LONDON (Reuters) - Achieving three A grades at A-level will no longer be enough to ensure a place at a top university, academics warned on Wednesday.From September sixth-formers will begin studying A-level exams which will include a higher grade of A* for those getting marks of 90 percent or above in their papers.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080123/tuk-uk-britain-education-exams-fa6b408_3.html
Of course it's not anything to do with the schools being ranked on their grade performance, obviously teaching has got orders of magnitude better than when we were at school *sarcasm*. Such a magnitude of change is unlikely to be due to genetics, so must either be due to the environment, or the marking system.
It's almost inevitable that this will continue to happen, given that schools are 'marked' in league tables on this basis. What they should do (in addition perhaps) is introduce a mark similar to the IQ mark:
While IQ tests vary considerably, there is a built in 'normalization' for the result. That is, if you give 10,000 people an IQ test, the average mark will always be 100, BY DEFINITION. If it's an easy test, you'll STILL get the same people tending to score above 100, and similar people scoring below 100. So the actual mark in the test is passed through a mathematical function which compensates for the population result, to give a more standardized result (the IQ).
The same process can be applied to any exam, and if applied to A level results would give a clear, fair and consistent means for universities to select. An additional benefit is that this process could be used to correct for the inherent 'easyness' of some subject choices over others.
Thus the current A, B, C etc scale could be used as an ABSOLUTE measure of performance (poor as it is), and a normalized scale similar to IQ could be used as a RELATIVE measure of performance (more suited for selection).
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