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.

But then how do they get hired anywhere if they don’t get a 4? Who would bother with them when there are so many who have above a 4?

People that dont need grade 4 or above maths skills in the job role being offered.
They could be a lifeguard, bus driver- shortages in those roles so clearly all those people with grade 4 maths havent filled them

Unfortunately with grade inflation this is inevitable- otherwise how do you distinguish between candidates who all have the required high grades.

I say unfortunately because it is easier for students from a much better off background to obtain "additional experience" or to receive interview practice than it is for poorer students.

Grade inflation hurts the poorest students most. If entry was based purely on grades then clever poorer students would face a level playing field. This is not the case when entry is also based on additional experience or interview skills.

@mids2019

I haven't read the full thread, so I may be repeating others, but you have completely misread the Guardian article. A third of grades being A or A-star very different to:

1. a third of grades being A-star.
2. a third of students getting all A-stars.
3. a third of students getting all A's

If any of 1,2 or 3 were true then your thread might be justified, but they aren't.

I could stop there, but to answer your other points ...

"Oxbridge can use interview and additional tests in selection of students but where does this leave other universities?"

It leaves them using personal statements, as they have always done.

"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."

Ox & Cam have never been able to cater for their international demand. And it has never been the case that a clean sweep of top grades was sufficient to gain a place. Perfect 'grade A' students have always gone to other excellent UK universities.

"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."

There is no grade inflation - grade boundaries are altered each year to make sure that a similar proportion of students achieve each grade.

Also, you don't understand university recruitment. The most competitive courses have always used interviews, exams and/or personal statements to distinguish between candidates.

Competitive courses use personal statements to understand students' motivation for their applications. They are looking for things like reading around the subject, not necessarily "experience". They are (now) very attuned to the different backgrounds of applicants, much more so than in the past. Inclusive recruitment practices and outcomes are monitored by EDI departments and by the Government.

Can anyone link to stats about the number of A and A star grades awarded over maybe the last 50 years or so?

I'm not sure when A star grades came in. I ask because when I did A levels in the 1990s, offers for these competitive courses were BBB or similar. Only Oxbridge and maybe Durham asked for As. BCC was a common requirement for eg History at Leeds, courses that would now ask for at least one A.

As pp mentioned, First class degrees were very unusual. About 5% of students achieved them. Also very different now.

TIA

@Shinyredbicycle I think around 2010 when DD did A levels.

I do recruit for the NHS and for my particular role a slew of 9s or A stars is not unusual especially from grammar school students. It is incredibly hard to differentiate between candidates, it's all a bit of a lotfery. A star star might help pick out the truly talented who knows.

I remember those days. A grades were given to the top students at A level who were basically Oxbridge material. B seemed to be a very common grade. No A stars then!

If you recruit for the NHS I hope you will be using more than just A level grades to distinguish between candidates!

What sort of roles do you recruit for? You sound quite out of touch with modern recruiting practices.

All the CVs are written by AI now to be frank and so there is little to differentiate between candidates to call to interivew.

Yep, I feel your pain. I'm a hiring manager for a professional role in HE, and we sift through hundreds of very similar CVs. We use screening interviews to sort wheat from chaff, but its a resource-heavy process and not really sustainable. But there is no way we would use A level grades as a distinguishing criteria.

That would be unlawfully discriminating against applicants on the basis of age. No one my age has, or can have, an A star.

That reminds me of the tale of a recruitment manager who put half the CVs in the bin without looking at them. When someone objected they replied ‘we don’t want to recruit unlucky people do we?’

@mids2019 I’m not sure how much top grades in A levels really matter. They are not tests of critical thinking and how well someone will do a job.

My DD is a strange one. She’s not Gods gift to academia. She chose a career suited to her strengths but some people she worked with early in her training rated these strengths and others not so much. Therefore the start of her career was problematic. One supervisor thought she would either be a star or be somewhat average. Anyway they declined to give her a role after training. Wind on 8 years, this supervisor, on behalf of the chambers, asked her to go back! She said no because she was headhunted by one of the top 4 chambers in her area of work (Band 1 rated) and she knows where her bread is buttered!

