Top universities lower the bar for students in desperate bid to f ill courses

Yes, sixth-formers work hard. But, asks DOMINIC SANDBROOK, what IS the point of making A-levels tougher — only to lower pass marks and make everyone a winner?

TEENAGERS hoping to get into a top university through clearing will have a better chance than usual this year.

Elite institutions are lowering their entry requirements in a desperate bid to recruit more students when A-level results are announced on Thursday.

Colleges are awash with places because of a dip in initial applications, caused by a reduction in the population of 18-year-olds and a decrease in EU students.

There is no cap on the number of students universities can take – and many are aggressively trying to increase their total to boost revenue.

A Daily Mail survey revealed some will be lowering their normal grade offers, while others are running online campaigns and promising extras such as guaranteed accommodation.

Two thirds of Russell Group universities currently have vacancies, with a total of more than 4,000 courses advertised on the website of the Universities and Colleges Admission Service (Ucas). There are even places available on competitive courses such as medicine, law, English, maths and the sciences.

Experts say this year students entering clearing will have unprecedented choice.

The Mail’s survey revealed the lengths admissions tutors are taking to recruit via clearing:

÷Queen’s in Belfast, which is recruiting for 212 courses, has ‘no limit’ for students from England and Wales, and in many cases will accept students with at least one grade lower than the official requirements;

÷Sheffield is making ‘most’ courses available and will guarantee accommodation to any students coming through clearing to make it ‘stress-free’;

÷Liverpool is offering medicine

‘This year it’s a buyers’ market’

in clearing – despite it normally being an extremely competitive course requiring a minimum of three A grades;

÷Cardiff has been using Twitter to promote its clearing places to potential students;

÷Leeds is asking students to register before results day so they are easy to recruit if they miss out on their first choice.

On Thursday, sixth-formers will open their A-level results and discover whether they have secured a place at their chosen university.

Those missing out can apply for other courses via clearing, while those doing significantly better than predicted can ‘trade up’ for a more elite course through a process called adjustment. In total, the Ucas site shows that yesterday there were around 4,400 undergraduate courses at Russell Group institutions with places available for English students.

Among competitive courses on offer was medicine at St George’s, University of London, a hospital-affiliated programme that normally requires AAA. Meanwhile, the highly selective University College London, which never enters clearing, has revealed it will make a ‘limited’ number of its spare places available through adjustment.

The 15 Russell Group universities entering clearing are Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Durham, Exeter, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Queen Mary University of London, Queen’s Belfast, Sheffield, Southampton and York.

Alan Smithers, education professor at Buckingham University, said: ‘Clearing this year is a buyers’ market. Even the leading universities, other than Oxford and Cambridge, have places they are desperate to fill.

‘Anyone with better grades than expected should aim for the top … there is a good chance they will get in. Clearing this year is a free-for-all and a great opportunity to get into the top universities.’

Many universities are so desperate to secure students that they have made unconditional offers – guaranteed places regardless of grades. At the weekend, it emerged unconditional offers at some top institutions have more than doubled in the past five years.

T HE date is 1865, the place Wonderland, and little Alice, having fallen down a rabbit hole, is dripping wet after swimming in a sea of tears. So, on the advice of the Dodo, Alice and the other animals take part in a Caucus Race.

According to the children’s classic: ‘They began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over.’

At the end they crowded around the Dodo, clamouring, ‘Who has won?’

There was a long pause, while the Dodo thought. Then, at last, it produced the answer: ‘ Everybody has won, and all must have prizes!’

When Lewis Carroll wrote those words more than 150 years ago, he meant to satirise the incestuous nature of Victorian politics.

He could scarcely have imagined that they would become the guiding principle of 21st- century Britain’s educational establishment.

As hundreds of thousands of parents (and their offspring) will know, this Thursday is A-level results day — the day of judgment, when dreams will be realised and hopes dashed in every street in the country.

Yet even before the results have been announced, it appears that today’s equivalent of the Dodo, the exam regulator Ofqual, has been fiddling the figures in an attempt to ensure that all have prizes.

As it happens, this is the first year that students have taken exams under the new system designed by the former education secretary Michael Gove, who was keen to end the curse of relentless grade inflation.

Mockery

But as Ofqual’s head, Sally Collier, explained over the weekend, she has decided to intervene in the marking process to ‘ protect’ students from getting bad grades.

Even though Mr Gove’s reforms were designed specifically to differentiate between different students, Ms Collier is having none of it.

In her own words, she has decided to lower the marking thresholds to make sure that there are just as many ‘winners’ as there were last year — even though this makes a mockery of the new system.

