The British Education system....to eezy too pass exams these days?

[Pert_UK]

Given the furore over this year's A-level results I wondered what people thought about the English / British exam system.

Personally I couldn't believe it when they decided to adopt the Spinal Tap method of GCSE grading....

"Why don't you just make it harder to get a grade A?"
"But these grades go up to A*!"

What a complete waste of everybody's time, although I suppose I have to concede that if they'd just admitted that GCSE's had got farsically easy and they had to "revalue" them, the government would have had to announce that pre-1995 GCSE grade A's were worth less than post-1995 A's.....Which doesn't make sense either.

When I did A-levels (around 1993 I think) there was a HUGE gap between (for example) GCSE maths and A-level maths, and the teachers complained that they had to spend the first 6 months of A-level tuition bringing students up to the old O-level standard before they could move on.

And now universities and employers are saying that so many people get a bagfull of A grades at A-level that they can't tell who's a genius and who's just plain bloody clever, so we've got to re-value the whole system again......

Personally I think it was a mistake to move from relative marking. In the old days (before my time) A-level papers would be marked, and then examination boards would look at the distribution of marks across all entrants before deciding on what mark was required for each grade. In other words, a Grade A showed that you had done significantly better than the majority of your peers. That way, even if the exams became easier and easier the Grading was still subject to a level of "moderation" or "normalisation", i.e. 90% in the exam wasn't good enough for an A, you had to do better than 90% of people who took the exam.

IMHO we seem to have fallen into the trap of insisting that nobody loses, and that just means that winning is meaningless. I can remember doing GCSEs and at that time a friend of mine wasn't even entered for a single exam on the basis that he didn't stand a chance of scraping a pass in any of them. These days I suspect he'd be given 5 passes and encouraged to try for university, wasting his time and everyone elses.........

What do people think? I hope I haven't come across as a dreadful snob........

:evilgrin:

P.