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What a farce. 55% gets you an A grade in Maths!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-49347539
Yes. I bet there were many unhappy people after the exam all thinking they'd blown their uni place.
As a person who took the test. It is solid. Don’t comment unless you have tried the paper. It is a lot harder than back in your day
Whatever the degree of difficulty was "back in my day" (mid 1960's) all I know is that to get one A grade at A level was quite an achievement and to get three A's was almost unheard of! You would have been looking at a 90%+ mark in each subject. I am not denigrating the achievement of today's youngsters at all, as it is not their fault that the standards have been dumbed down over the years and finally the education authorities have realised that something had to be done. Unfortunately it may be that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and the exams are now so difficult that they have to reduce the pass mark to compensate! Hence my comment, what a farce.
"Exam boards set grade boundaries once all the results are in.
They take into account the predicted achievement levels of the cohort taking the exam and the difficulty of the paper, in an attempt to keep standards the same from year to year."
The English word cohort comes from the Latin word cohors, which meant "an enclosed area" or "a pen or courtyard enclosing a group of cattle or poultry."
If anyone should be annoyed, it's me who got an average of over 95% in my Maths A level. I've now only got an A instead of the A* . I really don't care, also this "standards have been dumbed down" is rubbish, look at what young people are achieving now. If an exam board writes a paper that is outside of the curriculum (which has happened) it is deeply upfair to judge someone on it.
How times have changed. In my day even those who got 3 good A levels couldn't get a University place even though relatively few managed to get 3 A levels. There was a huge shortage of University places which enabled only around 2% of the school population to attend. By contrast you only needed 5 O' levels to secure a place at a Teachers Training College which would never happen today. Jobs for school leavers were plentiful.
When you think back it's amazing that we used to get paid to go to University in the form of a grant but today kids have to mortgage their futures to get a degree and many find they can't find a job with career prospects afterwards. Basically there are too many people with degrees chasing too few decent jobs making it difficult for employers to sort the wheat from the chaff. It's much harder for kids today but I hope those who decide to go to University on the back of today's results study for a degree that is of use to them in helping to secure a job afterwards.
When I was at school I remember my father telling me that exams had got easier since 'his day' i.e. the 1940's!
Stupid, stupider, stupidest! Innit?