Judging people who are not quite like you is fraught with difficulty. So many like candidates to be in the image of themselves. The skill of selecting people is to evaluate ALL info
you have about them. Most universities plainly don’t do this. That’s because many need the bums on seats. Employers look at far more (and should) and need to evaluate what they know and then back up these evaluations at interview by teasing out more info. I sometimes read recruitment methods on MN and I’m truly aghast at inbuilt bias and appointing in the image of themselves.

Dd had an "interview" for a course she applied for - it was more a case of trying to convince her to choose their course rather than her trying to convince them she was a suitable candidate. Too little too late - they'd been the last uni to get in touch - red flag - either they were shit at organising their dept or they didn't really want dd - either way it was a no brainer to reject them.

I agree - you definitely don't want to be choosing candidates who are like yourself - it's hard not to though.
We did critical thinking tests because it's an important skill for our business - but the results were mixed. One of our star employees took the test and failed (we never told her she failed and she didn't ask), the MD took the test and he was only mediocre. Most of the team took the test and scored almost perfectly. It's so hard to find genuinely good recruitment techniques that have a very high correlation with employee success rates - easy to find bad ones.
I believe Google has done some interesting analysis on this - I don't recruit anymore - I was very good at choosing people but I felt an emotional toll rejecting people and that feeling never got any easier - I couldn't disconnect from their pain

@Degasthegas All the test results are just one element of what you look at though. You need to evaluate everything and maybe that test was the wrong one? I agree it’s hard not be be biased in recruitment and of course some people just chime with you. You know they will fit in and that’s in the mix too. Depends on weighting given and whether you take exams over personality for example. Agree it’s hard!

Just discussed the issue of GCSE resits on R4 Today with Lucy Powell (I think). The stats are shocking - I think only 17% of resitters get Maths & 20 or 21% English (apologies if that’s wrong - didn’t write it down).

Lucy Powell was sounded quite sensible on this & apparently is looking at creating a Level
1 qualification with employers to let students progress. Unfortunately the interviewer was Emma Barnett who kept pushing that this was a dreadful lowering of academic standards as lamented by Michael Gove (this may be true but she missed the point completely about what to do with those who just cannot meet said standards).

I really wasn’t impressed by her questions & the fact that she referred to a Grade C rather than a Grade 4 seemed to sum up the interview for me as it’s such a basic thing to get right. Not impressed that Justin Webb (who I generally like listening to) is being wasted on the latest doings of Prince Harry.

But the system is failing them. The underlying problems should have been dealt with long before they got to year 13. Maths is a "building block" subject that starts in reception classes. I think the ship has long since sailed by the time they move to secondary, let alone within a year or two of the GCSEs. I know it's not "fashionable", but times tables, prime numbers, etc need to be learned at a very young age. You really can't expect someone to simplify an equation if they don't know the times tables and prime numbers. It's like asking a fish to climb a tree. Kids really shouldn't be "pushed" into learning new skills in Maths (and inevitably failing to do so) when they havn't mastered the basics. It's why we have so many adults who almost seem proud "I can't do Maths, me!". A complete failure of teaching throughout both primary and secondary schools. Not blaming teachers, I'm blaming the system.

I'm an accountant and have had loads of clients who "can't do Maths, me!", and hadn't a clue when I tried to explain to them about adding VAT to an invoice etc, or even how to halve a quote to give an interim 50% invoice - they look utterly lost as if it's rocket science, but once I've actually explained it in real life terms they can relate to, i.e. an invoice they need to create, they look with horror that they can actually understand and do it and wonder how on Earth they thought they couldn't do it!

I think a very good start would be to actually split the subject into two formally different subjects of Numeracy and Maths, with kids not being put onto "Maths" classes until they'd mastered numeracy, so no equations, trigonometry, etc until they were competent at the basics, however long that takes, and if they never get there, just concentrate on the basics to achieve a "living" level of numeracy. If kids can actually "do" something, they're less likely to disengage and lose interest.

They do spent loads of time on times tables - for mine in eg junior school there was absolutely loads of that in maths. Lots of talk of numeracy, learning times tables so as to be v adept and quick. Far more than when I was at school tbh.

