Here's your starter for ten: How, exactly, can you fail an A-level?
Judging from today's results, it's now virtually impossible to fail an A-level. The overall pass rate climbed for the 28th year in a row, with 97.6 per cent of A-levels being graded A* – E. Sceptics used to joke that you only needed to write your name at the top of the paper to pass an A-level, but given the appallingly low levels of literacy in this country it seems probable that more than 2.4 per cent of candidates failed to do that. From which it follows that A-levels are now so easy you can pass one without managing to write your own name. A simple "X" will suffice, even if the rest of the paper is completely blank.
Okay, I'm exaggerating slightly, but the evidence of dumbing down is plain to see. This year, examiners had a special prize in their back pockets in the form of the new A* grade, intended to help universities identify exceptional students. The problem, as any university teacher can tell you, is that over a quarter of all A-level candidates are now awarded the top grade, making it impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff. But, in their wisdom, the trigger-happy examiners awarded A*s to a whopping 8.1 per cent and that figure will no doubt increase next year. Overall, 27 per cent of candidates were awarded As or A*s, up 0.3 per cent from last year.
According to the Joint Council for Qualifications, the percentage of students gaining the new highest grade is the same as the number who were awarded As in 1965. Even the Guardian, in its report of today's results, accepts that grade inflation is rampant:
Research at Durham University has found that a candidate who would have got a C two decades ago would get an A now.
The study by Dr Robert Coe found that "candidates of comparable ability are being awarded higher grades each year, both at A-level where the trend has been consistent and substantial since 1988, and at GCSE."
The research was based on comparing A-level grades over the years with scores for tests that looked at general ability rather than curriculum knowledge.
There's a simple solution to this. The Department for Education should issue each examination board with a bell curve, stipulating what percentage of candidates in every subject should get an A, what percentage a B, and so on. Provided these percentages remain fixed, you'd eliminate grade inflation at a stroke. The only difficulty I anticipate is that it would be harder to get an A in tough subjects like Maths and Physics. But knowing this, universities could take it into account when making offers. Those candidates doing all three sciences and applying to do a science degree could be given lower conditional offers than those candidates doing humanities subjects and applying to read English.
Of course, the DfE will never do that because that would prevent the government from being able to point to the ever-improving A-level results as evidence of what a great job it's doing. Meanwhile, England continues to slide down the PISA international league tables with new countries – Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea – eclipsing us each year. Being able to scrawl an "X" at the top of an examination paper may be enough to satisfy an A-level examiner. But it won't impress an employer who has the choice of employing an Indian who's actually learnt some Calculus.
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