Not full marks

Fraser Grant (Letters, 18 July) bases his claim that“education is not being dumbed down” on the current “all-time high number of Higher passes”. He goes on to urge us to download and tackle questions from the latest SQA papers, which he claims are “challenging”.

Perhaps mr grant is unaware that Lindsay Paterson, Professor of Education at Edinburgh University, has recently done just that and more. He compared 2016 Higher papers in English, Modern Studies and Maths with papers from 1980. His conclusion was that the current exams are less challenging than the earlier ones. In Maths, abstract rigour is no longer expected. In the other subjects the 1980 questions demanded better background knowledge, greater depth and a greater subtlety of response. So perhaps we should not be overly impressed by what Mr Grant sees as successful performance. The difficulty of the exam paper must be taken into consideration.

Even if current exams were as challenging as in the past, the pass rates which excite Mr Grant’s approval would still need to be considered in context. Pass marks and grade cut-off scores are determined by mapping individual scores on to a normal distribution. A pass, therefore, may be awarded for a score of 52 in one year and 44 in another. In 2015 the “pass” mark for higher maths, for example, was 34!

Record numbers of passes do not therefore, per se, prove that our education system is flourishing. Wouldn’t we expect easier exams and lower pass marks to produce higher pass rates? Nor is it an “insult to teachers and pupils to suggest that standards are falling”. Prof Paterson suggests that the fall in standards – as recorded, for instance, in the PISA international comparison scores – could be the outcome of the trend of curriculum reform leading to Curriculum for Excellence and resulting in a lowering of expectation of what is required of pupils. That is seriously worrying and the focus of concern should be addressing that issue rather than deflecting blame or political point scoring.

COLIN HAMILTON Braid Hills Avenue, Edinburgh