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.

Depends on what your overall goals are.

Anecdote which doesn't really answer the question: I recently met a student studying a humanities subject at Southampton. Her A-level results were not good enough to get her on to another similar course at Southampton. I read a humanities subject at Cambridge 20 years ago. It turns out that we took exactly the same subjects at A-level and got exactly the same grades.

This issue of dumbing down of A'levels started to be discussed probably 20-25 years ago. Definitely before modular A'levels.
Actually there isn't time in a 2 year A'level course to do many resits (you can only sit the exams in January and July), and the material moves on quickly so it could be quite hard to revise earlier modules.

Drop out rates, the greatest factor in students dropping out of university is financial hardship. They are also more likely to drop out if they come from families/backgrounds where university education is not a traditional route. I don't think drop out rates have increased that much recently, but if the have it could be argued it is because of higher participation by non-traditional social groups. And to be honest training as a Doctor is very very hard, and unless you have parents who are doctors you may not realise exactly what you are letting yourself in for.

Universities also have probably spent the last 30 years trying to catch up with the changes to how students are taught at school. Even more so as there still isn't any requirement at most Universities for Lecturers to be taught how to teach. They may also expect students to come through with the same fact based learning as I received rather than the deeper understanding based learning that is aimed for in schools nowadays.

Also although the DM etc. may hate them, non-traditional exams can be rigorous. I know Medics who have sat multiple choice exams (with marks taken off for wrong answers). I have sat both open book and take away exams; in which case it is your understanding and ability to use information which is tested rather than just being able to regurgitate it.

A'level is usually taught on about 4 contact hours per subject per week. That isn't enough time to cover the syllabus and to teach pupils to just reproduce correct answers by rote.

Drop out rates are lowest the more 'academic' the institution on the whole and the particular demands of Medicine and the recruitment policy for at least some pre-Clinical courses make it not especially relevant either.

Some multiple choice tests are extremely testing: the LNAT and the BMAT are both cases in point.

The friends we have whose children have dropped out of uni. did not come from families/backgrounds where university was not traditional in fact the complete opposite and money was certainly not an issue either. We know of about 6 children all privately educated at top schools who felt they were wasting their time at university and that the lecturers were being forced to teach basic skills punctation, research skills even using an index to some of their fellow students in the first year. All were at RG universities requiring at least 2 A's.
They of course don't feel the A levels have been dumbed down because they worked hard to get those grades. But at the same time felt that some of their fellow students were just not up to it even those with better grades than they had.

Multiple choice tests are designed to test the full breadth of the specification. The longer answer questions address smaller parts in more depth.

Ben Goldacre: Exams are getting easier

mummytime if lecturers are lecturers and not teachers, they wouldn't need a teaching qualification. I didn't expect my lecturers to teach me (20 years back). Does your comment mean that you do expect lecturers now to teach?

My DS took his A Levels in 2009 (before the A*). He was in the top set for English and History. All the boys in those sets invariably got As. He reckoned there were at least two "standards" in both of those sets. Really clever boys who found them easy and read around the subject for fun (what I would call an academic approach) and clever boys who could get an A by doing the minimum well.
I think he is describing A and B grade students from my day.

I generally have a lot of respect for Ben Goldacre, but the article is not particularly 'scientific'.

I had a look through the Chemistry questions from 1965, 1975, 1985 to present, and I don't think any had a claim for being particularly difficult or rigorous. I think students are not asked to memorise as much nowadays, so they are not going to do as well on questions where they have to recall a particular fact. For example, one of the older questions was about making ammonia, and they asked a question about how much nitrogen without giving the equation. I am confident that if they gave the equation, today's students would be just as competent about solving the problem.

It's very easy to ask today's students to do a question from 1965, but it's not really possible for a student from 1965 to answer a question from today's papers. How would such a student have tackled a problem about nanotechnology, global warming, smart materials, designer products?

I am not arguing about an element of grade inflation, but I do take a bit of an exception to 'dumbing down'. The two things are not the same.

Hg, there may be a whole different set of reasons for well off, well educated children baling after a short stint at uni. The reasons they give to their parents or the reasons their parents give to friends may not be the real ones. Some of them have had it too easy and lack stickability. Your own set may be different but I've been amazed at the slightly weak attitude of some hugely privileged top schooler friends (or rather children of friends) who have recently flaked off: they all justify it, but I think sometimes unconvincingly. Your six may be very different of course. With mine, I just wonder how different their approach would have been if they'd had no parental money/ gullibility to fall back on.

I second amerryscot with regard to History (in which I got an A in the olden days).

I wouldn't say that exams are getting easier, I would say that teachers and schools are training pupils to pass exams rather than understand and enjoy the subject. What questions may come up, what part of the syllabus to ignore etc. Even though i do recall trying out a few decades old papers during my a-levels and finding them much harder, it was perhaps due to the syllabus changing and not covering as much now as it did then.

If you want to see irrefutable evidence of A Levels being dumbed down, look at the maths syllabus.

