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.

I agree, noble.

I sort of agree, but it has gone too far in some cases. Like science GCSEs, for example. Access to google without a certain level of understanding is not always helpful.

I would much rather that in science gcse they learned how to evaluate evidence, how clinical trials work, the process of peer review, not to take arguments from authority etc, anything which helps them dismiss all sorts of bullshit that will be thrown at them in the future (see daily mail cancer cure claims for example) than how to label parts of a blast furnace. But obviously as we want a significant proportion of them to go on to be scientists, there also needs to be room for some fact acquisition.

They do that, noble.

I know, I was assuming that was what was being referred to in Endo's post about going too far in science gcse.

As someone who was extensively involved in clinical trials in anther life I have as yet failed to meet anyone outside of the industry whether they be adult or child who really understands how they are organised and what the statistical significance of the results is. In my current job where many have an understanding of clinical trials and stats, recent results are still broken down and their statistical significance carefully explained and posted on our in house website!

Noble,

I don't get your false dichotomy that you either need to learn facts or learn how to think. Education is about acquiring both simultaneously. Someone gave an example about ammonia production upthread, saying that a student today would not know the formula but would be able to calculate the proportion of nitrogen if given the formula. To me, that is not good enough. You need to know both. And, also, giving the formula is a big hint at how to do the calculation. A reasonable factual knowledge base is a necessary though not sufficient base for learning how to think. For example, it would be hard to think about chemistry without at least an approximate knowledge of the periodic table in one's head.

In maths, a subject I know well, there is absolutely zero question that the A level has been dumbed down in terms of both knowledge and problem solving. You are not only given a lot more info but talked through problems step by step, and that in a narrower (though trendier) syllabus. It cannot be ignored that university dons in all the top unis are saying that they spend a lot of the first year teaching A grade A Level students what they used to automatically know.

Whether teaching has improved is highly debatable. It is very hard to measure. On the other hand, there have always been fantastic teachers and I am unconvinced that supplying them with "active" whiteboards rather than "chalk and talk" could have improved them. Further, in science, a lot of the experiments that were most exciting are now considered too dangerous for school children.

happygardening I'm not thinking of that level of analysis about clinical trials, that obviously takes quite a level of statistical knowledge. What I would like to see is a pupil able to look at a 'blueberries cure cancer' news story and be able to ask critical questions like 'was the research done on humans? What was the sample size? Was the treatment compared to a placebo or the next best treatment? Phase I, II or III?'. If the research was done on a rat, I would like them to understand just how far off a blueberry cancer pill actually is. These kind of healthcare stories appear in the press all the time and given that we all get ill it is quite important to have some level of understanding of this. A lot of students I teach don't even know that drugs are in fact tested on humans - if animal testing is discussed, someone always brings up humans as an 'alternative'.

Larry I agree with you about how maths has been dumbed down, re breaking down of questions etc. An extra year was added to the maths degree before I started uni in 1996 (I did the 4 year course), so certainly there was concern about dumbing down before this. I don't know whether I can say that the syllabus has been dumbed down since then, because as I said, new material has been added to the course which might potentially justify some old content removal without a lowering of standards.

I too am unconvinced "that supplying them with "active" whiteboards rather than "chalk and talk" improves results in countries like China and India teaching remains very traditional but they certainly seem to be getting top exam results in my DS's school.
As a recent uni student there were none of these things, lecturers were still using OHP's but I personally didn't feel this affected the quality of the teaching. One of our lectures was voted lecturer of the year and he only used OHP's but was a wonderful lecturer. The text books he used were as dry as hell not a picture/cartoon to be seen and many of the students found it hard going ay first because it was such a contrast with their school experiences. But once they were used to it they too agreed that he was wonderful and many opted for his modules not because of any particular interest in his subject but because they knew the lecturers would be so clear and well organised, although within a few weeks we were always hooked. He also never went over old exam papers but had excellent results; it was all there in the lecture if you could be bothered to listen and take notes. Or perhaps I should say if you had the intelligence to listen understand and take coherent notes.

