A Level Playing Field

Once more exam results are out and they are better than ever before. Once more we get the same reasons why they are better (teaching methods have improved, children are harder working) and once more we hear the complaints that exams are getting easier and the exam system is devalued.

Personally I wouldn't say exams are getting easier to take, but I would say that exams are getting easier to pass. A subtle difference, but an important one. (I'm certainly not going to deny the poor sods who work their butts off and end up getting a pile of "A" grades.)

Back in my exam days (some 25 years ago) passing the exam meant doing two lots of exam papers on two separate days (with the odd exception, like the oral test in French or the "identify these bits of animals" test in Biology). If you cocked up on one of those days, that could easily be one or two grades lost, so any headaches, hay-fever, feeling ill, or being sat in blinding sunlight behind the smelly kid could really make a big difference. It annoyed me that the way you felt in a single 2 or 3 hour period on one particular day could affect the result of 2 or 3 years work, and the primary requirement for passing an exam was to have a good memory, not necessarily an understanding of the subject.

We were told by more than one of our teachers how most exams were graded (unpopular subjects like Astronomy or Russian would have predefined pass levels). Once all the papers were marked, a bit of analysis on the resulting bell-curve graph was used to assign the grades to the marks scored. This was done in such a way that more or less the same number of people got an "A" grade, a "B" grade etc. each year, so that if the paper was a bit easier or harder in one year, the overall results would be much the same (making the sensible assumption that any year of school kids would have the same level of intelligence overall).
At O-level, about 5-10% of kids would get the "A" grade, most would get the "C" grade, and I think it was about 30-40% failed ("D" grade or less). This struck me as a fair way of doing things. One result of this system was that if someone did get a straight set of "A" grades at O-level, they often made the news for being so clever.

A few years after I left school they changed the system so that various work done over those 2 or three years would also count towards the overall result. This was a great move, I often achieved A grade in my course work, only to end up with a B or C in the resulting exam. OK, so it was too late for me, but it was an improvement. The other thing that changed was that the percentage mark needed to get particular grades was apparently fixed before the exam, which struck me as a bit dodgy, especially as there are several different examining boards offering exam courses and schools started to be valued on their pass results. Surely a school would pick the exam course that had a higher number of pupils passing, and wouldn't then the setters of an exam course set the pass grade lower to make their course more tempting to schools? Note that I am not even thinking of the difficulty of the exam questions and the course work, these are almost irrelevant and from what I've read are meant to be strictly controlled.

The one thing that irks me to this day is that they are still called O- and A-levels, which meant that people from my era have grades that now seemed rather poor in comparison to the new results coming out. In the late 1990s I had a job interview along with some young bragging upstart who implied only getting 3 or 4 grade "A"s at O-level (I got 4) was rather poor (he got 8). I would much rather admit that I am so old that they didn't have "N- and P-levels" in my day.

It strikes me that an exam system that lets more and more pupils pass at higher and higher grades, to the extent that they have to bring in a new "A*" grade, is not actually grading pupils in a useful or meaningful way. They should bring in the old system of checking the figures then assigning the grades, allowing approximately the same percentage of pupils to get the same grades every year, then getting an "A" grade would still mean something special. Then universities can still select candidates on merit, employers can still compare people from different years.

"Higher pass rates mean more young people are achieving advanced qualifications that will help them fulfill their ambitions, and this is something we should all celebrate."
Jim Knight (Schools Minister)

Now this is about the only argument that supports a system of artificial higher grades. If children are more motivated by getting great grades at O-levels, they are more likely to go on to do A-levels and then on to higher education.

Now if only they would come out and say "yes, it is getting easier to get higher grades in exams, but look at the happy smiling children signing up for higher education". Then the next time someone tries to compare young Johnnie's eight "A"s at O-level with my ancient results I might not feel the urge to give them an "F" and a "U" in English Language.