Grade inflation

[oishidesne]

I studied in the 1990s. I recall universities like bath and imperial needed AAB or ABB for science or engineering courses. I was checking this today for by DD in a years time and see they now need AAA on average...

Similarly requirements to do maths A levels used to be C in maths GCSE. It is not a 7 minimum... equivalent to an A at gcse...

What's going on. How do average folks get to university?

Maths A level with a C at GCSE would always have been a big ask. I recall that we allowed a student to start an MFL A level with a C at GCSE quite a few years ago and we soon realised it would not work.

Lots of universities have standard offers lower than A Astar Astar. Imperial and Bath are two of the top (ie most popular, therefore can be most choosy) unis for engineering and science courses in the country.

There are more unis now than there were in the late 1980s at least, and a lot of the post-1992 unis might be a good option for a candidate likely to gain (say) BBB. Check out NTU or Sheffield Hallam or Leeds Beckett.

Remember also that the highest grade used to be an A. The best A level result in my year at my grammar school in the 1980s was AAB. I imagine the same candidate moved forward in time 40 years would maybe have got A-star A-star A.

Unis may ask for high grades but this year they seem to take students who had slipped a few grades and there were loads of courses available in clearing at much lower grades.

My DC needs ABB to get into his top 4 choices as that is their standard offer - but all 4 were in clearing, 1 at BBB, 2 at BBC and 1 at CCC. These are good unis, 2 are Russell Group and the other 2 score higher in the rankings than many RGs.

So leaving courses like medicine and law aside, you don't always need all As to get into a good uni. It's all about supply and demand!

That's not grade inflation. It is that many more students are now attending uni, partly because employers insist on it despite few jobs actually needing a degree. So they need to keep their slot as a top uni by demanding high entry grades (also the international component). The fact students apply with predicted rather than actual grades makes the system unstable and stressful. Forecasting grades is inaccurate in many cases (though the higher the prediction the more likely they will attain the grades - there's nothing higher than an A star after all - but those in the B-C range are harder to predict).
There's always someone who says they got an E offer from Oxford back in the day, well that wouldn't happen now. Does it mean that that E is equivalent to an A now? Of course not. But now it's not who you are (or who you are related to) and what school you went to but academic ability and the competition is very tough,

OP, you are not wrong. The situation is complex, but a higher percentage of pupils entered for each exam is earning top grades than 10 years ago, a significantly higher percentage than 20 years ago, and a much higher percentage than 30 or 40 years ago. The last government was very concerned about this, one of my few points of agreement with them. (I love for people to attend uni! But I think many unis and applicants got caught up in a vicious cycle perpetuated by grade inflation)

PPs are also correct about the sheer numbers of applicants at each grade increasing, but percentages validate the claim of grade inflation. That’s why the A star grade had to be introduced.

Posted too soon. Now there are concerns that A star does not differentiate enough at the top. Various admissions exams that were once almost exclusive to Oxbridge are being used more widely.

It is an awful lot of hoops for our young people.

There has been grade inflation- i got BBC back in the 80s and that was considered to be a decent, impressive set of grades.

Agree re Maths A level - you needed really to go in with an A grade from O level (ie the top grade) to have a chance of keeping up at A level.

I think the A level students these days are under massively more pressure than we were in the 90s. The introduction of A* has fuelled this also. They are achieving higher grades through harder work in most cases.
There is also increased competition as top universities in the UK rely heavily on international students now
Sadly this gradual increase in stress and need to get A*s (80%+) for the same courses that used to require As (70%+) has had a detrimental impact on our young people's mental health and quality of life.

I have some data now for Maths A level.

In 2016 Dr Ian Jones of the renowned Mathematics Education Centre at Loughborough led a robust study on the Maths A Level standard. The conclusion was that standards dropped considerably from the 1960s to the 1990s, then stabilised. Specifically, a Maths script earning Grade B in the 1990s (or in 2015) would have earned Grade E in the 1960s.

