Have examination standards really fallen?

Each year triumphant A level students are brought swiftly back down to earth by annoying adults who proclaim how much easier exams are "these days". But a new report from the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors (CIEA) shows that 21st century youngsters not only work incredibly hard, but claims that "there was no golden age of exams". It appears that we are fooling ourselves....

The survey includes examiners' reports from days gone by. One for O Levels in 1958 is scathing.

"The standard of English was no worse than in previous years, but is still very unsatisfactory. ……The most evident if not the most serious weakness is in the spelling.  A few examples will suffice: ammount, Brittain, Britian, buisness, bussiness, deffinate, fourty, fivety, ocurred, occured, payed, polytitions, publically, usualy."

David Wright, chief executive of the CIEA, also explains that in the late 70s and early 80s one O level examining board (AEB) introduced a popular series of basic tests – beginning with arithmetic and English. This was because, he says, "employers complained that even with O levels in these subjects, students couldn’t count or do mental arithmetic, they couldn’t spell, and had little understanding of grammar and punctuation." Doesn't this sound familiar?

The CIEA also surveyed 471 15-19 year olds, and found that sixty percent believed that students now work harder for their A levels and GCSEs than their parents did. They also, rather sadly "despaired" at the "negative reporting of their school achievements." Poor loves.

David Wright finishes by saying that we all “could have done better". Our elders always think that it was harder for them. But it seems they (we now) may actually be wrong....

Comments

[Chris]

Consider, before you post, what has changed.

My son when he took his A levels had had a PC since he was 3 years old; he was brought up on a diet of Dorling Kingsley, Microsoft, Disney and other educational games; they taught him to touch type as well. Did this give him an advantage?

When I wanted to do research I set off to the local reference library, took worked by way through a cross-referenced Britanica and then set off for home. Maybe a couple of hours for a few paragraphs? My son missed out onthis real research experience. In 2 hours he could consult multiple sources: on-line; multiple encyclopediae on compact disc and touch type a complete paper. Did he miss out on the real research experience though?

We also went overseas and travelled the country on trips taking in geographical features and things like English Heritage historical re-enactments. The EH video on the last year's re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings has some young children on it. They comment that seeing it live means that you can answer all your own questions. don't need to ask questions because seeing it live gives you all the answers. (There were 3,000 re-enactors).

At school we had very few books, mabe 1 per course for 2 years. They had few diagrams and at best an odd colour plate. My son had / has hundreds of books from around the world purchased on EBay, Amazon and other sources. Is he spoilt?

And the authors who produced the books have been able to do so using sophisticated word processing software. The latest research. It may have been reworked many times to make the meaning crystal clear. Surely the books cannot be better though, surely not.

When I learnt French it was very, very tedious. My son uses programmes such as the Rosetta Stone natural learning methods. His computer is more powerful than the language labs that universities used long ago. Does this give him an advantage.

My school teachers prepared lessons once and that would have to suffice until the next course change. The delivery method involved a blackboard and chalk. Gradually this changed: hand outs, overhead projectors, presentations from computer via increasingly cheap projectors. Better?

If you were doing English and wanted to see a play you had to scour the local/regionl/national paper. Far easier these days. And technology has made productions easier and cheaper to put on. But if you cannot find a live performance you will be able to find it on dvd. Along with comments by the producer, writer, director, actors and so forth. Did this type of thing help him gain added insight?

And technology has had an impact on the quality of teachers as well.

There is more but to finish consider a factory - schools are, in one sense, factories after all. If a factory had had this many major improvements had not increased its productivity we would be calling for it to be closed. So why do some people insist that things were harder when they did it.

And yes, as people above say, I could take an exam today, apply myself and get a good result. I would do so though with the tools of today - not the stoneage apparatus of yesteryear. In a sense people making this type of comment prove the point: people are better able to learn today than yesterday.

This process has been going on for centuries.

What people learnt in the 1900s would not have been much use in the 1500s. What - and how - people learnt in recent decades would have left them poorly prepared for life today. Fortunately things have changed.

[SimonB]

Devan, your logic is flawed as J has already pointed out. Alex, yours would be laughable if it were not so depressing that people hold your views in the face of the obvious. I'm quite sure I would find A level papers difficult today given that it is 28 years since I studied the subjects. However, with two years of recent study and a few weeks off to revise I'm fairly sure I could make short work of your quantum paper (we had quantum physics in the 80s you know) so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. On the other hand it's fairly easy to set a current A level student a test using old papers on physics (if you use the same subject matter) or maths, which hasn't changed much, or English or History and all the evidence is that they struggle with both the depth of knowedge and the difficulty of the questions. Compare the papers side by side and modern A levels are like old O levels which is not surprising as more people take A levels now than took O levels 30 years ago.

