Why have an exam where more than half the students get the best possible grade?

Stellios said:
Yes i fully understand that, but whats the use of having further maths to your name if you have a very high chance of gettign an A? Surely itll get so common at grade A that it wont be worth as much as it sounds?
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The point of further maths is that it's aimed at students aiming to do maths or a maths-related course, and gives them the extra knowledge required to succeed on these courses, for which the standard maths A-level would be insufficient.

As a result the students who sit it generally have a lot of natural mathematical ability. It's a similar reason as to why language exams such as Chinese also have a lot of A grades - because a lot of those sitting them are fluent in Chinese.
 
Lagz said:
The main purpose of A-levels is to decide who gets to go to which university, so their main requirement is to differentiate between pupils.
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You make a valid point here in favour of percentiles. However, the problems with this approach are:

-Not all A-Level students go to uni
-Unis don't merely need to differentiate between pupils, they also need to know that any prospective students have acheived a given standard (say an A grade). When you start using percentiles, you can't be certain of that - especially in rare/unpopular subjects.

For your bread and butter like English and Maths, then yeah, you probably could get away with it because the sheer volume of pupils mean that in order to place in the top 5% you probably have acheived a given standard. But for incredibly specialised subjects which many schools / colleges don't teach, it's a more risky approach. For a start they will often only be attempted by pupils who are very good at the subject. So placing in the top 5% may be tough simply because the calibre of student is very high - that doesn't mean to say you don't have a good aptitude for it yourself!
 
I don’t have time to read the thread (I have an exam tomorrow) however I do agree its stupidly easy to get an A in the uk, in my university you have to be top of your game to get a first. However you have to remember that the students that take further math’s are normally especially gifted students.
 
I'm sick of people saying A Levels and GCSEs are getting easier. The fact is, with government funding and the right teachers, pupils are performing. I can't believe this. When we want to improve something in society - people's educations, when we actually do see results, there is still something wrong with it. It makes me absolutely angry to hear **** and bull stories from the BBC, Times and other stuck up media profiles shooting down people who achieve. I got my results today. I got a B in Maths. A B in Graphics. And a D in Physics. Not the best results in the world, but I tried my hardest and got the best I could. It got me into Uni and now i'm happy. I've spoken to at least 20 other people of my age and asked them if the A Levels are getting easier. Their response? No, it's not. It's not fair.
 
Ricochet J said:
I'm sick of people saying A Levels and GCSEs are getting easier. The fact is, with government funding and the right teachers, pupils are performing. I can't believe this. When we want to improve something in society - people's educations, when we actually do see results, there is still something wrong with it. It makes me absolutely angry to hear **** and bull stories from the BBC, Times and other stuck up media profiles shooting down people who achieve. I got my results today. I got a B in Maths. A B in Graphics. And a D in Physics. Not the best results in the world, but I tried my hardest and got the best I could. It got me into Uni and now i'm happy. I've spoken to at least 20 other people of my age and asked them if the A Levels are getting easier. Their response? No, it's not. It's not fair.
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They are getting easier. Maybe you are not as intelligent as you think you are.

When 56% of an examination detail are getting 'A's, you know something isn't right.
 
When I did IB Maths (Higher Level), something like a whole 5% of the people who took it got a 7/7. (highest grade) And that is apparantly "the clever and dedicated people" as they (we) did it at Higher Level, and not at Standard/Studies level. (the HL is equivalent to A Level Maths + A Level Further Maths sandwiched together) Incidentally I got a 7 :p

I believe the IB is graded similarly on a curve, but the boundaries are set by a conference between the people that write the exams, and the teachers; the teachers discuss how difficult the exam was in relation to previous years and the current syllabus and decide the marks required for the boundaries that way.
 
So Further Maths is apparently one of the hardest courses? It should be used to separate the men from the boys and to show that you have the ability.

Grading has always depended on performance of other people in that the top percentile get As and the next get Bs etc. Over half getting As is fully ridiculous.
 
