In a discussion of A level results on the Today programme John Humphrys remarked that, until the 1960s, results were ungraded, you simply passed or failed; this surprised his interviewees.
He also mentioned a history of A levels by Kim Catcheside, which I went to in order to check my own recollections on this point.
Disappointingly, it rather skates over the years before the late 1980s, although it gives a very useful explanation of the pressures that have developed since then, as A levels have changed from being (mainly) a university entrance exam to meet a much wider range of aims.
The system also changed half a century ago, between the time I took my O & A levels (slightly complicated by the fact that I also moved schools half way through & did them with different exam boards). These changes were in part a reaction to the revised arrangements for maintenance payments – you no longer needed to sit the higher level Scholarship exams to qualify for a full grant.
At O level, the Northern Universities Joint Matriculation Board reported the results to the school as % marks, rounded to the nearest 5. These were however kept confidential – I had to report to the headmaster’s office to be told mine because I was late back from my summer in France. The certificate (and the results for individuals reported in the local paper) showed merely that you had “satisfied the examiners in the following subjects.” The school however could pass on your marks with your university application.
We had been told by our teachers that although the pass mark was fixed at 45%(?), the marks were in fact adjusted at the end of the process to maintain the overall pass rate at a fixed % of the number of candidates – memory tells me this was 75%. The justification for this was that exam marks could vary from year to year for all sorts of contingent reasons, but the overall proportion of bright pupils was more stable.
It was then announced that in future years the NUJMB was to move to an alphabetical grading system, already used by some other boards.
We thought this unfair. Everybody who got more than 75% would get an A, but everybody knew that there was all the difference in the world between 75% & 95% (the highest you could normally hope to get, at least in arts subjects. More than 100% was, theoretically, possible in maths). The A level grades were recorded on the certificate.
But context is all, in any marking scheme.
At university the pass mark was 40%, but 60% was good enough for a First. And only the best 5 of your 8 finals papers counted towards the overall degree classification.
In my more recent experience of university, “everybody got very nervous” about awarding any mark over 80%, which led to a distinct clustering of marks around 78% to 83%.
When I was briefly a teacher in a school which followed an English GCE curriculum, the American nuns who ran the place were concerned if marks for schoolwork fell below 80% - 70% was virtually a fail, & showed that the teacher was not doing a proper job.
Three summers ago, in the smoking area outside the main railway station, at about 4 o’clock one sunny afternoon, I could not help but overhear the conversation which the young woman standing next to me was having with her father on her mobile. She had come up for the day to discuss her first year results & was reporting the outcome. By dint of her representations to her tutors she had succeeded in getting adjustments so that, overall, she had achieved a 2.1
