The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) - they really do have a quango for everything - recommended this year in a letter to the former Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, that the A* grade should only go to students who get 90 per cent. An A grade is awarded for 80 per cent. This is off the back of pass rates rising every year for the past 23 years. Last year one teenager in ten achieved three A grades at A level, prompting universities to complain that they could not identify the best candidates, the Times reports. How is this A* scheme a solution to the problem, however?
How about testing students a bit more rather than making them all feel special by giving the less able ones A and the more able ones A*. The fear of failure in schools drives this. It manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, in our nannying and grossly overly PC society, to brand a child a failure is not right. No one is allowed to fail anymore (until they get out in to real world and end up struggling to get a job). Secondly, the very nature of the schooling system means that no government would dare make exams harder. Who, after all, wants to be education secretary or PM when the headlines hit that exam pass rates have dropped dramatically? Instead we will head in the same direction we have been going in for the last quarter of a century. But what will the powers that be do when everyone starts getting A*?
Comments
Change the incentives
Watch out. I'm sure you meant "more strenuous" rather than "more frequent" by your proposal for "testing students a bit more". But someone might take you literally. More frequent tests are neither wise nor popular.
In answer to your questions, eventually we will devalue, as we would for currency inflation, in this case by changing the exam system so it is difficult to compare with previous years. It will probably be portrayed as a move to a baccalaureat-type system, with claimed benefits for breadth of education, as though this system has been the secret of France's stunning success over the past twenty-five years.
The answer to this inflation is to change people's incentives. Schools need to be judged by the satisfaction of their customers, not by attainment of arbitrary standards of grade performance. Independence for all schools (including freedom in their selection and disciplinary procedures) and payment directly by parents (enabled by a Basic Income) would achieve that change of incentive.
I certainly did mean more
I certainly did mean more strenuous - as in provide more of a test.
Thank you for clairfying that. I certainly do not think even more frequent tests, government targets and league tables will be of benefit to anyone (except the government soundbites when they can claim the education system is in its best ever state as more and more are gaining top grades).