Correct, but the “bad English” part is spoiled by using the “shear” rather than “sheer” before the word hypocrisy.

Note – left school with A-levels in 2003.

This is an excellent article Chris – I’d like to see some of the Daily Mail columnists siting modern A-Levels…

There was a girl on Radio 5 with 4 A grades who said that when it came to the exam she only needed to get a C/D in the actual exam to get her As.

From memory (and it was a long time ago!) My A levels were predominantly exam based (Physics was all exam or exam condition practicals, Geography had a project and I think Biology was all exam based) – we certainly didn’t know any grades before sitting the exam. My predominantly exam based results were B/C/E so what does that say about the comparison?

Hywel – now, you get the breakdown by module of AS results prior to getting A levels sop you can have a rough idea pre-exam, but nothing exact. Also, the school has to “cash-in” to get a result when the subject is finished. If not, students will receive module marks, but no actual grades and until a result is cashed in they cannot get grades. This has to be done months in advance, when entries are made.

In short, if someone finds out they haven’t been cashed in today, they will get marks, but no grade and won’t get one for weeks and exam boards can’t confirm a grade based solely on marks alone.

I never sat A Levels, I left school and did vocational qualifications. HNC/HND etc, so I do not know if exams are getting any easier or not.

What I do know, having recruited people, is that young people I have interviewed, spoken to and seen their CV’s are less articulate, less able to write and less intelligent than, say, 10 years ago but have better qualifications. I appreciate that is anecdotal but it is the experience of quite a few in HR I talk to and quite a few in industry so there is a disconnect in the ever improving “performance” of people in exams at all levels and the experience of recruiters and employers. What is it then ? I am interested.

Oh, BTW, suggest you moderate the tone of future posts labelling people idiots and acting all macho. You come over as a real dickhead.

HTH.

Yep, when I think Chris Ward I think “boy! is he ever a stereotypically macho male!” 😛

Interesting article Chris, one point though. I sat A Levels in 95-97, and two of the four were in modular form then, allowing you to resit bad ones and have the best mark counted, so not sure the new AS system you did was much different from a previous system, unless you’re much older than i thought!

Think there were probably quirks in my day though, as on results day i found I’d passed an AS level I’d never consciously sat too, as a result of sitting one of the A Levels. Odd.

As for whether they’re getting easier or not, i have no idea, other than we were berated for their increasing easyness even in my day, and they certainly weren’t easy. I suspect the results coming out when many journo’s are only holiday might have something to do with it. Why find someone to write new copy when you can just dust off last year’s time and again?

Your argument is wrong. It’s quite logical to believe “the exams are easy” and not “all the students must be stupid”. In fact, if both those things were the case, then there would be no problem! The real problem is easy exams plus students who are becoming more intelligent. The A grade in particular is devalued when 26% of students get one, because it no longer acts as a signal of excellence. So universities are obliged to use other measures to choose students – measures which will generally advantage private schools over state schools – not a situation a Liberal or a Democrat would want to endorse.

So my problem is that your efforts as students are not being acknowledged when grade inflation distorts the signal of quality that grades should convey. Two possible solutions:
1. Return to grading on a curve, where a fixed proportion of students get A, B, etc. each year.
2. Create new sub-grades as in the Irish examination system, where students receive A1-2, B1-3, C1-3, etc.

Here we go again, stupid binary thinking.

Chris is assuming there are only two positions:

1) Exams are as hard as they ever were, a grade in a particular subject means exactly the same in terms of ability of the student as the same grade in the same subject taken 30 years ago.

2) Exams now are so easy, anyone could pass them, they require no effort or intelligence whatsoever.

So, according to Chris, anyone who denies one of these positions is automatically 100% in support of the other.

This is rather like the silliness over the NHS, in which there was so much rubbishy argument on the lines that there were only two possible positions:

1) The one adopted by Republican opponents of Obama’s Health Care reforms and supported by Daniel Hannan MEP – the NHS is evil socialism, which offers really bad value for money, and leaves anyone who falls outside certain bonds with no alternative but to die.

2) The NHS is wonderful, extremely efficient, nothing whatsoever could be done to improve it.

It seemed to me the madness was mainly those who adopted position 1 assuming anyone who criticised them for going OTT must be from position 2.

Now, if we could get over this binary mindset and accept just because someone has reason to suggest A-level standards are slipping it doesn’t mean they are saying all students taking A-levels now are lazy and useless and did no work whatsoever to pass them, we might be able to have a useful debate on the issue.

One point we might note is that some years ago, a mid-point examination, the AS level, was introduced. Every A-level student takes this examination. A student who fails it need not continue with the A-level, and can instead pick another A-level and study it to this mid-point exam. It ought to be rather obvious that this will have a dramatic effect on failure rates for the final A-level. When students had no choice but to carry on for two years and take the final exams, of course some of them only found out at that point that they weren’t up to the subject and failed. But allow a mid-point drop-out, and of course they could discover then the subject wasn’t right for them, drop out, do something else, and so OF COURSE the failure rate for the final exam drops – those who would have failed in the past never reach that point.

