NO LONGER THE GOLD STANDARD

The public does not realise how the nature of A-levels has fundamentally changed in the last 25 years. 25 years ago, only a minority even got the O-levels needed to sit A-levels, and an A grade was very, very difficult to achieve. This was because students were not competing against the exam as such, but were competing against each other. The A grade would be awarded to roughly the top 5% of students, and this percentage was kept consistent from year to year. The advantage of this method was that employers and universities knew that an A grade student was an exceptional one. The disadvantage was that this hampered measures designed to gauge improvement. The Tories abandoned this system and replaced it with A-level results which were independent of how other students did. Nowadays, you can get an A grade with a score as low as 80% or even lower in some subjects, and how your fellow students do is irrelevant.

Labour have taken things a stage further. There is general dumbing down - Subjects that used to be part of an O-level syllabus are now not studied until A-level, while some of what was taught at A-level has disappeared completely. Course work, which is open to cheating and easier to produce than under exam conditions, now goes towards an A-level grade. Bizarrely, marks are now granted for ideas, even if the ideas are blatantly wrong!

I feel sorry for students because they have no say over the system and they are being let down. The brightest are not getting a chance to shine and find themselves competing for a university place with applicants who once would have been two grades lower than them. Average students are finding themselves on degree courses and in jobs for which they are not equipped. Increasingly, universities and employers are having to set their own exams, and then induction courses to fill in the gaps in the knowledge of their new recruits.

The farcical thing about all this is that no doubt ministers will be slapping each other on the back and claiming the credit for this A-level "success story". In reality they should all be in detention for ruining an exam that was once the gold standard of attainment.

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