Harsh and unfair, yes, but when an employer gets literally dozens if not hundreds of applications, they have to have some kind of system of "weeding out". If literally lots of the applicants "could have been" suitable, then the ones in the bin were probably unlikely to have been successful anyway if you think of it as a numbers game.

I was never in that position, thankfully, as whenever I was involved in recruitment for anything other than starter/trainee roles, we'd be lucky to get a handful of applicants, sometimes just one or two. So, at least for "experienced/qualified" levels of applicants, we did look at every application properly and interviewed most (except the ones where their skills/experience didn't match the job spec which was pretty rare).

Junior/Trainee positions were different, as we could get a few dozen, and I tended to skim read their covering letters and cvs, discount the ones who clearly couldn't be bothered to put a good letter/cv together (untidy, lots of mistakes, copy and paste covering letter etc). I'd never just look at exam results or any other individual part, I'd look at each in overview, and tended to regard exam results as acceptable as long as they were "above average" in my mind especially in the critical subjects of Maths and English. As the jobs were always in accountancy, a below average result in Maths or English was always a rejection as we needed good numeracy and literacy as a basic requirement. Not so bothered about other subjects really - someone with a C or above in Maths/English would get on the "pending" pile even if they got lower grades in other subjects, and then I'd be looking at what else was on their CV, any other skills, abilities or experience that would give them an edge perhaps over someone with a grade better, maybe more work experience, or an unusual/interesting hobby?

We can only hope that starts to filter through to later years as the current/recent cohort move into their GCSE years then.

But if kids at primary are learning their times tables and prime numbers, we should be looking at why/how they forget them? Perhaps there needs to be refreshers etc as the school years pass, rather than using equations/algebra to keep them in pupil's heads, i.e. keep going back to basics. Something is clearly going wrong and we, as a society, need to find out what/why and how to solve it.

Doing the same thing again and again clearly doesn't work. It's insanity.

It's OK saying "normal distribution curve" etc., but if you look at the core numbers, people getting less than half the questions right aren't going to be motivated - they're getting more wrong that right and that's demotivational and fuels the "I can't do Maths, me!" attitude. Likewise, pretending less than 25% to be a "pass" is clearly insane as that means getting 75% wrong - that's not a "pass" on any Planet. If that's how the exam system works, then it clearly isn't fit for purpose. But then again, I've never been in favour of the "normal distribution curve" style of exam marking. In professional exams, there's usually a pretty fixed "pass/fail" level - sometimes the exam is harder and fewer pass - that's life. When I did my chartered accountancy exams, there was a "hard" pass grade of 50% - if you got 49% you failed, end of story, regardless of how well/badly everyone else did - it was a line in the sand. My son is doing professional exams (different profession) and his are exactly the same. If you get a few marks below 50%, they review the paper and you "may" get a few extra marks if the reviewer believes it was harshly marked, but you still have to get the 50% level to pass. They never reduce/tweak the grade boundaries to fiddle it so that the "right" number of people pass.

Actually teaching of mental arithmetic has improved greatly since I was at school and as said there is the times tables screening in Year 4. My DC could do so much more mentally in KS1 & 2 than I could do at the same age, which I thought was a great improvement.

Not a Maths expert, but what would be interesting to research is:

-how GCSE lower grades correlate to those not reaching expectations in SATS
-dyscalculia diagnoses & interventions
-are there issues with children retaining what they have learned
-how are the questions worded & is this causing problems (if it’s long word problems then this may be an English issue rather than Maths)
-how are the questions marked (eg is it 1 mark per answer or do you need to get 2 or 3 correct answers to get the mark)
-how many questions out of the whole paper are being completed by students with lower grades (to see if there are any trends)

Possibly / probably there is already academic research on this that just hasn’t been reported.

I remember in Covid lockdown discovering how bad my primary-aged dc understanding of numbers was. School just moved onto the next thing without properly grounding numbers.

He was also introduced to algebra in lockdown and I wasn’t convinced his teacher had a good understanding of it. He was completely lost by the maths set until I stepped in. Lack of good mathematical knowledge in teachers at primary might well be the cause of issues later. Plus Covid meaning basic building blocks were missed would still have an impact even now.