noblegiraffe if this sort of thing is/can be included anywhere in the school curriculum it would be excellent.
I'm always exasperated by Jo Publics lack of knowledge. The conversation goes like this; "have you taken some pain killers for that head ache/painful ankle/sore ear etc?" The common reply "I never take tablets you don't know whats in them or what it might do to you" I always want to say on the contrary by the time you can walk into Boots and by it over the counter we know exactly what is in it because its been tested on every man and his dog (rat) and we also know exactly what it will do to you or not.

Larry when I was thinking about the importance of fact acquisition versus analysis I was thinking about my RE GCSE where we had to study and be able to quote Mark's Gospel, and my German A-level where we similarly had to memorise chunks of text from 3 German novels for potential reproduction in an exam, depending on the questions being asked.
I expect it would be considered dumbing down to bring the books into the exam, but so long as the time saved memorising is spent doing more rigorous analysis, I can't really see a problem. You have to decide what skills you are testing.

"Or perhaps I should say if you had the intelligence to listen understand and take coherent notes."

It's not so much intelligence as the right temperement you need for this. By offering a wider range of teaching methods you can get through to people with a wider ranger of learning styles. I wouldn't say they are necessarily less intelligent, but they are far less likely to engage with conventional teaching methods.

As for Indian/Chinese successes, from what I have read this is down to a culture of very hard work rather than particularly inspiring teaching.

Chinese and Indian students also perform well in UK schools. It's not the teaching, it's the students and the work ethic.

I love my whiteboard. I'm a maths teacher and I'm terrible at drawing, so any geometry lesson is automatically made easier to visualise. Anything dynamic like volumes of revolution is transformed. I can pull up an animation of a train on a journey and show how the travel graph changes as the train accelerates or pulls into a station. I can instantly and accurately plot graphs, then show how changing the equation changes the shape of the graph. Instead of imagining that an equation is a set of scales, you can show them animated scales and what happens if you take x from one side but not the other.
Yes you can do that with OHTs, but if a student says 'what if....?' you aren't restricted by what you have pre-prepared.

My university lectures consisted of the lecturer writing on the board and 200 of us dutifully copying what he had written down. For 4 years. I know that there are better teaching methods than that.

Im not knocking white boards just find it difficult to accept that this is one of the main reasons given for the unbelievable improvement in A level grades. I can see that this might have an impact on non selective state schools but not on schools with a long history of being highly selective like St Paul's Boys.
You may be interested to know that IME the majority boys there thirty years ago came from parents with a "culture of very hard work."

Of course grade inflation exists. And it's perfectly possible for really quite thick people to get A*.

Some things that were part of O level maths are now part of the GCE syllabus. If that isn't a very clear example of grade inflation, then I'm a prima ballerina.

My personal feeling is that yes exams are getting easier. Well, at least the syllabusses are different etc. Certainly in maths some things that used to be a-level are now degree level I think.

I haven't read all the posts but did get as far as pushydad's. It is wildly unlikely that children now are far brighter than when we were young! We don't evolve that quickly! As for your examples - I can do those things and when I was 8 I got my ZX spectrum and spent hours programming it to do not very exciting things. Parents always think their children are doing clever thing but for sure across tge board human beings aren't getting cleverer!!!

Also I think this because I did a science degree in the early 90s and frankly it was bloody impossible. I am now doing a similarish degree with the OU and so far it has been a piece of piss. So that's interesting. Certainly when I was at uni they were bemoaning how little knowledge the students had when they arrived. For financial reasons they were doing what many other science courses were doing at the time which was set entry grades very low and know they woudl lose a lot of students after they failed the first year. I have heard that on some courses that the 1st year uni is now covering stuff that used to be taught at A-Level. So I would be amazed if overall the standards are the same, the difficulty of what is taught is the same. It can't be. But the universities have to make money too...

