no narration to deal with (which is where you might find more complex verb forms & sentence structure). There’s also not as much text on the page to deal with.

I actually rather enjoyed reading Racine’s Andromaque as extra reading when an A-Level student. It was easier to read than a novel & as it’s all about unrequited love it was fairly easy to understand from a teenage perspective. It’s not a bad text to read at present either as it fits in very well with The Odyssey.

That doesn’t mean that widening texts is necessarily a bad thing (it’s good in various ways) but just because a text is old doesn’t necessarily mean it is difficult for a novice student & I do think this is important to understand as sadly there are so many issues with MFL. I agree with the issue re native speakers having an advantage affecting grades - I’m not sure how to solve that, but it does need to be addressed. There are other issues to & we could learn a lot from the Netherlands & Germany.

I think the focus on Oxford & Cambridge is perhaps the wrong way to look at this issue - they already have excessively complex admissions criteria & are perfectly capable of finding the students they want.

What I think is worth thinking about is strengthening the offer of the rest of the Russell Group as Oxbridge just can’t offer enough places for all applicants. Given how many applicants there are particularly for STEM subjects, most applicants will be rejected & inevitably this includes lots of who are capable of working at Oxbridge level however there is the difference between contact hours & staff ratios at Oxbridge & at other unis.

I think this difference is greater now that when I was a student particularly for Arts students as I remember tutorial hours were declining slightly in my final year & judging by newspaper reports this increased across the board in following years. I can remember feeling that this was wrong when I was a student as I needed those conversation & translation sessions for my language skills to improve so I could compete with other students who had spent more time abroad so had an advantage.

To flip @jeanne16’s point about unfairness, it’s also unfair that Oxbridge students benefit from lower staff ratios so are getting a better education for the same price. I can see how this seems unfair to her DS that he has to work harder, but it’s also unfair to his friends if their educational offer isn’t as rich as his.

I very much doubt if this will be addressed given the current situation of the universities, but it would be nice if the response to exam results could be looking at improving the university offer to benefit students rather than just a narrow focus on more testing.

Today, students with those grades may well be stuck at college endlessly resitting Maths & English due to the problem of grade boundaries meaning a certain proportion has to fail.

Agree - I’ve always found this absolutely ridiculous.

@Benvenuto There isn’t a huge difference between stem at Oxbridge and stem at Imperial or LSE. Plenty of other universities have many well respected courses and the “Oxbridge rejects” really can thrive. They do get a bit more time to develop as people with skills employers want.

How can anyone not get a GCSE in Maths?

For the same reason that not everyone has a reading age of 16+ when aged 16.

@DigerydontBecause they are not great at maths? I don’t have an O level in maths - happy now? You might as well say how can anyone not pass any exam they take!

I agree re Imperial (don’t know much about LSE so can’t comment) but it’s only been mentioned once on this thread - all the attention has been on Oxbridge.

That said - all 4 are in the south & given the rise in students are staying at home there needs to be centres of excellence across the country so I still think the focus should be on others as there are just so many students being rejected by Oxbridge for popular courses like computing & engineering etc. as there just aren’t enough places.

As you say, there are lots of good unis that could fill this role & offer a good student experience, but then some also have financial problems too. If students are paying the same, then there’s a case for standards in provision.

There’s also the difference between STEM & Arts provision as the latter tends to be the one where hours are cut.

Because of how the grade boundaries work - a certain proportion has to fail / get lower grades each year. It’s not the case that you can get a certain mark / percentage & be guaranteed a “pass” as the grade boundaries depend on everyone else’s performance.

If you are adding to the cohort each year a group who has previously failed, then you are increasing the lower attainers so there is no guarantee that they will get out of the “fail” grades even if their attainment improved. Hopefully someone will be able to give a more elegant & accurate mathematical explanation for this!

@Degasthegascalled it ridiculous, which is fair - I think it’s also cruel as it must be so disheartening for those students and it also doesn’t focus on what they need (to get a basic Maths qualification to get on with their lives). There would be ways to break the cycle eg by making these students sit Functional skills first before progressing to GCSE resits.

@Benvenuto I was referring to the Economics taught at LSE which needs FM and many of their courses require maths A level but are not truly stem.

Regarding them being in the south - yes they are but they also have a high % of international students. Plus a dc who won’t move for uni, won’t move for a job either.

My DH had an engineering consultancy not far from London but never had an Imperial grad apply. He also had branches in the north and very much had grads from Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Newcastle etc apply. It’s perfectly possible for northern based students to get great jobs in stem. There are great unis there too and definitely not all RG for engineering either.

That’s too stark a view on moving to London. London is expensive & a long way from some parts of the country. Student debt is now extremely high. It’s entirely possible that students want to move away from home & families are happy to facilitate this but London is just too far & too expensive at that time. It might be different after uni not least because they would be paid.

That’s also different to students choosing to stay at home to study (which I’m definitely noticing as a trend amongst DS’s friends) & if that is a generational trend it’s worth understanding why. If it’s due to university being much more expensive now, then I think that is a good reason to look at how the university system is set up.

I agree with what you said about other unis being great (I used Russell Group as shorthand but as you say there are unis that are outside it) & probably that didn’t come across so well in my previous posts. That said, the Oxbridge offer is still better in various ways (staff - student ratios; contact time; accommodation; prestige; financial situation & even attractiveness of the setting) & I still think there’s a case think about improving the offer of other unis rather than just focusing on Oxbridge.

I think A-level maths was a lot easier about ten years ago when it was modular. I was a maths teacher then and now.

But a "low pass" at GCSE is said to be equivalent to an average 11 year old, not an average 16 year old.

