Sir, I was interested to see that this year’s A level grades had increased again, for the 24th consecutive year. Clearly, when I sat my A levels in 1981, the examination papers were abnormally difficult, which goes some way to explaining my achieved grades. I have been telling my parents this for 25 years.



DAVID R. ROBINSON
Westerham, Kent

Sir, Students do better at A level now because the exam is far less arbitrary than it was 20 years ago. Syllabuses are clearly delineated, and eccentric or perverse question papers no longer appear. Marking schemes are in the public domain, and marked scripts can be retrieved and challenged later.

Teachers are under the pressure of Ofsted and league tables not just to empower students but to spoonfeed them. Whether all this adds up to a lowering of standards is a matter of semantics.

All A-level unit raw marks are standardised to allow for varying difficulty between subjects and the difference in quality between the cohorts of students entered for them. Thus a mark of 80 per cent or more gets a grade A. If it is desirable to differentiate between the 20 per cent of students achieving this grade, there is no need to agonise about whether this can be done by 2008. The A mark can simply be set at 90 per cent.



ANDY CONNELL
Appleby, Cumbria

Sir, Would it be possible to allow my daughter just one day to enjoy her three As at A level before telling her that they are worthless?



WENDY HOFFMAN
London N20

Sir, In the grim days of spelling accuracy, syntactical precision and numerical fluency in the 1950s there was no public self-congratulation about the performance as a whole and no photographs of hordes of students in a frenzy of excitement about their success. The results were too important for public display and individuals needed to absorb their significance in privacy first.

Success or failure in examinations is essentially a matter of individual performance, and in any properly run examination system there will be failures, for the very purpose of an examination is to discriminate. We already have the absurdity of A* and A (as if that distinction could not more easily be signified by A and B). At university level the third-class degree (awarded to some 30 to 40 per cent of finalists when I took my finals at Oxford in 1964) has virtually disappeared, and even the 2.2 is somewhat rare.

In football we have a Premiership and a first division, the latter of which no longer means what it is supposed to mean. How long can we go on deluding ourselves?



GERALD MORGAN
Trinity College, Dublin

Sir, While there may be a variety of ability among the 25,000 students with three grade As or more, I have no doubt that every one of them would be able to successfully complete a degree at any of the so-called elite universities.

The key question is how many applicants who have, or were predicted to obtain, three grade As did not get an offer from any of the six universities to which they applied. I have asked Ucas to find the answer. If it proves to be a very small number, as I believe it will, then there is hardly a compelling imperative to change a whole examination system.



PROFESSOR ERIC THOMAS
Vice-Chancellor, University of Bristol

Sir, I deduce from the pictures on the front of today’s Times that anyone passing their A levels is either very young, very old or very pretty.



KEITH RICHARDSON
Epsom, Surrey

Sir, Is the new A* grade the educational equivalent of the Spinal Tap amplifier that goes up to 11?



IAN JAMES
Norwich

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