A-Level Pass Rate

Once again the A-Level pre-University exam pass rate has gone up. It is really difficult for Universities to distinguish students. A warden from the University of Oxford made an interesting point on the radio this morning. The universities want to know which students are the best so they prefer it if the students are graded relative to one another; the top 10% get an A for example. The schools want to be fair to the students and give them an absolute mark that isn't based on how well they fared against others ; they might be in a year of kids who are smarter than in an average year. The Oxford warden suggested this; give the kids a percentage mark. This way they can be both compared against other students and they also get a grading based purely on how well they did. Good idea. Problems might arise when kids miss out on a place by 1%. There might be a deluge of appeals for remarking of papers. But it has to be better than the current system of choosing between 100 kids, all with the same grade B or whatever.

The next problem to fix will be the creeping up of grades, year on year. Are the students getting smarter? Are teaching methods and schools improving each year? Unlikely. A sure way to test if the papers are getting easier would be to take a representative sample of the kids from this year and make them sit a paper from 5 years ago. Of course, it should be easy to look at a paper and see if the questions are easier than a few years ago. When I was at University I looked at past papers and the older papers always seemed to be harder. Older papers seemed to set really challenging problems that tested not just knowledge but understanding too. The more recent papers seemed to be an act of guided regurgitation.