Topic titles mean nothing anyway. You could set a very easy paper on quantum physics while I set a colleague a question the other day that required no more than 12 year old maths to solve and he couldn't do it.

Modern A levels are spoon-fed through the papers. In science papers each step is set out requiring very little thought. In the 70s and 80s you had to draw from several areas of your knowldge even to work out what science was need to answer the questions. They were a much greater test of scientific thinking.

Your arrogance that I know nothing of modern standards is also astounding. I went through A levels in 1980, both my parents were teachers then and for a long time after that, my brother in law is a university professor with admissions responsibilities, my mother in law was a teacher and my father in law was also a university professor and an A level exmainer for years and I have two children and several nephews and nieces in the education system now.

I just have a feeling that I know ever so slighly slightly more than you do about the relative difficulty of A levels then and now.

The only sources you will be able to find that say that "the sceptics are completely unfounded" will be the government and teachers both of whome have either a clear vested interest or wish to keep their jobs, and students who cannot get away from the "stop being mean to me and my results" idea. Try reading the comments by CEM or Sir Peter Williams
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,330196922-102285,.html
or by Geoff Parks head of admissions at Cambridge
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/aug/14/alevels.inflation
None of these people have axes to grind or vested interests and they are at one in acknowledging that the boundaries have moved. Only the willfully obtuse or the certifiable (or those with a vested interest) can possibly argue the emperor is still wearing any clothes.

[SimonB]

There you go again Emily. You start off quite rationally but you spoil it with your comment

"Our Academic achievement is being devalued, and that is a cruel, cruel thing."

That is irrelevant. It might be a cruel, cruel thing to describe someone as fat. They might be deeply hurt and resentful but it wouldn't stop it being true and their fervent wish that it should not be true would not stop it being so.

You are confusing the issue about grade inflation and the "relative" ease with which you can get an A with the question of absolute standards and also with the emotional factor that you don't want your grades devalued.

Firstly let's deal with the question of absolute standards. This is not about that. I am not saying that the best A level students know less than they did 25 years ago (although there is little evidence for universities that they know more!). So good As are as good as they ever were, let's leave it at that.

The question is about how far down the ability scale an A grade goes, from the best 25 years ago that would have got an A down to those that would have got Bs or Cs etc, and it is clear that the current A grade goes much further than it ever did. In around 1980, about 7% of A level grades were As and that was at a time when a much smaller more academically selective group of students took A levels. Typical entry requirements at leading medical schools were Bs and you could get into Russell Group universities with Bs and Cs with, as J points out, no shame attached. My school, which was quite academic and got people into Oxbridge every year gave out prizes for getting an A and two Bs, typically there were four or five a year. Most of those went on to Oxbridge. They gave up giving those prizes out long ago.

So has that devalued the A grade? Yes it has in that it doesn't mean what it once did but the real losers are the ones that would have got As 25 years ago. They cannot demonstrate that now. The ones that would have got Bs and Cs 25 years ago are arguably better off as they are walking around with As and we'll never know who they are but then university offers have just gone up to match. It does make university entrance much more of a lottery than it was which can't be good for anyone except the less able. It that fair on the rest?

You will just have to put up with people like me pointing out that "some" of the As are not worth what they were 25 years ago. The fact that you don't like it, doesn't stop it being so. Get over it but it's not your fault. Blame the system and those that defend it by attacking me for "denigrating the efforts of our poor hard-working students". I have never done that, students do work hard. This is not about how hard people work - that is a smokescreen to justify higher pass rates. This is about how easy it is for a student of a given level of ability to get an A.

Finally "easier becaue they are fairer" doesn't really make a lot of sense. If you mean they are more "accessible", whatever that means, such that people of a given level of ability or hard work can score higher then yes, that's exactly what "easier" means. That doesn't mean the course content is necessarily any different (although it might be). You can set an easy exam on a hard subject or a difficult exam that few could pass on very little content. The pass rate is arbitrary - which is precisely the point; it has systematically (and deliberately) moved over the last 20 years.

[j]

Emily I understand your POV. But I also did A levels (in 1980) and I did humanities, first at a comprehensive school and then at Oxbridge.

Oxbridge humanities students also have skills in deeper thought and analysis but we dont get to do coursework (there is a very small element that has been introduced since my day, but still not very much). The reason is, you are supposed to be able to demonstrate the same things in an exam. Which is going to be harder, so not as many people will demonstrate the skills, and the A grade will be awarded to a smaller number of people. As a means of examination, leaving out plagiarism and internet research which I am sure most people wouldnt engage in, coursework gives far, far more time to people to do the same task than an exam does.