Moses99p said:
And its complete rubbish when people say, "its easier nowadays." It patently isn't, I tend to listen to my old teachers rather than armchair critics when it comes to that topic.
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My old physics A-level teacher (who was head of science with a good 20+ years of teaching experience behind him, has a doctorate and seemingly knew the answer to any relevant question we threw at him) said that in his view A-levels were definitely easier than they used to be. The stuff we were doing at A-level, he had done at O-level.
 
markyp23 said:
They are getting easier. Maybe you are not as intelligent as you think you are.

When 56% of an examination detail are getting 'A's, you know something isn't right.
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Now I understand your worry. Where is 56% coming from? Like I said, a few of the defining factors are government support, teaching quality and general help. But I think one of the main factors which is overlooked are examining types. Put yourself in the shoes of an examiner. Every examiner is human. At the end of the day after examining 100 or more papers, they will tire. It's easy as an examiner to be lenient as naturally you'd want the best possible result for the person taking the exam and just say “Oh, he didn’t get the right answer but I get what he’s saying. Let’s give them a point.”
 
Ricochet J said:
Now I understand your worry. Where is 56% coming from? Like I said, a few of the defining factors are government support, teaching quality and general help. But I think one of the main factors which is overlooked are examining types. Put yourself in the shoes of an examiner. Every examiner is human. At the end of the day after examining 100 or more papers, they will tire. It's easy as an examiner to be lenient as naturally you'd want the best possible result for the person taking the exam and just say “Oh, he didn’t get the right answer but I get what he’s saying. Let’s give them a point.”
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That isn't anything to do with the fundamental error of an exam where the MAJORITY of people are getting an A. I thought the whole point of an exam was to show ability relative to others?

EDIT: Just read what you said again. Absolute tosh about the markers.
 
One thing I would say in relation to 'students are getting better' is that there are some valid (albiet perhaps slightly worrying) reasons why students get better grades in recent years:

-Better access to research materials (internet) for coursework.
-Higher standard of presentation and spelling due to use of computers for coursework
-Examinations less focussed on memory recall and more on applying techniques (e.g. being given equations to use in Maths, more emphasis on structure/argument than facts in History...)

Whether or not one deems these things to be good or bad is open to debate, but I think we need to try and look at the situation in more depth than simply branding exams as being 'easier'.
 
I took Futher Maths, (along with Maths, Physics and Chemistry), way back in '93. it was not a particularly difficult subject particularly if you were doing Physics as well as normal Maths as quite a few of the calculations and concepts overlapped. I wouldn't have said it was any harder then normal Maths A-level, it just extended the syllabus further.

That being said I would agree that the people on the course were the really clever people, (apart from me, I was just there for comic relief ;)). At my college there was 3 or 4 sets of normal maths classes at say 20 people a time but a grand total of 6 of us doing further maths. Of those six, five of us were doing the four couses I have stated above. Of the group, at least three went on to do Maths at Oxford and the other two, (including me), did 4-year MPhys Astrophysics courses.

The sort of people doing Further Maths back then were those who took the Extention paper at GCSE level on top of the normal exams, (I don't know if they even have that exam any more).

edit:I should have mentioned, I would have been in the minority this year, (assuming the exam is as difficult now as it was then), as I didn't get an A ... I got a B and I was very happy at that as I am not good at exams, (suffer badly from exam stress and have a memory like a sieve).
 
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markyp23 said:
I thought the whole point of an exam was to show ability relative to others?
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It is, and it does. Just because people taking that particular exam are generally higher achieving students doesn't mean it's an easy exam.
 
memyselfandi said:
The sort of people doing Further Maths back then were those who took the Extention paper at GCSE level on top of the normal exams, (I don't know if they even have that exam any more).
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Most of the people doing Further Maths at my school were the ones who took GCSE a year early. We'd basically had a year of doing A-level stuff from 15-16 anyway, although people weren't taking it all that seriously.
 
Cambridge will be asking people to submit their marks voluntarily which bypasses the variance in marks per grade. Those that don't submit will, I assume, be treated as though they scored a low A.
 
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