Sixth formers across the country yesterday opened the letters containing their A-level results under an ever more familiar furore of criticism from education watchdogs, repeating the yearly claim that exams are too easy and standards are on their way down yet again. This supposedly explains the reason why this year, 25% of the grades at A-level are As.
Having received my AS-level results yesterday, it is disappointing to hear this claim. Not only does it detract from candidates' achievements, but it is also simply not true. What most adults outside the education sector seem to misunderstand is the fact that education has changed since they were students. Not only are students now over-examined, with the introduction of AS-levels in 2000, but also the structure of examining in A-levels is becoming ridiculous.
For instance, an AS-level English essay now allows little room for creativity; instead, it involves not much more than "box-ticking". The examiner will quite literally go through the essay checking whether or not the candidate has used ultimately irrelevant literary terms. "Verisimilitude" anyone? When I presented my mum, who is a writer with a degree in English from Cambridge University, with an A-standard essay, she couldn't make head or tail of half the technical literary terms in it. In the end, knowing what these words mean won't necessarily make you a good writer, or even a good reader, but you'll get an A in the exam.
Of course, the change in standards and examining will vary from subject to subject. The easiest subject to measure a change in difficulty is probably maths; it is here where the government claims that standards have dropped most. Sir Peter Williams, appointed by Gordon Brown to review the teaching of maths and chair of the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME), said, "there is no doubt whatsoever that absolute A-level standards have fallen". Yet at the same time I hardly doubt he will be complaining that the number of students taking maths has risen 7.3% and further maths 8.3%. If a drop in difficulty means more students get a chance to study and go on to higher education, is it a bad thing?
And however much this makes me sound like a whiny teenager, I believe students are over-examined and put under too much stress in school. I'm not the only one, it seems, as in June this year, George Turnbull, the "doctor" of the QCA, warned that students are under more stress than ever before during exams. The people who decide whether the standards of exams have changed will never have had to take three lots of exams in three years. It is relentless, and emphasis is moving away from coursework and towards exams all the time.
But what I found most disheartening when reviewing the figures for A-levels was the increase in subjects such as "critical thinking" - especially as there were fewer than 1,000 students taking Latin or ancient Greek this year. Why is critical thinking even a subject? I can understand why A-levels come under flak when you need to be given a certificate telling you that you have the capacity to think.
