97.6% pass rate on A levels.

i thought there was suppossed to be a percentage that fit into each grade ie the bottom 15% fail the next 10% get E etc

everyones a winner

The strange thing is that when I was at school, in the 1970s, only a small minority stayed on, as "6th formers", to do A levels. These were considered to be the cleverest kids in the school. Yet the pass rate, amongst this elite, was much lower than it is today, even though, nowadays, most of the school's population will eventually be doing A levels.

But don't they pay for it when they get to Uni. Fees, loans, possibly a new graduate tax. Makes the Premium Charge seem almost reasonable.

getintheir: "i thought there was suppossed to be a percentage that fit into each grade ie the bottom 15% fail the next 10% get E etc"

Results used to be norm referenced in that way, but not now.

It's irrelevant anyway, the subjects are so dumbed down. A lot of Unis run Study Skills courses to make sure new students can read and write.

^ you've just made the last line up. what is your experience with the current curriculum that suggests it is being dumbed down iyo?

Just a government ploy to get young people into debt, then when they leave university with their fancy diplomas they find that because virtually everybody has one they can't get a job so have to work in McDonald's to pay their loan off.

By: Whelk
A lot of Unis run Study Skills courses to make sure new students can read and write.

By: Splottside Rocksteady When: 20 Aug 10 07:32 ^ you've just made the last line up. what is your experience with the current curriculum that suggests it is being dumbed down iyo?

Sorry Splottside but Whelk is correct.
When I taught in a FE College, we had students who had progressed to the local Uni. The Uni would identify the 'weaker' students in the first term.

Between ourselves and the Uni, extra classes were then arranged for them to bring them up to the minimum levels required by a degree course in English and Maths.
Previous to these extra courses, the drop-outs from Uni were horrendous as our students had received a lot of extra support at College and of course Uni operates on a 'FOFO'. (F... Off and Find Out).

From my chit-chat thread:


This is either an A-Level system debacle, or we humans have suddenly turned into a race of super humans, evolving inconceivably rapidly over - not millions of years - but just 20 years!

Since 1990 the A-E pass rate has rise from 77% to a Stephen Hawking-esque 97.6%.

Wow!  So the young humans of today are 20.6% more intelligent than a mere 20 years ago??  I hardly feel worthy to tread the same cobbles and rub shoulders with this new Mensa species.

I'd suggest the system needs changing as this has completely devalued the University degree. I see already that certain alternatives to A-Levels are being adopted/discussed as a means to filtering out the able from the less-able as the results are no longer able to.

It is clear to anyone that the exams have been dumbed down over the years, to keep 'selling' the success of the education system.

An experiment was carried out a few years ago (within last 10 years) on an 'O Level' Maths paper from 1980.

2 x A* pass students agreed to take the old 'O Level' paper to prove that the current exams were as taxing. They even let them use a calculator.

One of them failed , the other managed a C grade pass. Both a very long way from the A* passes they managed with the 'current' exam they had recently sat.

From Gold Standard to worthless bauble in a generation. Well done politicians and educators.

This is from Daily Telegraph last year:
Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period.
Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago.
The trend marks an abrupt reversal of the so-called "Flynn effect" which has seen IQ scores rise year on year, among all age groups, in most industrialised countries throughout the past century.
Professor James Flynn, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, the discoverer of the Flynn effect and the author of the latest study, believes the abnormal drop in British teenage IQ could be due to youth culture having "stagnated" or even dumbed down.
Richard House, a senior lecturer in therapeutic education at Roehampton University and a researcher into the effects of television on children, said: "Taking these findings at face value, it appears that there is something happening to teenagers.
"Computer games and computer culture has led to a decrease in reading books. The tendency for teachers to now 'teach to the test' has also led to a decrease in the capacity to think in lateral ways."

IQ is not about knowledge - so it should not matter how many books you've read. (The only exception is books on how to practice IQ tests)

The point about decreased ability to THINK and problem solve is true though - but I'd argue computer games are not the issue here - most are puzzle/maze based.