“Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.” (From Alice in Wonderland)
The UK’s gold-standard exam is now so easy that almost everybody who takes it passes.
The degradation of the A-level exam is now so complete that the more astute teenager realises that the standard two or three that my generation went for is simply not enough to distinguish them from the crowd.
To distinguish themselves from the mass of candidates, many brighter pupils now take six or seven A-levels. In private, education ministers have expressed concern that the system is forcing the most able teenagers to take on an absurd workload in order to prove their excellence.
The greatest improvements in exam scores are in the so-called ‘fake’ subjects:
In some subjects, such as media studies, the proportion of sixth-formers recording passes has risen even further, to more than 98 per cent, according to a senior education official.
Ruth Kelly promised in February to make the A-level harder - an admission surely that they had become too easy. So these results will require some A-level grade wiggling to get out of.
Now that’s a task they won’t fail…
