There's no A in SUCCESSFUL

Grade inflation is everywhere. No, call that hyper-inflation. Nowadays, when British universities reprint their prospectuses the photographs are still the same, fashions and hair-dos have not altered, but the grades required for entry have risen yet again.
Recently I found a dusty prospectus for a top ten university. Several popular courses including Economics required ‘only’ AAB grades at A Level. Surely a prospectus from the end of the last century? I thought, thinking myself wise about grade inflation. But it was just three years old and three years is a long time in university admissions. Just a year ago you would have been hard pressed to find an Economics or Law course at a top ten university willing to accept anything less than 3 As at A Level.
This year the new A* (90%+) A level grade is painfully evident in newly-minted prospectuses even though this grade will only be awarded for the first time in June 2010. In addition, some two dozen universities have increased the number of subjects requiring AAA for 2010 entry. The University of Exeter newly requires AAA for Politics, Nottingham for History, and Southampton for Electronic Engineering. According to one newspaper survey over 180 courses now require a minimum of AAA for 2010 admission.
It won’t stop there. Cambridge, with a few A* requirements dotted around its current prospectus, has already announced it wants A*AA for all undergraduate degrees for 2011 entry. Soon universities will be stamping new grade requirements over the old ones like the Mark notes in the Weimar Republic. And I’m not being flippant. Last year Warwick raised its requirements for Economics months after its prospectus went out. 2008-9 was already a bad year for grade inflation.
And there are universities who say the ABB or AAB grades in their brochure “are merely a guide”, in case they have to “upgrade the course” once the applications are in. Some universities deliberately print lower grades in the prospectus to attract more applicants, knowing full well that they will turn most away. That way they can point proudly to the competition for places. After, all when Warwick is claiming 23 applicants per place for Law, ten applicants per place at your own university might sound like there is something wrong with the course. The more competition for places, the more desirable the university will appear.
Statistics show that 12% of pupils get three As. But equally there are very bright pupils who just miss an A in one of their subjects, usually one they are not going on to study at university. This year legions of bright pupils missed out on extortionate AAA offers and had nowhere to go. Next year an A* will mean nothing if your third A Level is a B.
The pressure is not just on pupils, who know they cannot slacken off because even half way decent universities are asking for impossible grades, but schools as well. Timetable hours for each A level subject has increased. Some years ago it averaged at 6 periods per subject per week, then it was 7, and this year it has risen to 8 periods a week in many schools.
Not surprisingly, heads are wondering where it will all end. But there are some enlightened people out there in the wilderness.
One of the more open-minded universities, University College London blocks out student grade predictions before it hands the forms to admissions officers interviewing candidates. That way they hope talent will mean more than grades.
UCL’s provost Malcolm Grant has gone on the record to say A level grades are “reaching the margins of utility”.
UCL isn’t just a top ten university in Britain. It is among the top ten in the world. It turns away hundred of students with straight As and is asking for A*AA in a number of subjects including history for entry in 2010. But demanding higher and higher grades may not be the answer. “The worst thing you can do is fill your institution with geeks…you want people to have a hinterland so that when they come under stress, they have other lines, other strengths upon which they can draw,” Grant told the UCL union newspaper.
There is something to be said for that. A well-known private girls’ school on the outskirts of London began its rise and rise in the school league tables when the then headmistress made sure she did not just pick girls who came top in the ferociously competitive entrance examinations but also those with a specific talent.
If, say, they had been a champion gymnast or ice skater, then she would give less consideration to their exam scores. She took on talented linguists, scrabble players, and chess prodigies. They could be champions at tiddly winks but what mattered was that they knew how to stand out and win at something. More importantly they knew how to concentrate and spend time perfecting their hobby. That headmistress has now left and the school is dropping in the league tables even though the current head selects from among the best of the best in terms of exam results.
I recently interviewed the Headmaster of one of the elite grammar schools in Berlin. Germany still has a selective secondary school system and the school creams off the top scorers from primary schools around and has a high percentage of academically gifted children. The school teaches them well and sends them to the best universities. “They would all get decent jobs”, the head said. He should be happy with his intake, but he is not. The world outside is changing, he said. Globalisation has increased the competition. “We have to think for the first time how do we make these kids compete in the world,” he told me. “What should we be teaching them? Is it enough to have a high IQ? Should we be looking for more creativity in selecting our pupils, not just high exam scores?”
Perhaps, he said, they should look for lower exam scores but seek out qualities not necessarily revealed by primary school exams.
Malcolm Gladwell in his popular book “Outliers, the story of Success” says that the relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. An IQ above 120 does not translate into any meaningful real world advantage according to studies. Harvard researchers have also found that creativity rises with IQ but tapers off and even falls after an IQ of 120.
Other studies have found that a scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is just as likely to win the Nobel Prize as one with an IQ of 180.
The universities might get some top performers and those who are good at exams, but they might be missing out on a whole lot more.
The problem with hyperinflation is that it soon reaches a level where everyone suffers. Then a new currency is required. That point might soon be approaching for A Levels.