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Hard Working Students
Apparently over 40 percent of maths A Level students received an A grade. How on earth can that happen? Surely the same percentage of students should get an A grade each year or the whole grading system is useless. Wouldn't it be much better if the top five or ten percent of students are given the A grade?
As things stand the pass rate and the A grade rate seems to be a political football, so governments can claim their education policies are succeeding. It's clearly claptrap, they are just passing more people and fiddling the way grades are given.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of this right now are the way various education and government mouthpieces are defending this. I've just heard a woman on BBC 5Live trying to defend this policy and any time it was called into question would start talking about "not denigrating the hard working students who achieved these results."
I've heard the phrase "hard working students" from at least four spokesmen today in defending the pointless way exam results are graded today. I'm sure plenty of students do work well. Yet using them as a human shield for a policy that means universities and employers can't sort the wheat from the chaff seems rather disingenuous.
There's been a lot of this type of nonsense recently, often you'll hear politicians talking about "hard working people" and hiding behind them when laying on another stupid policy. Anyway well done to those who got A grades, you must be delighted to be in that select group of nearly half the students.
Overall total A grades in all subjects amount to a quarter of the results this year. I seem to remember a time when A grades were given to a much more select group of students.
I'm also wondering how stupid you have to be these days to be one of the three percent who failed A levels, seeing as they've made them so easy. Did they spell their name wrong or something?
This entry was posted on August 17th, 2006 at 16:32 by Harry and is filed under Current Affairs.
3 comments
Especially as a large proportion of A Levels are now modular.
Especially as you can resit modules that you get a bad grade in again and again and again until you get the grade you want.
Especially as you cannot be marked down for poor English (like we could back in the day), as it "unfairly" penalises people who don't have English as a first language. Or who are illiterate. Or who are thick.
The governments ludicrous policy for getting an arbritary percentage of 18 year olds into university, whether it suits them or not, is to blame here. I am reminded of the teacher who wanted to abolish the word "failure" from the classroom and replace it with "delayed success", it's mental!
Reminds me of the Ark B survivors from Hitchhikers deciding to use leaves as a currency.
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