A lot of the harder topics that I covered in 1980 (matrices, complex numbers, moments of inertia - actually also the fun stuff) is now "Further Maths". I was too thick for further then, but most of that syllabus seems to have buggered off to Uni.

But clawedbawls if you look at the maths syllabus you will see the introduction of a Decision Maths module which wasn't even an option back in 1980. I would say that the Simplex Algorithm from D1 is at least as complicated as matrix manipulation. You can't say that it moved to Further Maths because it was too hard if you don't have an appreciation of what replaced it. The Simplex Algorithm was only devised in the mid 1900s so it is possible to say that rather than being dumbed down, the syllabus has been updated. It would be like saying that the Physics syllabus has been dumbed down because it doesn't contain X anymore when it now contains Quantum Mechanics.

I'm not saying that Maths A-level hasn't been dumbed down, btw (GCSE maths certainly has), but that the change in syllabus isn't 'irrefutable evidence' of this.

I happen to have copies of the School Leavers' Maths Exam from 1946 (pre-O-level) and it is undoubtedly much harder than even A* GCSE. A sample arithmetic question is:
'A pond whose area is 3.5 acres is frozen over with ice whose thickness is 2 in. Calculate, to the nearest ton, the total weight of the ice, assuming that each cubic foot weighs 57 lb.'
Even allowing for a change to metric units which would make it far easier, students these days would expect to see the question broken down for them, with a helpful picture showing the ice.

Sticky - sorry to have not got back earlier (I am whipping my DS to get his GCSE portfolio finished). I have taught at University level, I also have studied for a teaching qualification. The best lecturers (naturally or otherwise) know the rudiments of teaching. I have had some brilliant lecturer's, and even better worked with an amazing one in the US (he continually won student voted for medals for his teaching). However most lecturers are probably more about the level I was, and know their subject but don't know enough about how to impart it to students, so don't use a full range of techniques in their teaching (just throwing out the odd question to the students, or a 2 minute discussion with the person next to you, could help a lot with concentration/understanding).
The worst lecturers, do not give eye contact, present facts but not understanding or do not even aim that all students should understand their material. That is my experience of 20 years ago as a student, nowadays most students have been taught up to University in an interactive and skilled way (not just making notes), and so being just droned on at by someone who has no understanding of the theories of learning must be an even bigger culture shock (and not necessarily what students want to pay for).

Noblegiraffe - I think that Maths question is pretty easy (if in metric, I have no idea of imperial measures) and seem like a foundation paper question if you had the (annoying) picture of a lake, and it was broken into two parts.

Interesting discussion. In my opinion we need to decide what exams are actually for. If they are to determine what a student knows, or can do, then it does not matter how many A are given out. What matters then is that each year's paper is comparable. If we want exams to "sort" students, we need to go back to top 10% get A. Possibly, employers, universities, schools, parents etc, all want different things. Are exams a competition or a demonstration?

But I'm also sure St Paul's is much more selective now then it was.

I know the City of London schools are more selective, as I know people who went there, who would never get in nowadays.

The only real problem is if we want to compared A'levels over a long time span. I would say my A'levels are not really comparable to todays. (The syllabuses are very different, in my subject something are in A'level that I didn't touch until degree, and the level of understanding is higher, other things could be easier, and the grades are just different.)

I think there may also be a flaw in trying to draw comparisons between the student body now, as a whole, and the student body thirty years ago, because of the vast expansion in numbers.

At the sharp end the standards are incredibly high (anyone who doubts it should go and talk to the students) which is relevant for a discussion about the relative challenge of A/ A* grades at A2.

mummytime that question, if in metric, broken into two parts and with a picture of a lake could be on the Foundation paper but it would be a C grade question, thus putting it supposedly at O-level level - the same level as the question involving acres and cubic feet, not broken down with no picture. (It was an early question on the paper, not a challenging one).

I suspect that one of the major reasons that people's arithmetic is worse these days is because of metric measures. If your maths paper was full of questions involving imperial measures and pounds, shillings and pence that you had to deal with as a matter of course in order to answer the actual maths question about volume and density then you would be far more adept at it.

Incidentally there was a 2 mark question on a maths Foundation GCSE paper recently which required a conversion from mph to km/h without being given the conversion (they are supposed to know it). The national mean score for that question was 0.03 out of 2.

I think that achievement must have improved over the decades. Think about learning difficulties such as dyslexia. In previous generations, these children would have been written off as thick or slow and would have left their secondary modern school at 14. Now, a fair share of dyslexics are getting As and A*s, as they deserve.

I think there probably is a little bit of unexplained grade inflation, but most of it can be explained.

I have been teaching since 1999. Since then there have been two major changes of A level specs, and each time I have had to remove stuff from my teaching notes, as there is less content. The style of the exams has changed, there is less memorising of facts, more application of knowledge.

Less memorising of facts makes complete sense in our technological world where most people carry access to google in their pocket. We have instant access to more information than ever, the important skills are how to deal with it.