There was an article in today's Metro (and so no doubt the weekend news) about the sorry educational state of today's school-leavers, and the need for them to grasp the basics of maths and English, including useful stuff like percentages.
The fact that a higher percentage of people each year are achieving the top grades is undermining the currency of school qualifications. This year is the 24th successive year in which the A-level success rate has gone up.
A Metro-published letter from Platteen Tsang (no doubt a recent A-level success story) suggests that critics of this are "jealous of the teenagers' performance". I have to disagree.
In my view, the examination boards themselves need to use applied knowledge of percentages, assuming they have such knowledge of course. Given that the overall intelligence of the population isn't likely to change significantly from one year to the next, and given the importance of a stable currency in the field of education, wouldn't it make sense if across the country, the percentage of papers receiving a given grade for a given subject were standardised? The top 15% of A-level English papers should receive an A, for instance?
That way, each grade would measure its recipient against his or her peers, as opposed to against an ever-sliding and ever more meaningless scale.