The other point is that there is a fair amount of hard evidence that students with an A-level grade in a subject can’t perform tasks that students with the same grade in the same subject could decades ago. This backs up the feeling which I find held by most university lecturers, that standards are dropping. We do need to be careful about “golden age” feelings, so this is something that needs to be backed by evidence before it can be properly asserted, and we need to be quite sure that what has been lost hasn’t just been balanced by new things gained. But silliness like Chris Ward’s evidence-less and illogical comments do not help get to the root of this.

@Matthew, where did I suggest this was simply a binary issue? I wasn’t tackling the FE system head-on, I was tackling the populist view of the system from those who choose to rubbish the achievements of students without fully understanding how the system works (as was said in the title of the article). The argument over what is broken in FE is much more complex than that and I wouldn’t dare to suggest that the entire scenario is merely based on two contrasting extremes. I was attacking the populism, nothing else.

@sanbikinoraion That truly is a fail, although I’m absolutely certain it wasn’t in the original document I sent out. I’ll take a look when I get back home… and for the record I did both, then became an engineer. 😉

I did my A Levels back in 2002 and dumbing down was in evidence then. Over 90% of people in my history class got an A which shocked the tutor as there was a wide range of abilities. I also got 100% in 2 economics tests even though I know I got a diagram wrong.

“Basic numeracy and literacy have also suffered, to the extent that I can now see the evidence in fellow teachers entering the profession.”

Maybe not only those just entering the profession!

I was amused to see the following comments from leading educationalists in a newspaper report:

“Mr Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “The standard of those exams will be more difficult.

Greg Watson, head of the OCR exam board, said: “The questions will be more analytical. There’s [sic] also more synoptic questions. We are told that these sort [sic] of exams will be more difficult next year. “

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/6060489/A-levels-tougher-exams-could-see-results-fall-next-year.html

@Matthew, where did I suggest this was simply a binary issue? I wasn’t tackling the FE system head-on, I was tackling the populist view of the system from those who choose to rubbish the achievements of students without fully understanding how the system works (as was said in the title of the article).

Your article came across as suggesting anyone who criticised A-levels was an “armchair idiot” who read and believed the Daily Mail. Essentially, you seemed to want to shut down the debate by insulting in this way anyone who has a viewpoint other than “A-levels and the students who take them are wonderful”.

If that wasn’t your intention, you should have been a little more careful about throwing your insults. To be honest, as someone who does believe A-level standards are falling (from a position of professional experience), I felt your article to be a nasty and untrue attack on me and others in my position.

Huw

The question is whether you actually have any evidence about what caused the percentage of A grades to increase by a factor of more than 2 since the early 1990s – over a period when the proportion of the population taking A levels also increased.

Obviously you’d prefer to believe that it reflects a genuine improvement in performance. But do you have any real evidence that this is the case?

Two observations:

The pool of students taking A-levels is not the same as it was 20 years ago; the economic and social biases have changed. Direct comparisons of results are therefore invalid.

Teaching is now more precisely focussed on the specific things which will be tested in the exam papers. This is expected to show a higher level of achievement on those things and a lower level on things which are not on the syllabus.

How many of the observations in this thread can be explained in terms or one or both of these? Looks like most of them to me.

I don’t know very much about History teaching, but Martin’s point about the narrow focus and teachers getting better at pushing students through the exams hints at what the problem might be, and fits in with my experience with students coming through on other A-levels.

The problem those of us taking on A-level students find is that we glance at the syllabus of the A-level, it seems fine, we get students with good grades in it, and then we are surprised at how little knowledge and ability they have with the subject.

Now, we are looking at general skills and ability in the subject, not the specific syllabus – and there’s an issue. As Martin suggests, the education has been too narrow, based on just those aspects which will “come up” on the exam. It hasn’t engendered a more general love of the subject and skills and interests which aren’t directly related to that syllabus. Furthermore, the skills of the teacher in getting the students through the exam often involve “exam technique”, which essentially means tricking the examiner – trying to find little ways in which the student can get good marks without really having a deep understanding of the subject. So this really means students are being taught not to learn, taught to think of this all as just a game, taught to think of education as passing exams not having general skills and knowledge.

We who are taking on these A-level students aren’t looking just for narrow exam-passing skills, we are looking for what passing the exam ought to be about, a measure of more general skills and knowledge in the subject. So when we get to see how these students are by making them do things which are to do with the subject but not with passing the A-level exam with its set syllabus on the subject, we find they lack what we thought the exam ought to be testing.

