George Kerevan: Could do better at stopping exam grade inflation

Published on Wednesday 3 August 2011 15:46

IN my day, in the Drumchapel of the 1960s, Higher results did not arrive by text message, a day early or otherwise.

In fact, our house did not possess a phone. Wee Davy Bell's mother had a phone but she lived four streets away.

UK schools on both sides of the Border are the most tested in Europe. So I sympathise with the 160,000 young (plus a few mature) Scots who got their Higher results this week. Whatever you think of the results, the process is stressful. I'm old fashioned enough to think a bit of stress early on is useful preparation for what life throws at you. But only a fool pretends that sitting exams is easy. My standard anxiety dream remains arriving late to the exam room.

I mention this because of the obvious thing about this week's exam statistics: the Higher pass rate hit 75.2 per cent, up half a point on last year. Passes in Advanced Highers reached 79.3 per cent, up nearly two points. These results even merited an item on the Today programme on Radio 4, notorious for its inability to imagine life beyond the M4.

Is this further evidence that Scotland is suffering from grade inflation? Or are jealous, elitist old fogeys in the media failing to understand that modernised, democratic and streamlined teaching systems have improved outcomes - and why would we not demand that anyway?

First, let's distinguish between a rise in the overall numbers passing a particular exam and the grades awarded inside that exam. It is incontestable that the overall numbers passing Scottish Highers and English A-levels have been going up. In England, a Stalinist-sounding 97.6 per cent of all those sitting A-level exams get a pass mark.

But surely we want more people to pass exams? Besides, we now live in a consumer culture. In 2011, you will not persuade taxpayers to fork out for an education system that denies their particular offspring educational attainment. Yet there are real problems with the rise in attainment levels.

One is that it makes it difficult for employers and universities to differentiate between average and gifted students. The solution, surely, is not to moan about a rising tide lifting all exam boats, but to have a better system of internal grading. The second problem occurs if a country dilutes its overall attainment standard. Education is the bedrock of economic productivity. If you fool yourself over educational attainment, you wreck economic growth.

According to a recent survey by the world's leading education think-tank OECD: "Official test scores and grades in England show systematically and significantly better performance than international and independent tests…" This is not a compliment.The OECD is warning against grade inflation.

The study brands exam testing in the UK (including Scotland) as "high risk" compared with most other industrial countries, meaning that failure has a significant negative impact on the pupil's ultimate life chances. That, the OECD implies, has led to political pressure to dilute the exams in order to let everyone pass. Which may go some way to explaining why 87 per cent of the 400,000 new jobs in the UK last year went to immigrants.

Overall attainment inflation is less marked in Scotland, perhaps due to a residue of meritocratic thinking in Scottish education. The average Higher pass rate was 75 per cent in 2000, dipped a bit, and has returned to where it was. A quarter of pupils fail - hardly a sign of laxity. This leaves the Scottish Government open to the criticism that attainment standards have not improved despite the massive increase in spending. Seems you are damned if there is grade inflation, and damned if there isn't.

What about the debasing of the internal quality benchmarks inside a given exam? Since 2000 the proportion of A-levels awarded a top A grade has increased from 17.8 per cent to 25.3 per cent. There is evidence of this occurring in Scottish Highers, in some subjects.

Researchers at Durham University's School of Education looked at how English pupils in 1988 and 2007 scored in the same cognitive aptitude test, then compared this to the grades the same students went on to achieve at A-level. Theoretically, scores on either test should be roughly comparable. But the researchers found that A-level pupils in 2007 got two grades higher than was achieved by those with the same cognitive abilities back in 1988.

Conclusion: the general ability level corresponding to the same exam grades is going down. At best, that is due to better teaching, the ability to re-sit exams, and the modular nature of courses. At worst, it has to do with the pressure on markers to deliver what politicians want.

Grade inflation is not only a UK problem - there's a similar worry in the US - but it seems less marked in other countries. In Scotland, the ultimate solution is counterintuitive. First, remove the constant pressure on the system to improve grades artificially by replacing our catalogue of individual subject exams with an overall high school leaving diploma, probably graded (eg "pass", "average", and "exceptional").

Secondly, devolve management and budgets to individual schools. I don't mean the bogus academy system in England, where the Westminster education secretary (Michael Gove) has actually increased centralisation through constant pupil testing. Centralised and continuous testing - not testing as such - is the primary political mechanism that gives rise to grade inflation.

Scotland can be proud of this week's Higher results but not complacent.Our biggest problem is not exam results that are too good, but the lack of them - the 12.3 per cent of people with no qualifications, ten per cent more than in England. We haven't solved that by doubling education spending. We can solve it by giving schools the right to experiment. So that someday, in some Scottish housing scheme, the mobile phones will beep.spare page