The point of an exam is to assess a students knowledge on the given subject not to rank students against their peers. It's especially unfair when the number of peers is low like in a school setting.
I don't think that's fair, either. That's suitable when you have a ranking and only the top n are accepted (like in admission exams) but IMHO not when the idea is to benchmark against a level of achievement: In which case it does not really matter how well others did, only how well each candidate did against the expectation.
So while I do think exams should be so that only a certain % of candidates usually get top grades, I think that this should be achieved by calibrating exam questions to the appropriate level of difficulty.
For instance, there should be a few stretch questions that are challenging enough that maybe only the top 10% on average are expected to get them right and the grades' thresholds should be set accordingly.
A-levels are ridiculous to the point that when it was becoming evident that too many As were handed a few years back the answer was to create a new A* grade for the "really good ones". But of course inflation did not stop so I fully expect someone to propose A* in a few years.
Yeah but the level of achievement required for starting university education has steadily dropped, and university enrollment has risen as a result.
I once read an article that claimed to have done the math for this, on math. It claimed that the absolute top grade in 1976 in high school math would have been insufficient to have gotten you into university just 15 years earlier. I believe they assumed you answered all the questions asked correctly and would leave any more advanced questions blank.
Of course, because you have to make all your offers, then see who makes their grades, it's annoying hard to predict.
What I'm wondering is what the factors truly are here and what to do with this data.
In my opinion these grades are there to differentiate the skill levels of the people, "short-term-memory" being the major skill here (another topic for another day). But if nearly half of the people are the same elite... this system of skill-measuring is getting useless.
Maybe there should be a better alternative?
Grade deflation is pretty-much impossible in the UK due to pushy parents; I've heard talk on the news of changing the grades from alphabetic to numeric ...
> The sharp rise in top grades at A-level means that the proportion getting top A* and A grades has risen by almost 75% since the last time conventional exams were taken in 2019.
It will be very interesting to see. Based on my own very limited observations, the correlation between high school grades and university performance isn't that strong.
I'd propose that a kid who worked their ass off to get a B+ will do much better at university than the lazy kid who got an A simply because they where smart and had knack for the subject.
I hope it is, I guess time will tell
At least I had to for Physics and Philosophy at Oxford, but I'm just an expendable American.
It really depends on how much information the Uni has and how contested each seat is. Some schools just make everyone take an entry exam anyway.
The SAT IIs were curved in the US and I saw no such effect.
"Incidentally I think grade inflation is the wrong terminology. It's not like the pound inflating. It's like we suddenly decided to switch to the yen. You simply cannot compare this year to previous ones in any meaningful way."
I assume what's going on there is that the teacher has to deal with the range of students in the class going from 8th graders who have no difficulties up to 12th graders who can barely understand the material, and the test's "full mark" is set at a level that allows the 12th graders to get passing scores.
On the other hand couldn't grade saturation be seen as a good thing, if it indicates that more and more students are successfully mastering all the material they are supposed to master.
It’s ridiculous that students couldn’t just sit their exams as usual this year.
I'm not saying I agree with the mitigations that were put in place this year and last year, but I certainly think normal exams would not have been good for students. Ideally we want people to fill the universities, the aim is not to maximize the number of people rejected.
I’ve lost any faith in the concept of “nurture” after watching two things right in front of my eyes:
ive watched some young kids steamroll adults who dedicated their entire life to the sport for a decade or two. it only took six months of training, and those prodigies weren’t particularly obsessed about their training either.
It was the same with academic studies. Some 1-in-million people were truly special. with either ridiculously deep insight where they could see patterns in problem sets nobody else could, or memory that allowed them to memorise 200 pages overnight. Not quite verbatim but quite precise, after only reading it once/twice.
True genius was nothing short of supernatural. There is a reason why we instinctively call it a “gift”.
Unfortunately, the other part of the spectrum exists as well, what we call special education, or the unfortunate kids with head injuries, bad infections, abused or just born that way. It’s quite sad.
What you are proposing is to create an educational system where both an IMO medalist and the special ed student both receive an A in math?
These are the extremes, but the gradient doesn’t just disappear between them. You’ll just teach at the slowest students pace, and eventually put stronger students on the “gifted” track, or super-specialize them based on their interests.
Here are some common arguments against percentiles:
1. You can't compare grades across years!
You can't anyway because of grade inflation.
2. What if one year is intrinsically better than the previous year? Giving them the same overall score would be unfair.
Subjects at A level are big enough that that is extremely unlikely. Even for small subjects there are ways of doing it fairly though, based on performance in previous years.
3. We don't want people concentrating on tiny differences in percentiles.
They would be quantised like grades are.
Then I can see that someone was schooled in Romania, studied Maths, and did better than 95% of other Romanians in school. I don't need to know the details of how the grades work, the retakes, the 'easy years', etc.
It would make hiring much easier. Currently I pretty much throw out the education part of peoples CV's because comparing totally different exam systems is impossible.
If everybody gets the same grade, other, potentially less “fair” methods will emerge.
It's believable that, in the future, candidate pools for certain masters, PhDs and employment positions will include both 2019 and 2021 high school graduates. These grades are almost always used as selection criteria. Can we really trust the process will be nuanced enough to account for the inflation, or will 2019 exam sitters be unfairly discriminated against by a surge of higher scoring students from 2020 and 2021?
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/guide-to-as-and-a-level-r...
Edit: The inflation is even more extreme at the very top: 2,664 students in 2018 received at least 3 subjects at the top grade; in 2021 that figure was 12,945 (+386%) (as someone that achieved this roughly a decade ago, I can't help but feel a bit bitter) [2]
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/c35e13f4-09cd-4700-9573-91fdfd012...
[1]: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/08/26/fk...
My uni have started to print the grade distribution for each subject on the report card, to show employers that a B is actually really good.
This approach is overall fairer to students by looking at the whole school year not one three hour exam based. UK exam setup has not really changed in 30 years plus and just because you did it is not a good reason to rethink how this works.
One of the things missed here also is a lot of exam boards historically let the teacher decide if the student is “not great” to sit the lower tier exam and cap there grade to a C no matter if you got 60 or 100% on the exam.