The same is true of retakes, you are right that it allows people to do much better.

So the old system had if you like a different filter. You had to do it to order, in an exam, right first time. I will agree with you that this means that the work of lots of people got marked lower, because they couldnt do it. I can also agree that the ability to do it right first time, to order, during an exam isnt the most important thing in the world. But I do think that its more difficult.

The other thing that old wrinklies like me notice is that A level students do learn a lot less actual information than we did- and givcen that the world has moved on so much, thats a shock really, there is more to learn, rather than less.

When you say its cruel that your work is being devalued, I agree with you but I think that it would be better valued if we had a smaller number of A grades that had real prestige and no shame attached to getting a B, as it used to be (I got 5 grade As btw, in 1980, so this is not sour grapes).

[Emily]

Yesterday, I recieved my A-Level Results.
Now, as a rational, academic and overridingly logical sort, I hope that the opinion I am about to voice will be taken as such, and not merely percieved as the emotional rantings of a resentful youth.
The largest problem with this debate is the definition of the terms easier and harder. With parents that took A-Levels, I hope that my knowledge of 1970s curriculum standards should be releatively accurate. The introduction of the modular system (with the added bonus of the "re-take"), surely, could only ever serve to improve the grades being produced. Moreover, the vast majority of humanities students have abilities tailored to detail and deeper thought which "coursework", again, can only benefit.
These changes, of course, are more likely to result in a rise of higher grades; they allow room for the sorts of problems that can occur when results are based purely upon one set of exams (as in the 50s/60s70s etc)
There is, therefore, a logical inconsistancy between assuming that better results overall are necessarily the result of less academic exams. The skills necessary to complete traditional A-Level subjects - I honestly believe - CANNOT be so vastly different. Furthermore, the overbearing media hype surrounding this issue is based on little more than "statistics" and sour grapes. Our Academic achievement is being devalued, and that is a cruel, cruel thing.
Exams are easier because they are fairer, not because they are less academic. Possibly that was slightly more rant-ish than i originally intended...

[SimonB]

Alex - read what I posted! I did not imply that students today do not work hard - in fact quite the opposite. And I resent your two implications: that students in my day did not work hard (perhaps you didn't realise that's what the argument that students are working harder today means) and that teachers then (both my parents were teachers) were so crap at their jobs that they could only get Cs and Ds out of clearly A grade candidates.

The issue is not about how well students are educated - that is a separate debate about absolute standards. This is about what proportion of the population (which has not evolved significantly over the past 20 years) can now get an A grade. In other words how far down the ability scale, the A grade extends. It clearly extends much further down that it did as we have 25 per cent of a much larger number of students getting As compared with about 7 per cent. of a smaller number 25 years ago. Read the research, read the comments by CEM or Sir Peter Williams. It's not really open to debate any more.

Now this is not students' fault. They can only do the exams they are set. But the real losers are the best students who are walking around with no more than an A grade that can be acheived by someone much less able than they are with no means of showing it, and universities who cannot sort the vey good from the merely good.

In my day you could get in to a good Russell Group university to read medicine with B grades. You could get in to do many courses with Bs and Cs. If you were anywhere close to getting three As you were Oxbridge material. The system self selected too. You knew what grades you might get and you held the best offer you dared and a backup. This kept the number of applicants to sensible levels and universitioes could interview instead of effectively the lottery we have now with 1,500 applications for 50 places. Relative grade boundaries are actually irrelevant but the system as it is does not work

[j]

"I personally think that the quality of education has increased as the teachers often now know what is more likely to turn up in the exams. "

Devan, how sad that for you "education" means being told the answer fairly reliably. It wasnt like that for us, and I'm afraid your argument is back to front. Your results are going up because your teachers tell you what to look for, (as opposed to: because you are as good as we used to be) is what you have said, but I'm sure its not what you meant.

[Bianca S]

The difference is that in the old O/A Levels, students were apparently penalised for these weaknesses, whereas now they are apparently not...

[j]

"I find it shocking that people who on the whole seem to have no experience of A-Levels of recent years feel they somehow know that exams have gotten easier. I understand that some people maybe don't want to feel that their hard work years ago is worth less now, but all you have to do is look at the universities, despite being constituted mostly from people of the "easy exam culture" - the UK does better each year in worldwide university league tables, even though the UK is the only country to believe that their education standards are falling."

Alex I wish I could agree with you.

I work in a Uni and I have children taking GSCEs.

