The Guardian has its flaws; however, I always like reading Polly Toynbee.
"In an average primary class of 30 children, only 14 will go on to take A-levels and only one will score three A grades – hardly inflationary. But if this little elite is determined to identify its pecking order even more precisely, let them have their A*s, their extra difficult additional papers or a precise breakdown of their marks, if they want. But frankly it doesn’t matter to the country or to anyone else. The science of correctly handicapping top racehorses or pricing footballers is probably of wider interest. This is a phoney controversy, of concern only in the offices of the Spectator, Times and Telegraph, where well-paid parents worry if the vast sums they spend on their children’s schooling will buy an Oxbridge place or not."
It would probably have been more honest had she added her own employer to the list of institutions above, but otherwise spot on.
Actually that is good. I’d never thought of it like that before. It’s partly because the way the data is presented, when you read 30% of students got 3 As, I at least think that means 30% of 18 yr olds, not (as it does) 30% of 30% of 18yr olds.
Sorry I’ve got all my figures wrong there (and I have an A-level in maths, shows standards always were dodgy). It’s about 10% of the 40% who do A-levels, so about 4%.
Sorry chaps, but there’s more to it than Polly’s somewhat patronising piece, as rambled here.
I wonder if Alan Rusbridger spends vast amounts on his kids education?
He’s not short of a penny. Just got a juicy 37% pay rise taking his basic pay up to £373,000 a year, and also got a tasty £150,000 bonus for having a hand in the new Berliner format, but before it’s even lauched.
All that’s obviously entirely unrelated to the fact that the Guardian circulation figures are their lowest for years and the Guardian and Observer are losing money.
Ah yes, the Guardian editor busily widening the gap between the rich and the poor. I wonder if Polly is suitably enraged? :-)
I’ve never understood why people are so keen on referring to A-levels as "the Gold Standard" (there’s one reference in the FT today). The gold standard was a damn silly monetary policy and I don’t see why that makes it a good education policy.
(btw, anyone crowing about Guardian circulation figures ought to possibly remember that they have more or less suspended their promotional budget because they have a big relaunch scheduled for later this year. Not that it will necessarily work, but you have to make apples-to-apples comparisons here).
The other thing to note is that most papers have declining circulations. There’s lots of smoke and mirrors with the Telegraph’s numbers, but it’s now down to 900k or thereabouts, 10 years ago it was well above 1m and 20 years ago more like 1.2m. So it’s hardly a shining success story.
On the other hand, it could be argued (and I’m sure it is being) that the Guardian’s circulation has effectively reached an all-time high thanks to the success of their website, particularly as regards their international readership.
Yes, I know there nothing necessarily disastrous about the Guardian’s circulation figures.
But if the company I work for started losing sales and money, even in a difficult climate, I wouldn’t be handed a 37% pay rise. In fact I’m unlikely to be handed such a pay rise in any event.
And a £150,000 bonus for the Berliner format before they know if its going to be success or not? Jolly good.
HSBC have just announced stonking profits, and their workers have just got 2% in Hong Kong, where the economy grew by 7.9%.
Mmmm… Well I guess SOME people are making heaps of cash!
Good point Michael. That’s not forgetting its power and influence, which if you read a lot of the Decent Left or Right is now up to the point where it effectively runs the world.
Apparently the Guardian’s website is particularly well read in the USA.
"Apparently the Guardian’s website is particularly well read in the USA". Mixed blessing. On the one hand it might teach them to spell; on the other, it’s the Graun, so it probably won’t.
I have never been swayed by the idea that everyone else’s mediocrity should encourage people not to try as hard. It’s probably true that the actual percentage of the population who go on to further and higher education will remain static, what we should change is the social background of the people who do so, not by punishing the middle class, but by enabling the others to access good quality education and encouraging them to acheive.
What a lot of bollocks. In so far as exams and A-levels matter, they ought to be a real test for the youngsters taking them. Having really bright kids taking papers where they score 97% or 98% by use of formulaic, mechanical answering is an empty ritual which can only teach them to despise the whole idea of education. Give the poor sods something to get their teeth into, and, at the same time, do let them know that exams are not the be-all and end-all. Nor, indeed, is academic prowess. But holding bogus exams and then attaching huge significance to the outcome is a cruel, wasteful and destructive nonsense for almost everyone concerned. Stop it.
I don’t know when anyone else on this board took their exams, however, i would wager i took them more recently than anyone else. Every year the papers make a big deal about how standards are slipping and the current exams aren’t as hard as those in the past, however there appear to be a number of trends which have resulted in higher pass rates and a perceived drop in difficulty.
1)
Piecemealisation (if that’s a word), the exams today are broken down into far simpler and smaller chunks than at any point in the past. Whereas a maths exam from 20 years ago would have been 3 hours long, and featured long, verbose questions with multiple interdependent calculations. Today, the candidates face 3, 1 hour exams, each with shorter and more succinct questions, thus a perceived lack of complexity.
