Competition between exam boards is often blamed for falling school standards
By C.R.
ON AUGUST 13th 18-year-olds all over Britain will open their A-level results, accompanied by either tears of joy or sobs of sorrow. The scorecards that they will receive in this annual ritual will let them know whether they have made the grades required to get into their university of choice. But for every chuffed parent or teacher, there always seem to be journalists lamenting in the press how A-levels are getting "easier" every year. From the face of it, the statistics do suggest that performing well is indeed getting easier: the pass rate has risen from just 68% in 1982 to more than 98% last year. And the number of top grades awarded has increased too. In the 1970s, less than 1% of candidates were awarded three "A" grades or more; now more than one in eight or so achieve this. So why, on the face of it, have A-levels become so much easier?
Teachers claim that these better scores reflect more studying, at school and at home. Certainly, it has become more important to achieve a place at university since full employment came to an end in the 1980s. Yet others point to the introduction of new A-levels in 2000, which are sat in six modular chunks throughout the course, rather than in a single set of exams at the end of two years of study, which improves performance. As less material is tested in each paper, it becomes possible to "cram" before the exam in ways unthinkable when two-years’ worth of material was tested at once. Elevating grades further, the new system allows students to re-sit their exams any number of times until they achieve the grades they want.
But this does not yet explain the extraordinary rise in grades. Technology has also played a role, by making it easier to both study for and complete the exams. For instance, while standard-deviation calculations had to be laboriously calculated by hand in A-level maths exams before the 1980s, pocket calculators meant that a question that once took 20 minutes before could take a mere one or two. Technology has made homework and coursework easier, too. For example, before the 1990s lacking the proper books or encyclopaedia at home made it easy to get the chronology wrong in an essay about history. The internet now ensures it takes a matter of seconds to check the facts.
These arguments have not convinced Britain's government, which has sought to make A-level tougher for students. Officials have forced the four exam boards that set and mark A-levels in England and Wales (which includes AQA, OCR, WJEC and Edexcel, a subsidiary of Pearson, which part-owns The Economist) to raise their standards and cut the number of retakes students are allowed. This helped to bring to a shuddering halt in 2014 31 successive years of rising A-level pass-rates. The government is now considering whether to replace the four exam boards with a state-run exams agency, as financial competition between these boards creates an incentive to become the most popular (ie, the easiest) exam. But nationalising them may increase political meddling in school curriculums, and prove unhelpfully distracting for education ministers. In Ireland, for example, difficult maths questions in graduation exams spur calls from miffed teachers and parents for a ministerial resignation. For a government that is committing itself to the biggest privatisation programme in British history, nationalising exam boards, which have never been under state control, would be a retrograde move for a minor problem.