More exam-focused teaching ISN’T better teaching at a deeper level, but of course it is at a shallower level as it gets the students the grades. The older style, where students were taught the subject not the exam syllabus, was better education at a deeper level, the idea being that if they had a general knowledge and love of the subject, the exam shouldn’t phase them too much and they should do OK on it. Exams were a bit more general then in any case. Also there wasn’t quite such a big competition for the top grades, if you got a B or C you still could get into most of the degrees going. So the bit of randomness in grades this entailed wasn’t such a big issue.

The narrow focus in the syllabus, and the exams which encourage “exam technique”, are in the name of “fairness”. If you have a fairly general exam, with an open marking scheme which leaves a lot up to the human judgement of the marker, you can better test real knowledge and skills. You can see it when you see it as an examiner, you can reward that flair and insight when a student does something unexpected and clever. We are now told, however, that relying on human judgement and vague marking schemes are unfair, and could lead to hidden prejudice. So instead we have to have much more focused questions, with a very detailed marking scheme which lays out exactly where each mark comes from, and steps which lead you carefully through each stage of the question so that no-one is unfairly treated by missing the point. The consequence is there is no scope for marking the unexpected or brilliant, there is nowhere where the clever student can take off using his or her own knowledge or skills with little in the way of guidelines, that skill in taking something general and breaking it down into steps is lost, because the question, in the name of fairness, does that breaking down for you. No wonder a grade A now feels like what a grade C used to feel like, because it can be gained by what used to be regarded as grade C level performance – thorough knowledge of the syllabus, but no real flair shown, methodical plodding sticking to what he or she was told, falls down when asked something which exercises the more general skills and knowledge of the subject but wasn’t directly on the syllabus.

If the exam is all predictable stuff coming directly from the syllabus, it turns it more into a memory test than it ought to be. Chris in his original article talks of “years of irrelevant examinations that serve as memory tests”. No exam should be a memory test, any exam that is short-changes the student. It can be a test of skills, because skills have to be practiced, not memorised, and they get better with practice and an exam is a useful test if they allow that to be demonstrated. An exam can be a test of ability to apply knowledge, that is to put it and use it in context, perhaps in an unexpected situation, or one where you have to work out for yourself what knowledge it is that you are supposed to use. Any exam which is a memory test is not just useless, it is WORSE than useless. It gives to the student and to the person who naively supposes the exam result means something an entirely false picture of his or her real ability and knowledge. It encourages the sort of “game” attitude in which the facts being memorised are treated as just abstract symbols, no linkage is made between therm and anything wider than the exam. It leads the student to confuse memorisation with real learning, which can have tragic consequences – the student has never really learnt to learn properly, has actively been discouraged from that, has take on what he or she thinks are good learning techniques but they drag him or her down when used at higher level. In my experience, the confusion of memorisation with learning is the second biggest cause of failure in university degrees (laziness is the first, lack of intelligence is way down as a cause).

Now this is what we see at university – all lecturers complain about it. Students whose ability and interest has been wrecked by the memorisation and exam technique approach to education. How fed up we get with students who are endlessly pestering us with “will it come up in the exam?” and “how many marks do I get for that?” and spend far more effort on trying to get round passing without really learning than they do an actual learning.

In the name of fairness, A-levels have become more like this, narrow memory tests, mechanisms for discouraging real learning. The “vocational” A-levels tend to be the worst – in the name of “fairness: and taking out any nasty academic abstract thinking, they in particular often become little more than memorisation of definitions. That is why they are so despised by university admissions tutors – as I said, they are not just useless but worse than useless because they encourage a bad attitude to education which is hard to turn around.

Well, there you are – this is me being an “armchair idiot”. I say this not because I am some stuffy elitist, though often when I try to say it the shutters come down and the people I am saying it to say “lah-lah-lah, we’re not listening you’re just a stuffy elitist/armchair idiot. etc”. Actually, I was the first in my direct family not just to go to university but to have any formal qualifications. I am passionately concerned with widening access to higher education. I say this because I think young people at the lower end of our society have been appallingly badly treated in education here, but much of that appallingly bad treatment has been done naively in what was thought to be their best interests – encouraging them to take useless vocational qualifications being a good example, and refusing to listen to those who complain about it on the grounds they must be “stuffy elitists” or “armchair idiots” is another.

Saying all this is not to say that A-level students don’t work hard. The concern is in fact that they have been set to do the wrong sort of work, that they been set work which kills rather than develops true interest in the subject and true educational skills. Sure, an A-level grade which is a measure of ability and willingness to do hard work isn’t entirely useless, but A-levels should be more than that. The line “I worked hard for my A-levels, so standards can’t have gone down” misses the point.

Jon- Norm referencing ended and therefore grade inflation began two years before you sat A-levels, so I’m afraid they did lose a little value there…

By the way, when I posted earlier, I should have mentioned that I will be ensuring that both my sons do the IB, not A levels!

