Dumbing down of A levels?

[Happygardening]

My DH went to St Paul's boys a long time ago admittedly but it has always been very very selective. He reckons when he was there out of 150 boys only about 15 (10%) got three A's at A level and those boys were considered to be unbelievably bright often boarding on the dysfunctional. Allowing for poor memory on his part lets say 25 got three A's so how can this be accounted for; FT Secondary School 2011 Percentage A/S you will need to search it as I don't know how to link it directly on here! Apparently 94% of the boys got A/A's although their web site states its only a mere 89%. No one is going to convince me that a levels have not been dumbed down.

There are other explanations for a higher number of A grades:

Better teaching (it's not chalk and talk anymore)

Pupils having more help with exam technique (the exam board websites have a wealth of info that just wasn't available to students in the past)

Grade inflation certainly exists. It is not the fault of the teachers or of the young people sitting exams today. It is actually quite hard on young people today because they cannot afford to have a bad exam, because so many other candidates will be getting straight A's.

But this is precisely why the A* was introduced for 2010.

Well I kind of think you can only directly compare an A now with an A then if you want to compare top grades only. They are publishing A/A stats for a start, not just A*.

It will also be skewed by social changes, it is now considered normal for children to stay in education until 18 no matter which background they are from. Even 20 years ago this was just not the case and plenty of bright kids went to work instead of A levels at 16. This means that more of the bright kids are doing A levels instead of just the ones with supportive parents so the standards go up.

If that school is very selective I would be shocked if they didn't get all As TBH, otherwise they would be 'devaluing' the kids. If you intake only from the top 10% (for example) of kids then you should expect them to come out within the top 10% of A level grades, which will be all As. It is also possible that over the years their selection criteria has become more genuinely based on academic qualities than any nepotism?

Plus all the normal stuff like grade inflation, exam technique, harder working kids etc.

Bear in mind the Flynn effect. If you want to keep a static level of "passes" on an IQ test you have to "bright them up" every 10 years or so. There are many explanations of the effect, but the most obvious one is that children are just cleverer.

Of course Yanbu.

I went to a grammar and not many achieved full A's across the board. I then went on to do a very challenging engineering degree - there were five firsts achieved.

Grade inflation helps nobody. For us oldies it makes us look 'fick' and the genuinely brilliant of this generation are also undermined by the distinctly average.

Here is the link rankings.ft.com/secondary-schools/secondary-schools-2011

The column you refer to doesn't actually mean that 94% of kids got three A or As, it means that of core subjects (can't see what core subject defintion is) 94% of results were A, A which means a lower percentage (albeit very high) will have 3As.

That school came first when ranked by this measure, I'm not sure you can draw more general conclusions from such a school.

I took my A-levels in 1998 under the old system. When I started teaching chemistry A-level in 2006 I used my old A-level notes, I had to remove about 1/5-1/4 of them because the new specs on the AS/A2 system contain less content.

So, less content. Then add in ability to resit to infinity, more students using private tutors (entry to top universities is so high stakes they daren't risk it on their own), more information available eg, exam seminars, websites etc....

From what I've seen students are not working harder although I accept that may just be those I have taught!

The results might be skewed by pupils taking easier subjects. Are there comparative figures for number of As in Maths, History eg?

Whether they have or not, university requirements have shot up, with some universities demanding as much as AAA. I don't think any universities had such high requirements a while ago.

My old Oxford professor tells me that over his career his students have become distinctly less knowledgeable on matriculation, but also more arrogant and entitled.

People/media have been talking about exams being dumbed down every year since I was at school. If that is in fact true then after 30 years of steady decline I'm surprised everyone isnt getting A or A*.

The next time your DC resolves your PC problem or teaches you to use Flash ask yourself if, as a child, you was smarter than DC.

My DC is certainly a lot smarter than I was at his age now. No doubt at 16 he will end up with better grades than me.

People go on above improved educational facililties, better teaching, the Internet, children maturing early, more children staying on to take exams AND then they are surprised that this is reflected in exam results.

Having said that, my HK b-in-law sent his 14 yr old DS over to study for GCSE. The kid's English is poor and coz the age cut off point is different he has skipped an academic year. And he is predicted several As. So maybe exams standards are low as opposed to being dumbed down over the years.

The modular system certainly makes it easier for students to get high grades as they only have to remember little chunks of the syllabus at a time and can resit if they have a bad day on a module whereas a bad day on a linear system would ruin your whole result. I'm a maths teacher and the content gets progressively harder on the core modules as you go from Y12 to Y13. It is possible for a Y13 student at the end of the course with all the extra accumulated knowledge to go back and resit modules from the beginning of the course - naturally resulting in higher grades as they now find this AS content easier having done the A2 stuff.

I sat my A-levels in 1996 and did a maths degree. Universities had already by this point introduced a 4 year maths degree (the MMath) which is what you were automatically enrolled on, although you could drop to a 3 year BSc later if you wished. The sales pitch was that this Masters was a more rigorous course and better preparation for further study, but the lecturers said that it was due to the poor level of maths knowledge students were arriving with from A-level, they had to add an extra year to the beginning of the course (rather than the end) to bring everyone up to a reasonable speed.

I went to grammar school and so did my sister. When my mum began teaching there, she got the whole year's results for my sister's O level year (1976) and my sister and I went through them together.
Of the girls, there were consistently more girls doing well in that a lot of them had five or six grade As.
Of the boys, in general they did not so well, but a few, probably about three, got straight As.
That was all.