‘I want the message to be that students have done fantastically well,’ she explained defiantly. ‘ All our kids are brilliant!’

‘ All our kids are brilliant.’ It’s the kind of thing you can just about tolerate from a painfully earnest headmistress. From the head of the government’s exam regulator, however, it is not merely embarrassing but downright horrifying.

Since I often go into schools to give history talks, I know how hard many of our teenagers work. Indeed, I am not ashamed to say that many of them work an awful lot harder than my friends and I did.

To claim that they are all brilliant, though, is utterly fatuous. Quite obviously many of them are very far from brilliant.

For example, if I had done physics A-level, or indeed art at the most rudimentary level, I would not have been brilliant. I would have been abysmal.

The ‘all our kids are brilliant’ ethos dates from the Seventies, when a generation of progressive educationalists, kicking against the strictness of their school days, argued that all students should be encouraged to feel like winners, even when they palpably weren’t.

There was perhaps a grain of sense in this. In previous decades, too many students had been cruelly written off too soon as moronic failures, dumped into failing secondary moderns and denied the chance of a university education.

Even so, the progressive ethos spiralled out of control. You can still see vestiges of it today at sports days where all the children are awarded medals, even if they rolled across the line several hours after beginning the 100 metres.

Nowhere was the damage more obvious, though, than in the assessment of A-levels. By the New Labour years, it had become a familiar ritual.

Every August, as students rejoiced in better results than ever, the latest education minister took to the airwaves to parrot some variation on Ms Collier’s ‘all our kids are brilliant’ line. The statistics tell the story. Out of more than 850,000 grades awarded in 2010, more than one in four were A or A*. Even in 2016, years after Mr Gove had promised to crack down on the all-must-haveprizes ethos, 25.8 per cent of grades were A or A*.

‘So what?’ you may well be asking. ‘Why not give every student an A?’

Well, one obvious answer is that it defeats the point of the exercise. Teenagers are not doing A-levels for fun; they are doing them so that employers and, in particular, universities can identify the brightest and most promising students.

Grades

Some years ago, as a university admissions tutor, I used to plough through hundreds of applications. Form after form carried the same list of GCSE grades —A,A, A,A,A — as well as the same list of predicted A-level grades —A, A, A.

It was impossible to tell them apart. Now it is even worse. In 2016, more than 41 per cent of maths students got an A or A*, as well as 39 per cent of German students, 37 per cent of French students and 32 per cent of Classics students.

What’s the point of that? How on earth can you expect universities to pick out the brilliant students, if thousands of them are getting the best grades? Hence Mr Gove’s reforms. The point was to make exams harder, but not for some strangely twisted sadistic purposes.

The point was to have a greater range of results, so top universities, as well as future employers, could get a better sense of students’ ability.

Alas, Sally Collier and colleagues — the dreaded progressive educational ‘blob’ against which Mr Gove regularly inveighed — are evidently determined to undermine the whole exercise.

By fiddling the figures, they want to make everybody look like winners — which will go down well with anxious students and their relieved parents, but will turn the exam season back into a nonsense.

Who loses from all this? Everybody. The brightest and hardest working students end up being cheated, because if everybody gets stellar grades, their efforts are devalued.

Cosseted

Universities lose out, too, because it is impossible for them to know what they are getting. As the novelist and lecturer Tibor Fischer wrote a couple of weeks ago, only six people out of his class of 120 English students could answer the question ‘what is a sentence?’ You can’t tell me that the 114 others were ‘brilliant’.

Above all, Britain loses. Of course, we can follow Ms Collier and delude ourselves that we have reared an unprecedented generation of geniuses.

Yet the most recent league tables published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development showed Britain far behind the likes of Singapore, Japan, Finland, South Korea and Australia in science, as well as 21st in reading and a pitiful 27th in maths. So much, then, for all those A* grades.

No parent wants their child to do badly, let alone to fail. But we should not be afraid to differentiate between good and bad students, both to pick out the best performers and to save the rest from wasting their time and money at university.

If we continue to pump them up with false results and exaggerated praise, we are doing them no favours. We will end up with a generation of cosseted, over-entitled youngsters, for whom the harsh pressures of reality will come as a terrible shock. And even as the Sally Colliers of the world tell us how brilliant we are, Britain will carry on drifting into mediocrity and decline.

For there are, after all, two things worth knowing about the Dodo. One is that it thought everybody must have prizes. The other is that it died out. I fear there is an omen there, unfortunately.