Get 16% in your exams and get a C grade?

[Yorkie]

so i need to go for a job(that i might not even want) in brighton, hope the manager is a football fan and hope that i get on with him.

Yep
Just pray he isn't a Palace fan

Seriously, work as hard as you can but once in the world of employment then a lot of other factors come into play.
I have done jobs that I didn't have the qualifications for and received on the job training instead.

 

[chip]

A levels have got much easier over the past decade, certainly in the more analytical subjects. I know this as I have been an admissions tutor in the engineering/science faculty of a Premier League university.

I have seen many people attempt courses that they are clearly not capable of despite good A levels in required subjects. Its a waste of everybodys time and damages the learning of able students devaluing their degrees.

In maths and physics, for example, much of the harder material has been dropped or is optional (calculus, matrix algebra, complex numbers, etc.). This has been going on at least since the end of the second world war. My fathers A level physics covered more than my first year university courses.

 

[Yorkie]

Calculus and algebra were in the O level course

 

[London Irish]

When I was at school 18 years ago, around 1 in 11 candidates got an A grade at A-level. The top grade was difficult to achieve, and to get two or three As meant you were an exceptional student, markedly one of the best in your year. The percentage achieving each grade was controlled nationally by the examining boards, so that standards were consistent from year to year.

Nowadays just over 1 in 3 candidates gets an A. Practically everybody taking A-levels walks away with a bagful of A grades. They've become meaningless. A relative of mine recently didn't complete her Psychology A-level paper - she ran out of time and messed up. Still got an A though.

Any attempt to say this gets attacked by today's students as, "We worked hard, don't demean us." Well so did we in our day, and this ludicrous grade bonanza demeans OUR achievements. You may well be SLIGHTLY harder-working than a generation ago, and SLIGHTLY more intelligent, but no way are you 4 times better, which is what this 1-in-11 to 1-in-3 inflation implies.

I hate to break this to you mate, but your gullibility in getting wound up by the latest tedious bit of A-level scare media misreporting doesn't attest too well to the intelligence of your generation of A-level student

What the hell is it with this contest diet of crap we are forced to read about A-levels?

All A-levels are is a system of sifting university applicants. It doesn't matter whether they are getting slightly harder or slightly easier as long as everyone sits the same exam - and they do!

You just don't get a situation in the job market where an employer compares the A-levels results of a 35-year-old with those of a 23-year-old in a tiebreaker for a job. IT DOESN'T HAPPEN - employers are only interested in the last thing you've done whether it be last job or university record, A-levels are utterly irrelevant once you are into the job market.

This A-level crap must be up there with "there's no bobbies on the beat" and "what's all this rap music about" as the favourite prematurely-old-man whinge of choice.

 

[Uncle C]

Average intelligence in humans cannot evolve and improve over the course of 3 decades. Ergo if grades have gone up, then exams have gotten easier. This is not rocket science even for a Grade C in sociology.
This fact is completely divorced from the effort that anyone puts into passing exams. On average the effort today is no more or less than the effort back then.

 

[Stumpy Tim]

My Dad took a GCSE in Astronomy recently. He said there were four questions. In one question he wrote for an hour about Gallileo, and realised afterwards that the question was about a completely different astronomer!

He got an A*.