Comments by "Taffy Terrier" (@taffyterrier) on "“Let’s Not LIE To Our Kids!” | Julia Hartley-Brewer Slams Inflated Exam Marks" video.

A levels were already being dumbed down in the late 80s/early 90s.
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@Hereford1642 when A level grades were norm referenced no more than 10% of passes were awarded a grade A. After Thatcher introduced criterion referencing circa 1985 the percentage of A grades steadily increased year on year from 10% to approx 26% in 2019. But in 1980 approx 10% of 18 year olds could manage old style rigorous A levels whereas in 2019 approx 5 times as many 18 year olds can manage new style simplified A levels. So only 1% of all 18 year olds in 1980 received a grade A in any given subject while 13% of all 18 year olds were awarded a grade A in 2019.
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@thecuttingsark5094 it was objective when norm referencing was used to determine grade distribution and before the exams were systematically simplified and dumbed down in a deliberate attempt to get 50% of young people into whatever passes for a “university”.
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Everyone makes the grade in dumbed down Britain.
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Modern “A-levels” are dumbed down, debased, devalued and degraded. A grade ‘A’ at “A-level” in 2023 is the equivalent of a grade ‘D’ in the 70s. Social media is irrelevant.
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@1990-t1j Presumably A level syllabuses were dumbed down in 1988 to coincide with the first generation of GCSE pupils beginning their sixth form studies.
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@1990-t1j I don’t believe standards were maintained. Less than 50% of pupils could manage O-levels while every pupil sat one size fits all GCSEs in which rigorous timed examinations were substituted with teacher assessed coursework.
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@1990-t1j I was shown a new GCSE Maths examination paper in 1987 and it was easier than a GCE O-level. If in 1988 50% of the exam was based on teacher assessed coursework and in 1987 there was no coursework allowed the decline must have been pretty immediate.
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Teachers and headmasters themselves are products of the dumbed down education system.
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@Hereford1642 I think it was New Labour who split A-levels into bite sized, easily digestible modules which could be resat multiple times to improve grades without penalty. It was well documented around 2000 that old O-level questions routinely appeared on contemporary A-level papers. If Labour had won the 2010 election Brown was going to go even further and modularise GCSEs. I believe Michael Gove attempted to reintroduce a bit of the old rigour and GCSEs and A-levels are now more difficult than they were under Blair and Brown but he backed away from rationing the proportion of A grades awarded. It was front page news a few years ago that pupils were getting grade As in A-level maths with a 45% score so although the exams were more testing (though not as rigorous as in the 70s/early 80s) the grades remained as artificially inflated as they were before.
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@Hereford1642 I can’t get my head round the idea that under New Labour pupils were allowed to resit the same A-level modules multiple times with advance knowledge of the questions then went on to be awarded grade As - then David Miliband appeared on Newsnight insisting that “standards are being maintained”.
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@thecuttingsark5094 On the contrary exam marks used to be norm referenced so an A grade in say 1971 would be the same as an A grade in 1981. Thatcher introduced criterion referencing at some point in the 1980s. Before her intervention no more than 10% of passes were awarded an A grade. But after exams were marked on criteria the number of A grades steadily increased from 10% in the early 80s to 26% in 2019 so an A grade lost its value with each passing year.
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@thecuttingsark5094 What you describe above is norm referencing which Thatcher got rid of in the 80s and has never been implemented since. Your statement above that ‘Currently exams are Normative referenced’ is incorrect.
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Most of today’s straight A students would have been straight E students in the 1970s.
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