Diary – 15 November 2003

In all the endless talk about school examinations I have never heard this important point made. It is that ever improving school exam results are the nearest thing yet to a panacea for universal happiness. Just notice how many people they please. Pupils, or students as everyone calls them these days, like getting A grades rather than Bs and Cs. Parents like that too. Headmasters and headmistresses can boast, year after year, of record results, and universities of rising entry standards. Governments like them most of all, because better results prove, of course, that standards are rising and that they made them rise. Only two groups grouse about them — top universities (which have to differentiate somehow between candidates with rows of A grades), and those spoil-sports who point out that ever improving grades might not mean that students and teachers are getting cleverer every year, but that standards are getting lower.

If I were secretary of state for education I would solve the problems of too many A grades and of odious comparisons with past years with one master stroke. All you actually need grades for is to show which people are capable of going to which universities. They don’t actually need to compare this year’s performance with last year’s or with any other year’s. All they need to know is who was best this year, who was next best and who was not so good. Why not just give A grades each year to the top 10 per cent of those who pass in each subject, B grades to the next 15 per cent, C grades to the next 25 per cent and so on? This is so simple and so obvious that I suppose it must be wrong. Or is it that we prefer to make things difficult? I think it was the Habsburg bureaucracy which had as its motto, ‘Why simple if it can be made complicated?’ Whoever it was, we seem now to be willing pupils.