Standards have dropped

On Radio 4's Today programme this morning there was a discussion on the A-level situation. The two interviewees were Professor. Anthony O'Hear and Professor. Heinz Wolf, the nation's favourite German.

They were each given a set of papers from this year and an equivalent set from 1975. O'Hear was in no doubt: standards had dropped. Wolf, on the other hand tried to be nice about it. He said that the questions were different - in that you didn't have to write essays anymore. He said that examinations were different - more continuous assessment ie more chances for teachers to do all the work. And he said that the curriculum wasn't as broad. This was devastating stuff not least from someone who seemed to be trying not to be critical.

All this dovetails with my own experiences. When I took O Level French in (ahem) the early 1980s we were given papers from the 1960s as practice. We couldn't do them. We were defeated by both a much wider vocabulary and a much wider grammar. The same year I took O Level Maths and was dead chuffed with my results. However, I was taken down a peg or two when I discovered the next year when studying calculus that my mother had had to learn if for O Level.

The rot set in a long, long time ago.