% system would be far more useful - just give you a % mark based on where you came compared to everyone else who took the exam
no arguments then tbh.. top 10% will automatically be included in the 90-100% mark & employers & universitys will actually have a way of comapring candidates
Well that is the way they are going - from next year individual module grades will be available to unis as well as overall grades. Wouldnt have been great for me as I had a couple of mediocre 65%s pulled up by a couple of 97% grades in one or two of mine.
I would dispute the statement that the rise in pass rate and A grade pass rate is
only to do with falling standards. In some a-levels certainly the standards are lower in some respects but these are not the only factors. Also you have to remember two other facts
1) The people who are saying a-levels are easier now are people who took them in the past and are perhaps a little annoyed that people seem to be getting top grades more easily these days.
2)Statisticians are bloody liars! Well not quite but stats can be presented in a more favourable light.
For example one point that hasnt been made is that the AS A grade rate is
significantly lower than that of the A2 rate. Something like 17.5% as comapred to 23/24%. This would indicate to me at least that the ability to try more subjects in your first year then stick with your stronger subjects may mean people end up with higher grades as they end up taking exams in their stronger areas where previously students taking 3 A-levels from start to finish were stuck with their choices. (An example from my own experience would be chemistry - learned after the first year that I wasnt bad at it I just couldn;t be bothered as it was bloody boring. As it happens I continued with it as I wanted 5 A-levels not 4)
Some other reasons for and increase in pass rates.
1) The modular nature means that the infiormation is fresh in your mind when you take the test. Now you could argue that taking all your exams at the end of your course ensures you dont just cram an area and then forget about it but actually learn the subject. Possibly, or it may just be that modular teaching helps to learn the subject in a structured way which makes it in turn easier to pass.
At this point though you have to ask yourself - do we want A-levels to be hard enough to keep a circa %10 A pass rate to show who are the brightest or do we award an A grade to everybody who has achieved a certain level of understanding and knowledge of the subject?
From the point of view of a top uni then clearly you want to know about the very best, but from the point of view of a less selective uni then maybe you just want all your students to have a certain understanding of a particular subject.
Then you have to ask do we apply a normal distribution to exam grades and use linear interpolation to assign people into different quotas of grades.
2)Perhaps teaching methods have improved - I personally dont think this is true but it is a point worth considering.
3) Teaching is more geared towards passing exams rather than learning about a subject and receiving a broad education. Now this I agree with, in fact in some courses we spent quite a portion of the the last term in revision classes doing exam questions rather than learning anything new about the course. Now Im not saying this is right or that this is how it should be done, but it would explain a rise in top grade passes. Also the fact that many teachers are assessed on their pass rates and can get better jobs based on this certainly gives them the impetus to persue this method.
4)The fact that there are more "soft option" courses now (media studies, social studies etc. you know what they are) which have enormous A-grade pass rates pushes the overall average up, whereas the more traditional (and increasingly neglected to the point where some courses eg. Physics are being dropped in some schools) retain more realistic grade distribution.
5)Perhaps kids are getting brighter - I certainly dont agree with this but it is a possible reason.
6)In order to standardise testing and make sure that each year has fair balanced course a large amount of repitition and predictability has come in. This combined with the exam focus of teachers means that it is easier to train people to answer predictable questions even if they are theoretically difficult.
Also people keep saying that they used O-level books to teach their A-Level courses, a couple of questions:
1) Did using these books allow people to get the top grades?
2)Could it not also be that instead of A-levels being much easier GCSES are much easier than old O-levels (a statement I really do find hard to dispute) and that we are now having to bring people all the way from below old O-level standard up to that standard and then into A-Level standard.
At the end of the day top unis havent been overly impressed by 3 or more As at A-Level for a number of years. For example 4-5 years ago I was predicted 5 As I think in my A-levels (which I didnt actually get but thats irrelevant with reagrads to my actual uni applications) which got me an interview at Cambridge uni, but then everybody was predicted the same so we were tested by them and put through various interviews to actually assess our abilities (didnt get in btw although I do partly blame the fact that I was tested on material I was to cover just after my cambridge test.)
Also this talk of bringing in extra exams or introducing an A*/A+ level at the top of the stack is all very well but we have actually had a system in place for years, although nobody has heard of it. Assuming it still runs the exams are called S.T.E.P which are Sixth Term Examination Papers, I know a lot of the Oxbridge colleges I looked at either reccomended or required that you take these.
As for the IB system, I imagine it does stretch people more than A-Levels, but I wouldnt have wanted to take it myself as it would have stopped me concentrating entirely on my science course and have forced me to take some amount of english or foreign language or whatever (Can someone confirm what exactly the structure is?) and I really didnt want to do that. Frankly for the sort of uni course and sort of career that I was and am interested in I dont really see the point in me learning a language to A-level/ IB standard as no job ever seems to require this (they either tend to want you fluent in another language or have no requirement). Similarly I think that my level of english is more than adequte and wouldnt really have befited from two years of reading pride and prejudice and sense and sensibility (which are in fact the two major texts that a friend who did english lit at a-level studied and got nothing from unless you count being able to quote such tripe as "oh mr darcy blah blah blah" as useful).
Well didnt mean to come out with quite such a tirade but it does annoy me when people with no statistical knowledge/qaulification and who havent actually looked at a recent A-level paper and actually compared it to an older one (but I read it in the Daily Nazi I mean Daily Mail so it must be true.....) go shooting their mouths off.
PS. I after all that in my balanced opinion A-Levels are probably getting easier
Edit: Boody hell 1300+ words and I always used to hate writing essays!
