UK High School top grades reach record high – with 44.8% getting A+ or A grades

For a bit of political context, last year there was a lot of controversy about people getting poor grades based on estimates, which reflected badly on the government. I suspect there was a lot of politics at play here to ensure that everyone was happy with their inflated grades.<p>It’s ridiculous that students couldn’t just sit their exams as usual this year.

I worked my fingers to the bone to get A grades in my highers. The grading was done based on a distribution where only a certain % of candidates could get each grade in a given exam. Teacher assesed grades are antithetical to the purpose of exams. This has been an incredible act of political cowardice on behalf of the UK governments. The only mitigating factor I can see is the universities benefiting from a larger candidate pool in the UK since there has been massive drop-off in EU students applying.

Worth noting that it was around 9% from 1964-1984, and has been pretty steadily climbing since then (with a levelling off at around 25% in 2010).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alansmithers.com&#x2F;reports&#x2F;AL2014.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alansmithers.com&#x2F;reports&#x2F;AL2014.pdf</a>

This tweet in a short thread from Sam Freedman hits the nail on the head for me:<p>&quot;Incidentally I think grade inflation is the wrong terminology. It&#x27;s not like the pound inflating. It&#x27;s like we suddenly decided to switch to the yen. You simply cannot compare this year to previous ones in any meaningful way.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Samfr&#x2F;status&#x2F;1424806593187794944" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Samfr&#x2F;status&#x2F;1424806593187794944</a>

Eventually, grades are used to quickly stack rank people in various admissions.<p>If everybody gets the same grade, other, potentially less “fair” methods will emerge.

I don&#x27;t know why they don&#x27;t switch to a percentile based system. All the arguments against it are nonsense because people implicitly do it in their heads anyway. Like when someone says they got an A now you&#x27;re immediately going to think &quot;in 2019? that&#x27;s pretty good&quot; or &quot;in 2021? only in the top 50%!&quot;.<p>Here are some common arguments against percentiles:<p>1. You can&#x27;t compare grades across years!<p>You can&#x27;t anyway because of grade inflation.<p>2. What if one year is intrinsically better than the previous year? Giving them the same overall score would be unfair.<p>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.<p>3. We don&#x27;t want people concentrating on tiny differences in percentiles.<p>They would be quantised like grades are.

Grade inflation has always been a thing but the velocity of this will lead to unfair outcomes. For comparison, in 2019 25.2% of students achieved these grades [1].<p>It&#x27;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?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;news&#x2F;guide-to-as-and-a-level-results-for-england-2019" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;news&#x2F;guide-to-as-and-a-level-r...</a><p>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&#x27;t help but feel a bit bitter) [2]<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;c35e13f4-09cd-4700-9573-91fdfd012418" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ft.com&#x2F;content&#x2F;c35e13f4-09cd-4700-9573-91fdfd012...</a>

Isn&#x27;t there a connection with that &quot;Fuck the algorithm&quot; protest last year [1]?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.lse.ac.uk&#x2F;impactofsocialsciences&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;26&#x2F;fk-the-algorithm-what-the-world-can-learn-from-the-uks-a-level-grading-fiasco&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.lse.ac.uk&#x2F;impactofsocialsciences&#x2F;2020&#x2F;08&#x2F;26&#x2F;fk...</a>

That was weird when some of my Norwegian friends went abroad for US one year for Uni. Could be ordinary C students here (which is good when it&#x27;s a study only containing the top of the top), but in the US they all got straight As. Basically just doing the coursework and extra credits and it was impossible to fail. They even were told they wouldn&#x27;t get to continue if they got more than a single B.<p>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 is a non-story because this year and last year, exams were cancelled and teachers effectively set the grades. These two years cannot be compared to previous ones.

If grades are saturating, then perhaps we need something like high dynamic range (HDR) for grades.

Based on the responses here can tell this is the crowd who like to recite CS101 algorithms on a whiteboard in interviews.<p>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.<p>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.

I&#x27;d really like to have some system that can convert any grade or score to a &quot;ranking in class&quot;.<p>Then I can see that someone was schooled in Romania, studied Maths, and did better than 95% of other Romanians in school. I don&#x27;t need to know the details of how the grades work, the retakes, the &#x27;easy years&#x27;, etc.<p>It would make hiring much easier. Currently I pretty much throw out the education part of peoples CV&#x27;s because comparing totally different exam systems is impossible.

I think the impact is that some students are going to get placements that they otherwise would not have gotten, and will struggle accordingly because the level of study required at Uni will be that much greater. Outside of gaining entry into a university, A-levels are fairly meaningless.

The UK must be an amazing place for education. Nearly half their students are above the 85th percentile!

This is such a big problem in society. We teach kids that every one of them is &quot;exceptional&quot; at everything they do and then, when they hit the real world, they shut down at the first sign of criticism or &quot;failure.&quot;

Schools and especially universities are viewed as products. Consumers want their product to be worth something. This is why parents put up such an uproar, they are defending their investment. It&#x27;s bonkers.

Wouldn&#x27;t it make more sense to grade all students on a curve, if what you&#x27;re trying to do is effectively rank students for university admissions?

Quite a few people are going to be wondering what on earth A levels are.

Soon: everyone is a genius

yes, because of the Internet, and especially Youtube! So much easier to learn than in the past, because you can find teachers that reach you better.

This is why standardized testing exists.

It should be noted that the UK uses an arcane system where results don&#x27;t really change what university you get to go to...

I was raised that A and B were the only acceptable grades, C means you need to study more. But then I ended up dropping out of college so that wasn’t too helpful.