2)
The topics covered have changed to reflect changes in ideology and understanding, for example, my father, when looking at some of the work I did as part of my GCSE’s and AS levels swears that many of the topics I covered, he did not cover until degree or the final year of A level. However, other areas such as Logarithms were covered earlier in the past due to the lack of electronic calculators.
3)
The growth of evaluation based study rather than simple rote learning and regurgitation of facts. Increasingly exams are designed less to calculate the pupil’s retention of factual knowledge, and instead judge their ability to evaluate sources and argue an opinion. Thus when the media sets modern pupils old tests, which prize the memorization of dates over the development of argument and critical thinking there are inevitably allegations of ‘dumbing down’ when in fact the exams are testing a completely different and arguably more useful set of skills. Indeed, in the markscheme for A level Government and Politics, less than half the marks for each question are allocated based on the correct factual knowledge, the rest being based on the content of the argument, and the way in which the information was deployed. This of course means that exam technique and following a rubric inevitably take on a greater significance, allowing pupils to be coached that much more easily, learning painting by numbers arguments in which they join the dots on the day, thus undermining the changes made to the exams to favour independent thinking.
4)
The increased importance of continued assessment. In the past, almost all if not all of the candidates marks were allocated based on the results of the final examinations. Today an increasing percentage is based on performance in Coursework, this ranges from 20% in History to 60% or more in subjects like Media Studies. In theory this allows students who perform poorly under the pressure of exams to acheive, however the entire system is wide open to cheating, usually involving teachers who repeatedly mark and return supposedly ‘independent’ work for correction. The temptation to cheat is inevitably higher among lower acheiving schools, and penalises honest schools.
The other effect of this is a rise in ‘stress’, invariably the media portrays complaints of stress among students as whinging, and in part it may be, however continued assessment and the creation of AS levels which contribute half of the marks of the whole A level, mean that it is no longer possible for a pupil to doss their way through the lower sixth and find a good set of revision notes and do well in their final exams, this constant pressure to perform is the main cause of this stress. The modern child will face four years of constant coursework and exam pressure from age 14 onwards, then potentially followed by another three or four years of higher education.
The other effect of this is a rise in ‘stress’, invariably the media portrays complaints of stress among students as whinging, and in part it may be, however continued assessment and the creation of AS levels which contribute half of the marks of the whole A level, mean that it is no longer possible for a pupil to doss their way through the lower sixth and find a good set of revision notes and do well in their final exams, this constant pressure to perform is the main cause of this stress.
On the other hand, depending on how you approach things, this can actually help reduce stress. My degree was a modular one, and once I’d worked out that the final grade was based on a simple average of the sixteen courses I took across the second and third years (i.e. with no weighting towards particular subjects), my strategy was to work flat out in year two to get a mark much higher than the threshold for a First, and then relax a bit in year three.
Ironically, I ended up scoring better marks in year three, probably because of the relative lack of stress – I suspect I was more inclined to take risks than I might have been if the marks were critically important. The final exam was particularly entertaining: by that stage I was so far ahead of my target that merely turning up and signing my name at the top of the paper would have guaranteed me a 2.1, and I only needed 19% to get a First.
But a strategy like this needs a fair bit of forward planning, ideally right at the start of the course, and I can’t imagine too many 13-year-olds thinking that far ahead.
For all that people bang on about "grade inflation", Matthew Turner’s done the work on the figures and it seems to imply that over the period 1992-2005 it’s been about 2% per year. Lots of countries would love to have a currency that kept its value as well as the A-level.
People often go on about exams being easier now because there’s more course work. Am I the only person in the world who disagrees? If you’ve got course work you’ve got to work hard all the time, whereas if it’s an exam you can get by more with cramming nearer the time and with good exam technique.
I don’t mean that you can doss around till the last minute – you’ve got to work reasonably steadily – but it’s less stressful than being assessed all the time, surely?
Just a thought. Anyway, it’s a while since I took any exams so maybe it’s rose-coloured specs.
If you’ve got course work you’ve got to work hard all the time, whereas if it’s an exam you can get by more with cramming nearer the time and with good exam technique.
I suppose it depends on the course you’re doing, but that doesn’t tally with my experience. For starters, we weren’t assessed constantly – the two annual flashpoints were January and May, when we had our coursework deadlines and a handful of exams.
And I’d also argue that it’s far easier to prepare for regular assessments like these than it is to cram the whole of two or three years’ study into a handful of exams spread over a fortnight or so – not least because you can keep a running score of how you’re doing throughout the course, so you don’t have to deal with the hideous uncertainty that you may have blown it through feeling below par right at the end.