We were all very bright, and yet very few got all As.
Therefore, the only possible conclusion is that exams are getting easier.

pinkappleby according to St Paul's own web site 89% of all the boys got A's at A level in all subjects and an amazing 50%+ A*'s.
I have been told that 30 years ago A levels were graded according to the average performance of all the candidates. Therefore only a certain number could ever achieve an A grade in any year. Thus maintaing the absolute standards.
I dont accept amerryscot argument about better teaching etc. This may apply to a state comp but not a school like Westminster/StPauls.

What happygardening said

A Levels used to be graded (as were O Levels) according to the cohort, so only 10% would get an A grade.

Now if the grade boundary for an A grade is 90%, if you get 90% then you get an A grade, before the changes it didn't matter as much what % you scored, it mattered how well other people did.

Also you only had one chance, 2 exams of 3 hours each examining everything, noe you do 6 1h15 exams over 2 years with unliited resits.

My DS recently sat a notoriously difficult entrance exam in 7 diferent subjects for his senior school the marks were graded A - D I believe. We were told that to get an A grade in a particular subject it was not a % but that you had to be head and shoulders above everyone else you had demonstrated an outstanding ability; there was no fixed % for an A grade and even though the school is super selective only a small number would be awarded an A grade.
Would this not be a better way of grading A levels I don't accept the A does this because schools like Win Coll Westminster and St Paul's are achieving 50%+ A's.

The grading is done by a complex system called UMS marks. For the majority of exams, you need 90% for A*, 80% for A, 70% for B etc.

UMS marks means that papers or different lengths, practicals, controlled assessments etc can all be factored so that they can be counted on one scale.

However, the awarding of UMS marks are not directly proportional to the raw marks. In A-level, for most papers, you have to get 50% in raw terms to score even an E grade. Below that, you get nothing. It is very harsh on the weaker candidates.

I haven't done a mega analysis of where the grades are awarded, but I would say that there are more higher grades awarded than there are lower grades nowadays. I don't think it is the bell curve that it used to be. But this doesn't mean that there isn't a bell curve in the raw marks that candidates achieved - but just once you fudge in the UMS, the bottom candidates disappear as if they never existed, and it looks like there are proportionally more top grades.

Whether the courses are rigorous or not compared to yesteryear is a worthy thing to debate. But we have to be realistic about the content. In Biology in the past, you might have had to sketch and label the internal organs of a rat, but is that really a skill our young people need today? A-levels today are more about analysing and synthesising rather than recalling factoids.

I don't think I would want to go back in time. Our world has moved on. It's a bummer that grades then can't be compared with grades now, especially university degree classifications.

HG half of Y13 at Winchester, Westminster and St. Pauls does not amount to many pupils in national terms. The percentage achieving the A* nationally is what counts.

Given the selectivity at those schools and their resources it's absolutely to be expected that they achieve those results.

Grade inflation exists. To say that teaching is better nowadays is just nonsense. (I'm a teacher btw). Exam boards compete against each other for custom, the way they do this is by showing they can achieve better pass rates than the other boards, and so the cycle continues . . .

Tom Bennet puts it so much better than I can:

www.behaviourguru.blogspot.com/search/label/Glenys%20Stacey

I should have put, "to say that it is because teaching is better nowadays is nonsense".

The fact that different exam boards are competing proves the standards are slipping - schools will choose the exam board that gets them the most passes. So the competition will be to be the EASIEST.

But Yellowstone my point is that when my DH was at St Pauls with friends at Westminster, both were unbelievably selective even in those days (30 years ago oh God where how time flies) and 50% were not getting A*'s. Those sort of grades were seen as the preserve of the nerds/swots/geniuses and were something distinguishing you from the vast majority. Something surely must have changed for this to happen and dumbing down would seem to be the obvious explanation.
My DH feels it is the fault of the Blair goverment rather than raising the standard of education in schools he's lowered the exam grade bar but sold it to Jo Public as an overall improvement is teaching, schools etc. (I'm not critising teachers by the way) just intersted in people opinions.
What concerns me in an increasingly globalized world that other countries will do the opposite with their exams and that in the future our children will find that there A level grades which they've worked so hard for will not be worth the paper they are written on.

It is very shallow to put everything down to grade inflation without trying to unpack why grades are higher nowadays.

It is not all down to one thing. It is complex.

When people talk about grade inflation, they often mean to say that they believe exams are easier.

Exams are different, but they are not necessarily easier. Easier to one person isn't the same as easier to someone else. Why should top grades be the reserve of those who find traditional/old fashioned teaching styles adequate? What about the poor buggers who do not have those learning styles? Do they not count?

But the problem is amerryscot whilst the number of A grades is increasing schools like St Pauls etc are still streets ahead of the others; now they are getting 50%+ A*'s if this is now the gold standard why are so many getting it. IMO there are only three reasons St Pauls etc. has become even more selective ( my DH doubts this), St Pauls etc. are just better at playing the exam system than other schools or the exams have been dumbed down. If it is the later then I am unconvinced that changing the teaching style has levelled out the playing field ot done a good service to those "poor buggers who do not have those learning styles"
I find it ridiculous that 94% can get A's and I'm just concerned that my and your children will have an over inflated view of their exam grades regardless of where they were educated. Maybe I'm wrong and that the exams are equally as difficult as they were 30 years ago this was the point of the original thread to try and find out from those who know more than I.