The reseach I refer to above (its on Ch4’s FactCheck) suggests that grade inflation has occured. HOwever it does point out that this doesn’t automatically equate to exams being easier.

Two factors mean that A levels of today are not the same as A levels of 20 years ago. First, you can retake modules. My E in Physics was at least partly down to the complete a**e I made of my options paper. The ability to resit that could have had a marked effect on my overall grade.

Secondly, if there is now an AS and A2 exam at the end of each year that must impact on the teaching time available by the time you block of revision for AS and exam times in the summer of the first year. Whist we had internal exams in the summer of Lower Sixth (in old money 🙂 that was just an interruption to a full summer term of teaching.

I saw the appalling BTEC Advanced coursework assessments set for students when I was standing in for an ICT teacher. The incentive for these teachers is to go for the grades and not the education. The assessment objectives are so tickbox it is unfair to say that these examinations are a fair measure of how good these students are.

Thanks, this is a useful observation and fits in with my own experience. I think you should have started off by saying this rather than by saying what you did say. For me, the big problem is getting across messages like “these qualifications are useless at developing and assessing the skills of students” because the knee-jerk reaction to this is almost inevitably “You’re only saying that because you’re an elitist” or “these students worked really hard, how can you possibly insult them by saying their qualifications are useless?” or “you just don’t know what you’re talking about” or “you should just adapt your teaching to meet the skills they have developed”.

I don’t work in a university department where the problem is so many applicants with AAA in A-levels we don’t know what to do with them, so the grade inflation issue isn’t one that directly bothers me. The reality is that we set the grades required for entrance at whatever level it takes to fill up the place we have. What does bother me, however, is students who have been short-changed by poor qualifications which not only don’t give a good assessment of their ability and don’t actually develop useful skills, but also develop damaging attitudes to learning which place them at an even greater disadvantage when they come into higher education.

The students on the BTEC where you taught perhaps did work very hard to get those boxes ticked. Also, some bureaucrat somewhere has said “A Distinction in this is worth the same as two A-levels at grade A”. So, how as an admissions tutor do you face a student with that sort of qualification and say “No, sorry, my experience is that this is a very poor preparation for the degree and tells me nothing about whether you will manage on it”? At the moment we are at least allowed to say this and act on it by making offers which are not just UCAS-points based, but in the future we may get the bureaucrat saying “You have to use our points system for admissions, we know better than you, who are you to say what works on the course you teach?”.

When I was a university admissions tutor, we did take a few students with a BTEC background, but only when it was at Distinction level, with reasonable GCSEs and good references and personal statements. Even so, it was touch-and-go as to whether they succeeded or not, some did, others seemed to have almost no discernible skills in what the BTEC was supposed to be about. The more “vocational” A-levels also seemed to be like that. It would be OK if they had different but useful skills, but they didn’t seem to.

These students seem to have suffered all along from being led by people responsible for their education who had good intentions but weren’t willing to listen to criticism because they dismissed it as “typical Daily Mail reader” stuff. Also good liberals who thought “let them do what they want to do”, not realising that a child isn’t going to have much idea about what education will be useful in the future, particularly if he or she comes from an uneducated background. The worst thing is that I felt the tick-box attitude to education actually damaged them, developed within them an attitude that by the time they came to university was very difficult to get out of them and was counter-productive to real learning.

Jon: I was lucky – my parents found the one public school that ONLY takes the poor and talented. Christ’s Hospital.

@Chris Ward
“just grow up.”

Oh the irony.

LOL

@meandyew,

I have no problem with criticism, which is why I ignored your first posts. I didn’t respond because of a lack of thick skin, I responded because you were being a hypocrite. Especially when you talk about punctuation and the number of “CV’s” you’ve seen. You’re the one hiding behind an anonymous synonym banging angry words into the keyboard. Get a life.

” Chris Ward
Posted 31st August 2009 at 10:45 am | Permalink
@meandyew,

I have no problem with criticism, which is why I ignored your first posts. I didn’t respond because of a lack of thick skin, I responded because you were being a hypocrite. Especially when you talk about punctuation and the number of “CV’s” you’ve seen. You’re the one hiding behind an anonymous synonym banging angry words into the keyboard. Get a life.”

You’ll have to do better than that. Get a Life. It is you who is the one having a hissy fit about your oh-so wonderful educational achievements. As someone else has pointed out it is heavily ironic.

You also responded to my first post. Again you need to do better.

My comment about your spelling and grammar was appropriate. Can you not see the irony of someone moaning about perceptions of young people being thicker yet cannot spell and punctuate properly. It does not back up your argument at all.

My spelling and punctuation is not relevant to the issue as I am not the one trumpeting my academic achievements. However you are entitled to throw whatever mud you wish to. It hardly re-inforces your point.