You will, no doubt, have heard in the media that 2023 has marked a return to sanity in regard to A Levels, reversing the preposterous grade inflation in 2020, 2021 and 2022 which came about due to basing awards on teachers’ assessments, unmoderated. Last year, 2022, the policy to take a “half-way position” was adopted (because, apparently, being only 50% nonsense is OK). Peak-nonsense was attained in 2021. I refer you to my previous posts A Level Awards 2022, A Level Awards 2021 and Their Obfuscation, State Education Dying, Dying….Dead? and A Levels 2020: The Year of Utter Nonsense.
So, is it true that sanity has been restored? Broadly, yes it is.
Data has been taken from Brian Stubbs’ site.
Table 1 below shows the results for the top A* and A grades (wherein the inflation occurred) comparing this year with 2021 and with the pre-Covid years 2019 and 2010. The percentage of pupils, of either sex, gaining A* or A grades this year (2023) is larger than in 2019, but only to a reasonable degree. Admittedly, the percentage being awarded A* is larger than in any previous year (barring 2020-22), for both sexes.
A larger percentage of boys than girls were awarded the top A* grade, as they were in 2019, though this has varied over the years.
However, substantially more girls than boys take A Levels and this has been the case for several decades. Consequently, in terms of actual numbers, there are considerably more girls being awarded A* and A grades in all years.
Table 2 illustrates the gender-bias effect of the nonsense years, showing the excess of A* and A awards to girls over those to boys. In “sensible” years this has been around 20,000 to 26,000, whereas in peak-nonsense (2021) it reached 57,504. This implies that, in 2021, perhaps around 34,000 excess A* or A awards were made to girls over those to boys purely as a result of the bias introduced by using teachers’ assessments. Similar but smaller excess awards of top grades to girls would have occurred in 2020 and 2022.
| Year | Sex | percentage of same sex | number | ||
| A* | A | A* | A | ||
| 2023 | girls | 8.8 | 18.7 | 41514 | 88217 |
| boys | 9.1 | 17.8 | 36028 | 70472 | |
| 2021 | girls | 19.7 | 27.2 | 89582 | 123687 |
| boys | 18.4 | 23.7 | 68078 | 87687 | |
| 2019 | girls | 7.5 | 18.0 | 33028 | 79268 |
| boys | 8.2 | 17.2 | 29571 | 62027 | |
| 2010 | girls | 8.3 | 19.6 | 38204 | 90217 |
| boys | 7.9 | 18.2 | 31098 | 71643 | |
| Year | A* | A | A*+A |
| 2023 | 5486 | 17745 | 23231 |
| 2021 | 21504 | 36000 | 57504 |
| 2019 | 3457 | 17241 | 20698 |
| 2010 | 7106 | 18574 | 25681 |