Secondary education in the UK - the exams (Part I - the symptoms)

There were (and are) a lot of students seeking secondary education in the UK fom Hong Kong. I was one of them, at the sixth-form level.

Throughout my years in the UK, the exam reform had been in the news and on political agendas, especiallt during my years as sixth-formers.

Lurking at the background, the humming noise has always been the issues of 'grade inflation', 'ever easier exams' and 'easy way out'.

Every year after the GCSE and GCE results are released, newspapers would show charts deomonstrating the effect of grade inflation - in the 1990s only around 5% of candidates were awarded 'A', now around 20% awarded 'A*' or 'A'. 'A*' was the creation out of anger of 'grade inflation', but is by now as useless an indicator as a pound coin is to wealth.

Ever easier exams comes in two forms. Firstly the A Level exams were modulised - different parts of syllabus goes to different exam papers, and each split into two levels (AS and A level papers). Candidates take the easier AS papers after their first year, and the A papers after their second year. This means candidates who didn't do well in their first year could re-sit the concerned papers in the second - unfair to first-timers. Secondly the questions have become ever easier and common-sense/current affairs based, meaning that they are not much more difficult than a newspaper article. Not exactly demanding to learn. These easier questions are in turn making high grades easier to attain and top talents more difficult to spot.

Easy way out is simply adding salt to wounds. Not just that the subjects are getting easier to study and to get top grades, students are choosing the less intellectually challenging subjects - textile, drama, law, psychology. For candidates serious about their career paths in the respective fields, taking up a subject in those directions is perfectly fine. But as those subjects would have been taught for the first time in their education life, they are usually more introductory and easier with fewer complex concepts to grapple. Which means easier to get good grades with less efforts.