Humanities v STEM subject results at A level

[Almostdonenow]

My dc's school's A level results look great at first glance - approx 50% A/A star in STEM subjects and a couple of other random subjects, but every year in Humanities subjects (particularly English & History) the A/A star grades are around 10%, with a fair few students missing their predicted grades by a long way.
Is this a common disparity? Do schools put more funds into STEM subjects? Maybe the coursework has a detrimental effect on revision? Or perhaps the teachers are too stretched?
When this has been queried with teachers previously, the stock answer is "well they're really hard subjects" but aren't STEM subjects hard too?! Or are a lower percentage of Humanities subjects awarded an A/A star and this is normal for most schools?!
For context, this is a 'good' state school in a 'leafy' area!

Is there any difference in the requirements for being allowed to take different A levels? I think sometimes the STEM subjects (particularly maths and even more obviously FM) required eg a 7 (or 8 for FM) whereas the humanities would be allowed with a lower threshold.

This. STEM subjects usually have much higher requirements, especially at comprehensives and non-selective sixth form colleges.

Nationally there is a higher % of A star and A in STEM I think? By a fair bit

The highest A/A* percentages are for FM - obviously that’s not because it’s ‘easy’ to get top grades in, it’s because only the ablest mathematicians take it.

So last year for example, Maths was 42%ish whereas English was 25%

Application of mark schemes in English Literature, History, Politics etc is less cut and dried and more subjective. Questions can be more unusual or unlike past paper questions. I know from my DD2 that if you have covered every single past paper question and all of Seneca for A level Biology and Chemistry that you would probably not have many surprises in the actual exams.

Sorry should have added, my dc has recently had A level results - all lower than expected. From what I understand there were a lot of high attainers in their History & English Lit classes but only a couple achieved As. STEM subject results are always way higher The requirement in prospectus is at least a 7 to take A level Maths. Nothing stated for STEM but I imagine most have 7s at GCSE, but I think most of the friends of my dc who didn't get As had GCSE grades of 7s & 8s...

Oh wow, I didn't realise that! So already at a 'disadvantage' taking an A level in a subject where less entrants will achieve top grades? But still, my dc's school is nowhere near the 25% for English...!

Having just watched DS and pals get results in A levels, it seems to me school struggled in predicting the humanities accurately and it has more variance "on the day". The STEM subjects you are right if you are right. For example DS consistently got Astar in history but didnt in the exams, nothing massively "wrong" with his answers but examiner marked him bottom end of the range for each question.

Yes you're right, definitely more room for movement in humanities grades...

In general I would say it's more common to get a high grade for STEM subjects but also more common to get a low grade, whereas humanities subjects tend to be more in the middle. It's just the nature of the subject. In maths, if you get everything right you'll get 100% and if you get everything wrong you'll get 0%, whereas in English or history it's almost impossible to write a "perfect" essay or to write one worth nothing at all. So the grades cluster in the middle.

STEM has also been talked up a lot in recent years. People emphasise how hard it is. This can lead to self selection I think.

That makes sense. But I suppose it ultimately boils down to the individual school - so if English is 25% average A/A star nationally, my dc's school is and always has been way below that figure. But the 50% A/A* for STEM (which I imagine is pretty spot on average or above average nationally) shows a disparity at school level.
However, if my dc's school has a 10% average A/A* in English, then there must be some schools who achieve 25% and some 40%+ to make up for the 10% schools, if that makes sense, so either way, my dc's school is close to the bottom of the pile!

Entry requirements are generally lower for A level humanities subjects. In our schools, you can do English, history etc with grade 5 gcse. You can't do maths or stem subjects with a grade 5.
So humanities subjects probably have a larger number of students with lower attainment at GCSE, than stem subjects do.

Grade requirements are no lower in my dc's school. From what I understand, most of her classes were full of grade 7, 8 & 9 at gcse. Perhaps STEM subjects self select with higher grades though...

There are multiple reasons for this.
Others have mentioned that STEM subjects are more content based, are more consistent from year to year, and have less subjective assessment criteria; it's easier for schools (and students) to know what needs to be learned and exactly how to put it down on paper to get full marks. It's also easier to test to identify what content a student is weak in and fill in gaps quickly in later years. There's also some self-selection happening; schools do often have more firm requirements for continuing study in STEM subjects and students are less likely to do STEM subjects as backups or "I don't know what I want to do" subjects.