@Badbadbunny That’s inevitable in a supposedly all ability exam though. The lower grades reflect lower ability and of course some dc are not great readers. Wasn’t phonics meant to get rid of that? The system that switches dc off reading!

Yes it's also cruel and it's amazing how many people don't understand how the pass mark is obtained. In 2019, the exam board Edexcel set the GCSE Maths Higher Tier paper required a raw score of just 19% to achieve a Grade 4, who finishes a paper obtaining 19% feeling like they've passed, what employer would ever consider getting 19% in an exam is competent in Maths. Do employers really understand what a GCSE maths requirement means - I expect most don't. The pass mark for a 7 that year was 57.1%
There is no standard grade - just a comparison of peers and how hard they found the exam.

@Degasthegas Many employers, where maths matters, will set their own tests. My DH ran an engineering consultancy and employed civil and structural engineers. Grads were certainly tested on design principals and competence, just because applicants had a degree, did not mean they were competent. DH didn’t expect processional competence at 22, but the basic understanding of design principles had to be established. Most employers do this and don’t take exams at face value so grade boundaries don’t mean much to them. Although no grad engineers should have a 4 in maths!

I didn’t realise until this happened to the DC of someone that I knew. It makes a difference when you have experience of an actual person going through this. Otherwise the general idea (resit until you get your essential Maths & English skills) seems sensible.

As well as the things you mention, research on the failed papers would be interesting (it may exist but it isn’t being reported on) eg how much of the paper is being completed, how wordy are the questions, which areas of Maths are students struggling etc.

This is very interesting and I had no idea about modern grade bands. It is also somewhat alarming that such a low percentage is required to pass and it does a disservice to everyone; the candidate most of all. Back in the old days of O levels and CSEs, 45% was needed in order to gain a C grade, the passing grade, at O level. I can't remember the percentages needed for A and B grades but it was probably around 60% for a B grade and 75% for an A grade. A CSE grade 1 was the equivalent of a pass at O level but would have needed a score of at least 75-80% in order to achieve it.

There’s lots of issues with English too and I sort of agree in that reading is a key one although not phonics per se.

Phonics does what it is meant to do - it enables readers to decode words they read so they know the sound of the word & to encode (spell) a word. The problem is that phonics is seen as playing a much bigger role in reading, when in reality it is really an entry level skill to reading that children are meant to master by the end of Y1 (or as soon after that as they can manage).

Schools definitely have a role in developing children into fluent readers, but we rarely talk about what fluency actually means. Nor do we talk enough about enough about what comprehension means and how to develop it.

Nor is it just the role of schools - reading involves a lot of modelling, practice & general enthusiasm. If a child has a parent who will read to them, listen to them reading, talk about books & be seen reading, then they have a massive advantage.

The other problem with blaming phonics is that when this cohort was at school, teaching of phonics varied considerably. I have first-hand experience of this with DS as his school were very capable at teaching phonics but they didn’t link the reading books to the phonics phases sending home the old ORT instead. This meant that DS couldn’t decode words as taught, and instead tried to guess from the picture etc (eventually after reading a lot of MN threads I sorted this by buying a phonics reading scheme).

Then there are other issues such as dyslexia (provision for which varies considerably) & students speaking English as a second language & lots of others.

@Violinist64 You are correct about 45% to pass but my O levels (Oxford board) were graded 1-6. 7 was 40-45%. We did not have 3 grades A-C. 7 was a fail but it didn’t mean you were not reasonably numerate. In my case, badly taught.

We had 5 maths teachers at my grammar - all Oxbridge educated. Maybe two taught well but 3 just droned on and if you did not understand something they considered you worthless. Certainly no help offered and very many of us failed. I cannot tell you how great it was to have a teacher take time and effort (in their and our lunch break) when a group of us were struggling with Quantitive methods on a HNC at Oxford poly some 10 years later. I actuality passed and quality of teaching really did matter. I even understood what DH said was A level maths. Some of us just take a bit more time most of the SMP maths (remember that syllabus!) we did for O level remains a mystery to me!

It’s still the same reason.

Not everyone has a reading age of 11+ at age 16, either.

I cannot find a reliable source for the original information, but many sources say that the average reading age of UK adults is 9. This one says teenagers in English schools (all teenagers?) have an average reading age of 10 or 11. If “Nearly nine out of 10 children in England are deemed to have met the required levels in reading at age 11” it means that more than one in ten haven’t.

According to this government report, p37, “England’s mean score was significantly above the OECD average for literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem solving.”

Until you have taught a bottom set maths gcse class, you will have no idea how hard and utterly dispiriting it is for pupils and teachers to be aiming for those essential grade 4s. For most of y13 we would rotate around a max of about 6 of the easier maths topics. Generally when we rotated back to topic 1, they would have no memory of having covered it.

Their parents will have fought hard for extra time but they would usually finish the paper in 20 minutes and then just sit there.

To those politicians who decided pupils had to keep going until they had got a grade 4, I would suggest they sit in on one of these classes.

Oxford and Cambridge look at more than just your results

@jeanne16 It is also clearly stupid to have an exam graded 1-9 when 1,2 and 3 are meaningless grades for onward education. It’s also inevitable that some dc get the low grades because the grades are there. I had the same issue with maths O level at grade 7. If I could have taken a CSE I might have passed. The dc who struggle with a 4 should take a different syllabus and exam.

I know exactly what you mean about dc forgetting what they have been taught. I’ve sat in on our lower achiever group at y6 in primary. I got it, but most of them didn’t. So much maths builds on prior learning which is revised but it doesn’t stick.

Loads of universities already do interviews and base it on additional experiences