The study was widely reported and published in the British Education Research Journal.

However this was standards based research. The percentages of top grades in Maths have also c

Apologies for the premature post

The percentages

Damn.

The percentages of top grades in Maths have also continued to climb. The research I have cited did not investigate this. If standards for top grades have truly held steady, that would imply that more pupils are achieving more highly. I don’t know whether this has been analysed.

It is an interesting question

In any case, my original timings regarding the grade inflation were off!

Some amount of grade inflation as a consequence of the changing role of HE is probably sensible. But E to B?

Much better IMO to maintain somewhat stricter standards and for all of us to be setting more realistic Entry Requirements.

Higher standards for A levels might also increase the robustness of a fairly large minority of students at universities like mine. They’ve had top marks their whole lives and can be badly thrown by a 65, which is actually pretty good. Learning to cope with imperfection at a younger age would be a good thing.

They are achieving higher grades through harder work in most cases.

I disagree with this and think this is insulting to people who have sat exams in years past. There is no way successive students worked harder than the previous year for nearly 30 years between 1980 and 2010 when top grades stabilised somewhat.

UCAT is an example of this. Now universally required for medicine.

Something that has not yet been discussed here is how much more our youngsters know about their courses now compared to "back in the day". As an example, I took Music A level in 1986. I achieved an A at O level 2 years earlier and played 2 instruments tolerably well. We learned some of the History stuff in lower 6th then just before the summer holidays, our teacher suggested that we should go on a weekend course at a university an hour away as it was good preparation. It was a revelation. There was loads of stuff we found out that we had no idea was on the syllabus. There was no internet for us to look things up on and we were never given a syllabus or had access to past papers. My school was a well-regarded independent school which is regularly discussed on MN as an aspirational place to send your DD. It was utterly hopeless back then.

In contrast, my DDs took GCSEs under the A star - G specs in the mid 2010s and A levels in 2017 and 2019. Some of DD1's A levels had AS levels - Maths & FM but for the others she was the 1st year of reformed qualifications. At both levels with both DDs, they could see the syllabus of each course. They could readily access lots of past years' papers. They did lots of practice at school. It will come as a surprise to nobody that they achieved A star and A grades when I got Bs. Maybe I'm just thicker than them - a definite possibility as they both have Masters STEM degrees and one is most of the way through a PhD. However, I maintain that access to better resources is really useful.

This is an interesting point, @Malbecfan

I agree better, more uniform access to resources is important, and something I had overlooked. It probably does help results as it should.

But from 1986 into the 1990’s standards for achieving a given grade in Maths were dropping, according to Ian Jones’ study above. So your DDs inadvertently benefitted from that, also

Could the higher requirements for entry for UK (home) students lead to more places for fee paying foreign students? Is this what's happening?

As someone above says, I feel for today's kids as the competition is so high! There is no hope for someone with a bbc or a bcc to end up as an engineer for example...

As someone above says, I feel for today's kids as the competition is so high! There is no hope for someone with a bbc or a bcc to end up as an engineer for example...

That's just not true, luckily. I just searched a couple of less popular unis and you can study engineering at (my examples - somewhat at random but they are both good unis) Leeds Beckett and Sheffield Hallam with BBC. I am sure there are plenty of other places. Engineering degrees need to be accredited but the Leeds one is (not sure about Sheffield).

Sorry somewhat off the topic discussed by others which is very interesting, for sure.

Thanks, @clary. I was coming back tobthe thread just having found the same examples.

I don’t know much about Leeds Beckett but know and know of several DC who have attended Sheffield Hallam and done well by it

yes @poetryandwine agree re Sheffield Hallam; I know quite a few ppl who have done well at Leeds Beckett (good sporting uni if that matters haha).

Nottingham Trent is another well-rated uni with a similar offer for a whole range of engineering courses. Again, I know lots of students who have done well there (not for engineering as such but just rated the uni in general).