Next Thursday, thousands of nervous A-level students will tease open their results envelopes. What will they find inside? If statistics are anything to go by: lots of As. Last year, nearly 27 per cent of exam papers were awarded the top grade (in private schools, the figure was over 50 per cent).
But, this year, there will be something else: a sprinkling of lofty A*s. For the first time, top-scoring papers will be given a special award. Critics may scoff – further evidence, they say, of rampant grade inflation – but the A* is here to stay. Cambridge has now raised its “standard offer” from AAA to A*AA.
The question is: how do you get your hands on one? In a Radio 4 documentary next Monday, How to Get an A-Star, actress Imogen Stubbs tries to find out – partly by getting her husband, the revered theatre director Sir Trevor Nunn, to sit a recent English paper.
Stubbs, 49 – who made her name with the Royal Shakespeare Company – says she embarked on the programme after trying to help her sixth-form daughter, Ellie, revise for this year’s exams – and failing in the task. “The more you try to help, the more confusing it is,” she sighs (the couple also have a 14-year-old son called Jesse). “I was trying to provide things that were interesting, little anecdotes. But my kids would say, ‘You’re just filling our minds with stuff that won’t get any marks!’”
This is a familiar refrain for parents, says Stubbs, because the system is now bafflingly marks-oriented. In the 1970s and 1980s, only the top five or 10 per cent scored As, however good the year group. Under the current regime, As are awarded to pupils who correctly cover the exam criteria. So everyone, theoretically, can get an A – they just have to know the criteria back to front.
“You absolutely cannot sit an A-level now without understanding the marking system,” says Stubbs (who gained straight As in A-level English, French and History, and a First in English at Oxford). “That’s the fundamental difference with my education. I didn’t have a clue how examiners marked.
I thought they were nice old people who smoked pipes and chuckled at my use of the semicolon. Now kids are just ticking boxes. You can almost imagine them sitting there, thinking: ‘Find two critical voices. Now look for a metaphor. Use the word onomatopoeia – that’s good, you’ll get a mark for that…’ It’s a cynical approach to A-levels.”
To underline how things have changed, Stubbs asked Sir Trevor to attempt a question from a 2008 Shakespeare paper (anonymously), before having it graded. He had one hour to answer the poser, “Hamlet avenges his mother rather than his father: how far and in what ways do you agree?” No revision was undertaken; but, then again, he did head the Royal Shakespeare Company for 18 years.
How did he do? “He felt that he answered competently, but he was surprised by how restrictive the criteria-based marking system is,” says Stubbs, who prefers not to reveal his result before the show airs. “He felt that, in order to tick each box, you had to give relatively uninteresting answers.”
So exactly how do you get an A*? Stubbs still isn’t sure. “There’s no cut and dried answer,” she says. “In a subject like Maths, you have to really know your facts. But arts subjects have always been absurdly difficult to mark because they are subjective… I don’t think anyone has a clue.”
Not that A-level standards are necessarily falling. “I think kids work unbelievably hard,” she says. “Certainly, the French exam is phenomenally hard. So I don’t think they’ve got easier.”
And yet, last year, A grades rose for the 27th year running. So why have successive governments been so wedded to the notion of rising grades? “Because it makes them look like they’re improving education, and it’s a con.”
The real issue, Stubbs thinks, lies in our obsession with results. “I don’t know [if the A* grade is a bonkers idea]. I just think the system is wrong, because kids’ lives have become dominated by exams, from such a young age, and they’re killing childhood.
“The exam problem really goes back to what we think of education. Should it be based on exams, or on trying to nurture each child to find out what will make them most fulfilled in life? In learning First Aid, say, or practical skills, or how to be better human beings? It’s not all about getting A grades.”
--By Olly Grant,10 Aug 2010