Since I did A levels we have had to move almost all the degrees to four years from three, and use that new first year to teach the things that people used to be able to do already, especially in physics, chemistry, etc.

The league tables are complex but mainly we are ranked on how much we spend per head (libraries, computing on so forth), the research quality and international research rankings, and staff/student ratios. Dont forget that once you get past undergraduate level, Unis are very international places, so achievement is being measured of people not educated here, but often (say 50-70% of graduates and academic staff) all over the world. There is no process, I'm afraid, to rank the relative quality of the UK undergraduate students themselves in the way you assume. The data just isnt there to be used.

I do think modern education is good, and gives chances to a wider range of people than we had. But I also think that it is less academic as a education- which is often what people mean by "difficult".

[Alex]

I find it shocking that people who on the whole seem to have no experience of A-Levels of recent years feel they somehow know that exams have gotten easier. I understand that some people maybe don't want to feel that their hard work years ago is worth less now, but all you have to do is look at the universities, despite being constituted mostly from people of the "easy exam culture" - the UK does better each year in worldwide university league tables, even though the UK is the only country to believe that their education standards are falling.

Also, any claims of "a current student found a paper from X years ago to be really hard, so exams now must be easier" demonstrates that (rather ironically) anyone who believes this perhaps lacks the basic reasoning skills required in the modern A-Level. The idea that a syllabus wouldn't change over time is insane (I'd like to see a physics student from the 50s/60s/70s attempt the quantum section of the A-Level paper I did last year...)

There are so many sources now saying that the sceptics are completely unfounded, but I'm afraid that they seem to be too rooted in their own over inflated self-worth that they assume that exams must be easier without so much evidence as even looking at an exam themselves (a sample paper is usually available on examiners websites). I'd bet that most people wouldn't do better than the average A-Level student.

Oh and don't worry about revising before you look - you weren't taught to the test so your knowledge should be of sufficient depth to just answer all the questions.

As for SimonB, I'm sure the thousands of students now entering university resent your implication that they did not work hard, and I can guarantee you that many of them will have worked hard. Also, coursework is much more relevant to the real world in many senses, so shouldn't this actually make their degree more valuable than yours? Finally, just because a university degree was less common in the past it doesn't mean that it is more valuable - in fact I would argue that it was more valuable as it would most likely be more relevant to the modern world in terms of skills such as applying technology.

[Nathan James]

The previous comments seem to have missed the point of the blog. The point that is being communicated is that we all seem to think that the 50's and 60's were a golden age in education.

Although I am not happy with modular exams, teaching to the test, league tables etc, the 50's and 60's were not a bed of roses. Children who were probably dyslexic were frequently labelled stupid and almost ignored. Along with a curriculum that was generally dull and rather sterile (everyone who I speak to of the generation up from me tells me frankly how boring lessons were), it produced a high number of totally illiterate and innumerate adults. And not in the sense that we refer to today, I mean totally unable to read or write.

[Devan]

I have my exam results today and I think it is absolutely awful how so many people give almost no respect to the people who get good grades. I don’t think that we are necessarily working harder and we are certainly not getting easier a-levels. I personally think that the quality of education has increased as the teachers often now know what is more likely to turn up in the exams.
Also, how many people have actually got children who are taking an a-level or GCSE right now? I think then you might actually know the differences.

[Snuffy]

Anyone who knows anything about exams, knows that standards have dropped. I use my old exams from 10 years ago to build up to, as they are the most difficult. They get easier and easier every year.

[SimonB]

This means nothing.

So, examiners thought English could be improved 50 years ago. It depends on the standard against which you are measuring it. If the general standard was better 50 years ago than it is today (and the examiners then were not making the comparison with today - how could they?), then it could still be true that they thought English should be better than it was but that the standard today is much worse.

If you showed me a range of O level papers from 50 years ago and today and compared the standard of spelling on those that obbtained an A then that might be a useful comparison.

So, the kids today think they worked harder than their parents did. Big deal! Did you expect that particular question to have anything other than that response? How do they know? I'm not denying that kids today work hard - or at least their time is taken up doing course work etc which is not quite the same thing. That has no bearing on whether the exams are any easier or harder to pass. I also very very much doubt that students in the 50s, 60s and 70s when university places were a much scarcer thing and, as a result a degree arguably had even more of a premium value than it does today, just mucked about and missed their much needed grades.

From my experience, in the late 70s three As were very rare and common offers were ABB or BBB or BCC for good Russell Group universities. For almost every student with a university offer, each grade meant the difference between their first choice or their second or going through clearing or not getting in at all. There is no doubt they worked hard.