GCSE Recession!

Today’s top head line in every newspaper has been the surprise fall in GCSE results. For the first time since 1988 when they were introduced, the results have gone down. If you read any of the national newspapers you might think this was some kind of disaster or conspiracy with heart rending stories of children who just missed out and letters from distraught teaches, telling the government about how their pupils worked hard and deserved better, there is even some talk of lawsuits against exam boards.

I myself, and I suspect the government, intent to take the long view and discuss these results as part of a whole. When one does this, it becomes very clear that the dip is not so much a tumble over a sheer cliff, as it is a stumble over a small step. So without further ado, let’s get down to some hard figures.

This year the results fell by an average of 0.4 %. That means that this year, 69.4% of entries attained grade A*- C as opposed to 69.8% in 2011. Figures like these are always open to misinterpretation when taken out of context, so here’s the context.

In 1988 42.5 % of entrants received an A*- C grade. As you can see this steadily rose over the next 23 years, reaching a peak in 2011 at 69.8%. That is a 27.3% increase over 23 years which is frankly ridiculous. Taken as a proportion of the original 42.5% the increase in the number of students attaining grade A*- C is 27.3/42.5 x 100 = 64.2

A 64.2% increase in the number of students receiving grade A*- C can only be accounted for by grade inflation, primarily due to competition between exam boards. Some of it will be a result of improved teaching methods and curriculum along with a better standard of text books. This might account for a 5-10 % increase in the proportion of students receiving grade A*- C, as the bumps in the system were smoothed out, it cannot account for a 27.3% increase.

Put simply, in a well-run system, you would expect a slight increase as teachers, textbook writers and examiners adjusted to the new system. But then you would expect to see the results level off and remain fairly constant, fluctuating by 0.5-1% per year.

The fact is that whilst there have been accusations of late stage grade fixing by exam boards under pressure from the government, the real grade fixing  occurred over the past 20 years. It wasn’t malicious or even particularly deliberate, but simply an inescapable result of the current system; where independent exam boards are selected by each school. In this system, schools have an obvious incentive to select the easiest exams for their students, which gives the independent exam boards an incentive to compete to set the easiest exams. This can only lead to grade inflation, the latest fall in insignificant in comparison.

The real world implications of this dip have also been exaggerated. Figures for the number of student affected are hard to calculate, but it would seem that approximately 4000 students missed out on a grade C in English, receiving a D grade instead. This should not be ignored, as some of these students will no doubt suffer career wise. This is only for one subject but even extrapolating for other subject one would still end up with a relatively small number compared to the total number of entrants, approximately 1205000.

The secondary affect relates the schools themselves, some of which may be forced to close for not meeting government standards. These require that 40% of students receive five GCSE’s grade C and above. Frankly I have very little sympathy for these schools, if they cannot get 40% of their students to attain what is considered by many to be the minimum requirement in-order to proceed to higher education, then they are already failed schools, and any system that allows them to survive does a disservice to the students who could be better educated at schools which give a dam.

The last point one should remember about GCSE’s is that they are not there to give an absolute measure of a person’s abilities, that’s what university is for. GCSE’s are there to place individuals academically within their peer group. This is why grade boundaries are adjusted year by year via norm distribution calculations. These adjustments in grade boundary ensure that the proportion of students receiving each grade remains relatively constant, or so it should be. When done properly this means that GCSE’s give an accurate measure of an individual’s academic standing in society the year they took their exams.

So, when taken against the rises of past years, this blip barely registers and its effects should not be exaggerated to disastrous proportion, were it not the first time in 24 years, no one would even care. The fact that it is the first time is a poor indictment of past exams not the current ones.