Hopefully, harder exams will end the A* obsession
This year’s more rigorous GCSES in English and maths, with grades ranging from 9 to 1, brought forth a predictable chorus of complaint. The pass rate dipped in England. More than twothirds of secondary pupils don’t understand the new grading scale. Err, 9 is at the top, 1 is at the bottom; take a few seconds, kids, and you’ll probably figure it out.
Charlotte Avery, president of the Girls’ Schools Association, warned: “If the top grade is so unachievable, we are almost setting up many of them to feel that they are failing. It demoralises the school and the child and the parents.”
As a parent who has supported two offspring through GCSES, I could not disagree more. The truth is that progressively dumbing down public tests has had all kinds of perverse and distressing consequences. It is not a kindness to children. In fact, the epidemic of anxiety among young people maps almost exactly on to the years when perfect exam performance became a possibility.
Back in the Spacehopper Era, when I was doing O-levels, there was no expectation that you would get all As. Not even close. Admittedly, the odd prodigy (very odd, ours was called Cecil and dressed like Mr Toad) might do spectacularly across the board, but the rest of us only picked up As in subjects where we naturally excelled. After that, we got Bs, maybe a sprinkling of Cs and Ds and an E, or a fail in subjects we were rubbish at. Did we feel demoralised? Nope. Luckily, self-esteem hadn’t been invented back then. It really wasn’t a big deal. Besides, the exam results did us a favour. They indicated where our strengths lay, which helped us decide what to do next, whether that was continuing to A-level and university or leaving school to start an apprenticeship or get a job. Compare and contrast with certain 16-year-olds in my son’s year. With A*s galore, they couldn’t decide whether to aim for medicine or languages or art history or nuclear physics.
My daughter used to complain that the scientific kids could all get A*s in English because they were taught key words to parrot in the answers.
“They’re no good at English, Mum. They haven’t even read
Parents will have to accept that hapless Hugo isn’t Stephen Hawking
the set books.” Quite right, love. But by then exams were a game to be played, not tests of actual ability let alone flair. Pupils often understood the examiner’s mark scheme better than any of the concepts they wrote down.
The brightest students were advised to conceal their cleverness. If an able kid revised hard enough, suppressed any originality and learned which boxes to tick, then he or she could practically guarantee top grades.
Predictably, those schools catering to the aspirational middle classes became exam factories. They trained their young charges like Cold War gymnasts, jealously guarding their positions in the league tables, ruthlessly expunging any subject – or even child – that might tarnish their record. A school my son briefly attended discontinued drama after two boys allegedly let the side down by getting – oh, the horror! – Bs.
It was insane, but the madness was contagious. Girls, in particular, drove themselves into a frenzy of overachievement. I will never forget one mother who said that her daughter had mental health problems but, luckily, Sophie would still be able to take her GCSES in the psychiatric unit where she was locked up. Luckily? They called it success, but it was close to child abuse.
In such a climate, it is regrettable though hardly surprising that teachers at some of our finest public schools have been caught giving pupils “advance knowledge” of exam papers. Why, you may ask, would a couple of masters at Eton and Winchester take the risk of giving their wonderfully well-educated charges further advantage? Because the pressure on them to deliver is simply enormous. Because parental expectation, along with grades, is grossly inflated. Teachers in both the private and the state sector must all play, and win, the game, or else.
So, no, I don’t believe that making exams harder and awarding more realistic grades will be “demoralising”. Over the next two years, there will be a sobering period of adjustment as tougher papers are rolled out across more subjects. Parents will have to accept that hapless Hugo is not Stephen Hawking, nor was he meant to be. Gradually, the memory will fade of that crazy, masochistic period when teenagers, as pale as veal, laboured under the accursed tyranny of the A*.
Once more, there will be no shame in being good at what you’re good at and being OK at other things or even bad. What happened to bad? Bad was fine. Hell, bad was good.