Friday 17 August 2012

AS results

I suppose I'm a day late with this, but yesterday was a big day for 16-18 year olds across the country - AS and A2 results day!

Interestingly, this year was the first year since 1991 that the proportion of A* and A grades has decreased. The culprit for this huge rise in top grades is disputed, but generally blamed on one of two things: either we (as children in the UK) are genuinely getting clever, or it's getting easier to As and A*s. The latter of the two (so called "grade inflation") can come across as a bit old-man-ish, almost reminiscent of the three Yorkshiremen sketch, but it does have a point. Is it really possible that teaching standards across the whole country have risen so much that the percentage of people getting the top two grades has increased fourfold in as many decades?

Earlier in the year, schools across England were called out for choosing exam boards for subjects based on how easy it was to get top grades. Because the boards are all NGOs, they are motivated by profits, and so they want to make themselves more attractive to schools. The danger was that the exams were being dumbed down in order to gain more money for the boards.

One solution to this is to nationalise all the boards. It's a bit drastic, obviously, and would lead to copious new problems, as all nationalisation does, but if there was no competition between them, then there would be no incentive to making the exams easier. At the same time, if there was only one super-board, there would be no choice about the syllabus, so it would put a lot of power in the government's hands - educating children in a way that benefits a particular party is not unheard of in politics.

In light of that, I wonder if we're seeing this decrease because the system is under more scrutiny now. Is this the end of grade inflation? A*s have already been added as a "new currency", and Ofqual, the regulator, has issued a warning that the increase in grades does need to be shown to be because of an actual increase in quality of work. At the same time, it's a marginal decrease and it is only one year. This is by no means an established trend.

Anyway I got AAAA. Woooooo! And at least an A in maths A2, but I might retake some modules to try and push that up to an A* next year.



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