A-Level results improve once again

[clarshack]

Tis all a loab of crap chaps.
When i did A levels two people out of 100 plus got 3 A's.Now 33% get an A Grade.
The proof that theyre getting easier is clear.
If everyone is now smarter/works harder then why dont they all get firsts at uni? 

exactly!

[screenexile]

Yeah I see Business Studies up there too and as A level subjects go it's fairly easy compared to others but it attracts an extremely 'broad range' of students which probably contributes to its standing on the table.

[Derry Devil]

In relation to the Leaving Cert vs A Level stuff....

When UCAS benchmarked A-Levels against the leaving cert, they found that a Leaving Cert subject averaged out as about two 3rds of an A-level.

[rolloutking]

I got my results yesterday and was quite happy with BBC considering the amount of time that i put in to studying. I never really got into teh whole rythm and routine of revising and usually a few days before the exams just got stuck into it. My subjects were IT, Technolgy and History. I was quite lucky that the IT was 100% coursework and i knew before the results came that i had done well as i was sitting on a high B from AS.

Technolgy was 50% coursework and 50% exam and i can honestly say that i did absoulutly nothing for the theory paper. I had already done it in January and got an E but decided to repeat because my teacher made me but when i went to resit the exam i just sat at the desk and didnt do it. I knew that my coursework marks would pull my grade up and doing well in the paper wasnt neccessary. I ended up with a C or 416 out of 600 and i kinda regret not doing a bit better in the paper as 420 is a B and one more correct answer may have swung it for me.

History was a different story with 100% of the grade being exam assesed but i still found history relatively easy. We studied 6 modules throughout the 2 years and each of these modules were usually divided in two. For example in the Fascist Italy module it was divided into Mussolini's Foreign and Domestic Policy and when it came to the exam you only answered a question on one of the two. You were meant to study the whole course and then answer whichever question you wanted but we only studied his domestic policy and never went near the Foreign Policy, which meant that we had twice the time to study and half the work to get through. We then sat the exam before moving on to a different topic so as you can imagine it was relatively easy. Even when it came to studying for the exam i found this easy. When you go through the syllibus you realise that there are only certain questions that can be asked and the same questions appear year after year. I studied the patterns of the questions and then wrote out answers for the ones that i thought were going to come up. This was easy as well because i just copied a marks scheme from a previous years exam and therefore knew that my answer would be right. I then learned this off and when it came to the exam i just wrote it out and in effect i was just reciting off what i had learned and usually did not understand it. I may as well have been writing out a wee poem that i had learned.

To be honest i think that the exams are not getting easier as the same questions are still being asked but the structure of the course allows pupils to achieve their maximum potential. The teachers of the courses are also shrewd customers and in effect i feel the pupils have cracked the system. Coursework subjects are also a handy way out because the amount of copying that goes on is unreal with most pupils getting their work from wikipedia.

[inisceithleann]

CAO retaliated by having modular A levels benchmarked against the leaving and changed the points.  Points for an A fell from 150 to 120 making it almost impossible to get a place in a premium university in the south.  To do medicine from the north you need 4 grade A and then you are chosen by lottery for a limited number of places for northerners.

That decision by CAO was incredibly unfair. When I did A-Levels we weren't usually allowed to do 4 subjects as there wasn't the teaching resources for it so it put paid to many peoples ideas of going south, to Trinity especially. Surely CAO and UCAS have to come to some arrangement over this, we are all Irish citizens after all.