Two other things are at play IMO:

1. Individual schools can absolutely have stronger and weaker departments. This isn't so much about funds (not having money for a fancy new lab isn't a detriment to an English department) but it's just because schools are like any other organization where sometimes one department has stronger leadership that attracts and retains stronger employees and they function better as a group.
2. Technology. We have students doing essays and other prep with chatGPT, rapidly weakening research skills, shortening attention spans, a dependency on predictive text and spell-check, and less use of formal spoken and written communication in daily life. Reading comprehension, information synthesis and writing skills are eroding and this is likely to get worse before we can correct course - if we ever do.

Try and gauge progress made from GCSE to A Level. Loads more kids want to do STEM than humanities so STEM more likely to be higher attainers in the first place.
Don't know about STEM but I know humanities A Levels are hard - my best tip would be to get some tutoring from an A Level examiner in the subject prior to the exam.

I also think it depends on what exam board the school uses OP. I've posted on various threads about my DD getting a D in Edexcel Psychology A level when predicted A/A star. Looking into it, the grade boundary for A star Edexcel is 59.6%, for AQA it's 77% which I assume shows that the Edexcel papers must be far harder - if Edexcel required 77% like AQA presumably they'd give out hardly any A stars!

A far higher % of people doing STEM seem to get A/A stars than those doing Humanities, are we honestly saying that they're cleverer/more academic? If we accept that they aren't, surely equal quantities of STEM and Humanity students should get the higher grades?

The more I read about exam boards/grade boundaries etc. the more cynical I am about the system. It's a shame that they have such influence over a student's future.

I posted this on a different thread but it may be relevant here.

It seems that commonly students find the jump from gcse to a level hard - sometimes insurmountable - for maths, physics and chemistry. I don’t think I’ve heard other subjects mentioned as often as suffering from this. Some kids who are bright in other ways somehow just don’t seem to get the concepts, whereas to others it may be a lot more obvious.
So another factor may be what is the attrition rate - if they’re allowed to start more than 3 subjects, which is most likely to be dropped? Which ones more often result in students having to change tack and redo a year? I don’t know the answers to this, but it might be interesting if there were stats available.

It's definitely all the reasons everyone else has given but I think it's worth echoing a PP that where people look at the A stars and As what they don't see or acknowledge is those hums subjects are clustering at A to C (haven't checked but I believe B is the most commonly awarded grade in history, English Lit and sociology , for example) where there will be far more outright fails in maths, physics and so on. It's virtually unheard of to fail English lit, sociology, drama and so on and Es are rare.

The unis know this too - hence the high grade requirements these days for many STEM subjects and the typical top uni history offer being around AAA - ABB. This includes Oxford with AAA required for history (although in practice most will have higher, of course).

Unfortunately in life though, I reckon that people won't care what the subjects are, they'll just judge the 3 A star person to be cleverer than the BBB one. I can see why employers do their own testing when recruiting.

OP, what you need is this:

analytics.ofqual.gov.uk/apps/Alevel/Outcomes/

It's an interactive charting tool thingy that will show you the distribution of A Level grades by subject.

For ease I attach screenshots of maths and English Lit. You will see that this year just over 40% of 18yo got A or higher in maths and I think 25%-ish got A or above for English Lit. You can also infer that more people failed maths than English Literature.

It's logical really - maths has virtually no grey areas and is therefore harder to pass because you absolutely have to know it, you can't guess. But it is easier to get a high grade because if you know it you know it, and you will only be losing marks for silly mistakes or not showing your workings.

English Literature, apart from remembering the quotes and the plots, is mainly grey areas, interpretation and opinion. Therefore it is easier to pass because almost everyone has an opinion and can guess but hard to have the maturity at 18 to have very sophisticated insights.

How many pupils studied English and Humanities compared to STEM?

When I was at school decades ago we were always told that the jump in approach (rather than difficulty) from O to A level was bigger in humanities as the whole technique of an essay flipped from recounting the facts to deploying the facts to argue a case and its contra indications. No idea if this is true but I remember being very surprised when my head of year said this as she was also the head of maths....

A subject like history can be very subjective and gives a lot of scope for differences of opinion even with a mark scheme. One of my friends degree transcript shows that one marker gave her a grade that was borderline 2:1/ first and another 2:2/third for the same paper. The moderation sided with the first mark - she was relieved......