Every year British A-level results improve, and every year this causes an almighty fuss in the press. There's always a row over whether it's because education is getting better and people are working harder or because exams are getting easier.
Ask any smart teacher or pupil who has seen exams from ten or fifteen years ago and your answer will be unequivocal. OF COURSE the exams are getting easier. It's an absolute fact, and the efforts made annually by the education secretary to deny it are laughable.
Perhaps I should rephrase this. Maybe the exams aren't getting easier per se: rather, the skills needed to succeed in them are changing, and becoming less about revision or intelligence and more about exam technique. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that universities find people who arrive now know considerably less than their 1980s predecessors.
I find it remarkable that anyone can even pretend to believe that the country's just getting continually smarter. We're approaching 100% pass rates: does this mean my generation is the cleverest ever? of course it fucking doesn't. Evolution isn't that quick. (Note it doesn't mean we're stupid, either. The lack of a stretching test doesn't make the people who do well in the easy one any less bright - they simply get taught different stuff, and more about how to jump through the right hoops than about the topics concerned.)
Proof? Well, I was told that at one major university they've been giving biology students the same multi-choice fact only test every year since 1970something. The students who get As in A-level now get the same marks as the students who got cs or even ds twenty or thirty years ago.
It's not all bad. I for one think it's an admirable intention to make A-levels more about analysis and discussion than parrot-learned facts, which are ultimately less valuable than the skills of argument and thought which new A-levels are presumably meant to provide. But the style of the exam is so heavily prescribed now that there's very little room for teachers to teach as they wish, or for pupils to explore areas away from the main thrust of the syllabus; and the need to spend more time on exam technique takes away from time that could be spent on real discussion. A-levels are no longer any way for universities to distunguish between the excellent and the mediocre. This is certainly a Bad Thing. And let me reiterate - it doesn't mean that teachers or pupils are any worse than they were before. They just don't have any room to manoeuvre.