Bring back failure

It has become customary to preface any comment on the government’s policy on school examinations with a glowing tribute to schoolchildren who have worked hard for their grades. The school standards minister David Miliband goes so far as to cite the hard work of school pupils as an excuse for avoiding debate on the issue of ‘grade inflation’ altogether. Nobody complained when Paula Radcliffe broke the record for the London marathon, he argued the other day; therefore, nobody should dare to insult schoolchildren by questioning the integrity of A-level examinations, the results of which are announced this week, and of GCSEs, whose results are announced next week.

There is an important difference between the London marathon and school examination results. Paula Radcliffe ran the same course as has been run by every competitor in the London marathon since its inception in 1981. The organisers did not devise for her a special course, entirely downhill, in the same direction as the wind and three miles shorter than that run 20 years ago. There is genuine concern, on the other hand, that public examinations have been getting easier. School maths teachers say so; university lecturers say so. To quote but one consequence of grade inflation of A-levels over the past few years, the engineering course at Cambridge University has recently had to be lengthened from three to four years because students with good grades in maths A-level are no longer able to cope with equations which were tackled with confidence by their lower-marked forebears. Even Ken Boston, chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, sympathised with Eton’s decision to drop GCSEs on the grounds that they are too easy – before he was drawn into a defence of the exam by his government masters the next day.