Top grades for tougher GCSES are on the rise
Harder GCSE tests mean some students could pass after answering just 18 per cent of questions correctly
Top grades are on the rise despite the new “tougher” GCSE exams, with students able to pass some exams after answering just 18 per cent of the questions correctly. This year, 20.7 per cent of all exams were given grades 7, 8 or 9, which are equivalent to A or A*, making it the highest proportion since 2015. In 2002, when the Joint Council for Qualifications’ records began, 16.2 per cent were graded A or A*. This rose to 20.3 per cent by 2016, the year before the reformed GCSES were introduced.
TOP grades are on the rise despite the new “tougher” GCSE exams, with students able to pass some exams after answering just 18 per cent of the questions correctly.
This year, 20.7 per cent of all students were given grades 7, 8 or 9, which is equivalent to A or A*, making it the highest proportion since 2015. In 2002, when the Joint Council for Qualifications’ records began, 16.2 per cent were graded A or A*. This rose to 20.3 per cent by 2016, the year before the reformed GCSES were introduced.
To prevent students from being penalised for taking the new, harder exams, Ofqual fixes the proportions of each grade to make them roughly the same as last year, through a process they call “comparable outcomes”.
However, experts have pointed out that artificially lowering the pass marks to ensure consistency between different cohorts would create the illusion that students were doing better than they actually were.
Prof Alan Smithers, the director of Buckingham University’s centre for education and employment, said: “Ofqual was charged by the Government to deal with rampant grade inflation. They came up with comparable outcomes, a statistical way of stopping it.
“Now the exams have been made tougher and Ofqual is using the same approach to keep up the grades, when reasonably they could have expected them to have fallen. There is an irony about that.”
This year, students taking the maths higher-tier GCSE needed just 18 per cent to pass with AQA, down from 20 per cent last year.
Pupils taking the exam with all three of the major boards could get almost half the question wrong and still walk away with a grade A after the boundary was set at 57 per cent. Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, gave another reason for the increase in top grades.
“That will be attributed to teachers really getting a sense of the qualifications under their belts,” he said.
“I think that will be the result of teachers having had time to teach and re-teach the specification – in other words, you get better as a teacher if things aren’t changing constantly.
“It is having access to resources which won’t have been there at the beginning – for example, past papers and examiner reports and so on”.
This year, 837 students were awarded a clean sweep of seven grade 9s, the exam watchdog said, compared with
732 last year.
When it comes to the straight-9 students, girls continue to dominate, making up two thirds (66.4 per cent) of this year’s high-flyers, up from 62 per cent of last year’s.
Thousands of students picked up their GCSE results yesterday. They are the first group to take the reformed courses in virtually all subjects.
The new GCSES were created by Michael Gove, then the education secretary, in an attempt to inject rigour into the qualifications and bring the UK in line with top performing countries.
The reformed exams are designed to separate the very highest achievers with A* now split between an 8 and a 9.
‘Ofqual is using the same approach to keep up the grades, when reasonably they could have expected them to have fallen’