And then you have the explosion in "professional" qualifications, maybe to make up for these gaps. Most jobs now have exams you can take to hone your skills whereas in the past there were only the obvious ones (accountancy etc).

I think Alevel results have improved because the structure of the courses and exams is more inclusive.

MrsAlfred - thick people can get an A* in what?

I don't think they can get an A* in rigorous, traditionally academic subjects. They have to score 90% in all their modules, which is pretty near perfection.

A 'thick' person may get an A* in Art or Textiles, but many 'clever' people would struggle to even get an E. These thick people are human beings too, you know, and they will make a contribution to society. Let's celebrate all our achievements and talents. Intellect is not the only one worthwhile.

Having said that, textbooks are probably better and information is more accessible. If I don't like or understand the information provided in the school-issue dry (and B&W) text book, I can put 'ox bow lake' into a google search and come up with any number of much better explanations and photos etc.

So long as you accept that there are reasons other than just dumbing down!

Exam preparation has got much better for one. Assessment For Learning is a teaching method whereby you share the teaching objectives with the students so they know what they are going to learn, and the assessment criteria so they know how they will be assessed, and they also assess their own progress. Marking indicates what they need to do to achieve a higher grade. Students are now far more aware of what examiners will be looking for than was my experience at school.

I sat GCSEs in the first year the A was introduced. I got an A in maths, but although I was very (very) academic, only As in my other subjects. A few years later, students are coming out with loads of As. Not because they were cleverer than me or because the exams had got easier, but because the teachers had amended their schemes of work etc to focus on the skills needed to get an A. This hadn't been needed before because there was no difference between getting 80% and 90% so no need to push. It is the same with the A* at A-level, now that 90% is something to aim for, 80% is no longer good enough for top students.

Great points, noblegiraffe

MrsJAlfredPrufrock, that's a bit sweeping, the assertion that 'really quite thick people' can get an A Level A*.

What on earth do you base that on, since the grades have only been awarded in two cycles so far?

How many of your DC have been through those two cycles and what grades did they each achieve? Or are you a teacher? (in which case your view would be at odds with thos of the teachers at our (very good) school).

It is not easy to get an A at A2 without brains - as well as a good amount of application too. Some of the A students could knock spots off pontificating MNers, I bet. Give them credit where it's due!

I agree that you need brains to get an A but what concerns me was that at St Paul's Boys the school I'm using as my example and as I knew it 30 years ago my bench mark over 50% got A's in 2011 this did not happen in my DH's day and A as it was then was the exception rather than the rule. This leads me to wonder if A levels have been dumbed down

I think there are so many reasons why grades have gone up - grade inflation may well be a part of it, but I think there are other factors too.

One service my exam board now offers is a results plus service, where at the touch of a button I can look and see exactly how well my students did in their exams - I can see the actual marks they got for every question. If a student doesn't do well, then we'll look at their results, develop an action plan to combat the problem (was it timings, a bad question, not answering the part b question properly etc) and then they resit the exam in the Jan. this is a world apart from my experience where I dossed for 18 months, then in the January of my second year said 'oh shit', panicked and then revised like mad for the exams. Students are not allowed to doss like they did in my day. 4 months after arriving at college, they are now sitting exams. I don't think I had completed any homework myself .

I also agree with other reasons that other posters have put forward; today the exams place less emphasis on fact memorisation and more emphasis on analysis (for my subject at least), so the way students are taught has changed accordingly. Long gone are the days of just note taking in lessons, or worse the close exercises I spent hours doing as my teachers droned on!

SQ if you are going to flatly state that "across the board human beings aren't getting cleverer!!!" then you do need to explain away the Flynn effect, which appears to demonstrate, on the basis of enormous amounts of well-attested worldwide experiments, that they really are, and at an evolutionarily improbable rate.

However, it's probably not enough to explain the change in grades, so I assume that better teaching, teaching to the test, and a race to the bottom amongst exam boards also play a part.