Comments on: A-Levels, O-Levels, GCSEs and degradation.

By: Mr Duncan

Mr Duncan — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:05:20 +0000

A* must be the A that results from performance-enhancing drugs.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:37:07 +0000

sorry, that was replying to 40, not 41.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 11:36:25 +0000

@41, yeah, in the same way that a driving instructor prefers students who have some spatial awareness… There’s almost no limit to how hard and far a tutor can push a good student, and in most cases I’ve experienced, almost no limit to how much effort tutors will put in to do so. It’s the ones who not only can’t, but won’t, be pushed, pulled, or otherwise progressed in any sense that make life difficult. Sure, some of these were always there, but in the past they tended to know they were being lazy. Over the last decade or two, with the changes in school practices, they can’t even see that they’re not with the programme.

By: Dr Zen

Dr Zen — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:55:35 +0000

My understanding is that they used to be relative and switched to absolute ranks. In old system, you could not inflate grades, obviously. There would be the same percentage of A grades every year.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:33:16 +0000

As a one-time tertiary selection officer, I knew what my duty was; our ideal entrant was someone who required no input whatever from the university to pass the exams and score a degree, and we took the students who came closest to the ideal. I can’t see the point made by some comments earlier that tried to separate remediation, which wasn’t the job of the university, from teaching, which was. It’s all work, and none of it’s research, and academics don’t want to do it, any of it. Universities want to select exactly the people who need them least, (or, rather, they want someone else to do it for them).

By: Righteous Bubba

Righteous Bubba — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:15:10 +0000

Reading that piece again, Baker knows what he’s doing. He’s being deliberately misleading.

That seems correct to me, however we have, with the non-misleading figure, say around 75000 students with three As. Using my same half-assed math we get 9000 students with three A* grades when the new mark shows up. These numbers don’t seem unmanageable from an admissions perspective and the Sykes argument remains weak.

By: Clare

Clare — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:59:11 +0000

Two thoughts. Doesn’t every generation complain about declining educational and/or moral standards? By this reckoning we should all be drooling turnips by now. Second, I don’t mind that some students—okay, quite a lot—come to my university relatively unprepared for college work. What I do object to is their stolid refusal to admit that they stand in need of improvement.

By: a comment

a comment — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:47:33 +0000

Reading that piece again, Baker knows what he’s doing. He’s being deliberately misleading.

By: a comment

a comment — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:44:20 +0000

I’m not sure where the Guardian is getting that 4% stat from. In the 2005/6 round of exams 10.7% of A level candidates achieved 3 As or more at A level. It’s all here:http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000703/SFR02-2007-rev.pdf

The 4% figure comes from the same set of statistics, but it’s actually the figure for all 17 year olds (not just A level candidates). I’ve been confused about these conflicting figures that keep popping up, but now it’s settled.

By: Righteous Bubba

Righteous Bubba — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:08:28 +0000

Still doesn’t matter how many or few, or anything else quantitative, if the bulk of people feeding through into universities are critically unprepared for the experience…

That’s true, but the Richard Sykes argument above is demolished (if, as I read it, it’s not about quality but quantity).

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:03:52 +0000

Still doesn’t matter how many or few, or anything else quantitative, if the bulk of people feeding through into universities are critically unprepared for the experience…. And I mean socio-culturally, as well as purely academically – they are still children, when it comes to taking responsibility for their own output, though they pretend to be adults when it comes to their input, notably of alcohol. Seems to take about a year for them to realise that they don’t HAVE to be legless five or six nights a week…

By: Righteous Bubba

Righteous Bubba — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:32:08 +0000

From The Guardian:

Yet how many people know what proportion of all 17- to 18-year-olds actually achieve three grade As at A-level? Test yourself, you may be surprised. Is it a) 25% b) 20% or c) 15%?
In fact, it's none of these. The answer is 4%. Yes, only 26,000 out of an age cohort of around 600,000 students achieve three grade As at A-level.
Moreover, from this September, A-levels are being reformed and a new A* grade is coming in for candidates achieving more than 90% in at least two units. It is estimated that only 3,000 students will get three A* grades. Put another way, that is 0.5% of the cohort.

By: harry b

harry b — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:14:50 +0000

just to add—thanks, folks, for the really useful discussion. I’ve learned a lot (which may not be the point, but its good enough for me).

By: harry b

harry b — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:37:34 +0000

dan —I guess that a radical rethink of A-levels could do the job, and that would be fine—say, by having 12 or 15 grades, instead of just 5. The problem then would be that people would (reasonably enough) have lots of worries about the accuracy of the grading. And it has turned out to be immensely difficult to reform A-levels for political reasons (the same people who whine about grade inflation for which, I remind you, they provide no evidence, whine about any attempts to change them). Maybe one of the issues is just that A-levels were designed to do something very different from what they are now expected to do. Originally, and until not very long ago, helping universities decide whom to admit was a rather small part of their role—they were more important for employers. And, of course, until recently, relatively few 18 year olds went to college, and the range of institutions was less diverse. I don’t object elite institutions (I attended one myself) and don’t object to public support for them, but I’m sceptical of designing A-levels in a way that helps all of them in all the ways they want. (Like Marin, I suspect, I think O-levels were more valuable than A-levels for the admissions role in the first place, though I only have anecdotes to support that). I agree with all of #23—and don’t have a well-worked out view of what universities are for, just some scattered thoughts. I’m not sure anyone has a well-worked out plausible view of what universities should do in an age of mass HE (hence my reference to Wolf, whose skepticism about the value of mass HE I share).

g – he’s a philosophy professor at a top-ten Leiter school. My main contribution to the field was not putting him off philosophy when I taught him.

By: g

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:52:46 +0000

So, who was that one undergraduate who was already as good a philosopher as Harry, and how did he do thereafter?