Unbelievable A-Level Results As Per Usual
At last the Dodo said, ‘everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’
Once again, rather like tractor stats in the Soviet Union, the glorious march towards genetic perfection and the source of all knowledge continues apace. At least according to the numbers.
A hearty well done to everyone who took them and especially well done to those who are heading to the University of their choice. Unfortunately you’re always going to be tarred, on the evidence of the graph above, that “ours” were harder than “yours”.
This year saw the introduction of the hideous and pointless A*s which was awarded to 29.9% of Further Maths candidates. The lowest was in media, film and TV studies at 1.8% but that’s not a real subject anyway, so who cares.
Across the subjects, science has seen an odd resurgence this year with biology entries up 4.3%, chemistry up 3.7% and physics up by 5.2% despite the fact that the ‘Elf’n’Safety Nazis won’t let you do anything interesting any more. In TheEye’s day there were all sorts of exciting experiments with the potential do you a splendid injury. It has been the forced eradication of the interesting bits which has caused the recent catastrophic collapse in entries.
TheEye likes this time of year. The media always seem to pick the attractive students to interview and feature on their front pages – you’d think that nobody resembling the European Acne Mountain had ever sat an exam. The BBC do exactly that here but immediately change to a disappointed bloke who missed his required grades. That will be the BBC’s bias showing this year….students not making it to the place of their choice. Rather hard on them when they’ve spent the last few years being told that the most retarded mong-child is “entitled” to a Uni place on the taxpayers’ dime.
Despite this, it seems that one particular Beeboid doesn’t know the difference between “fare” and “fair”.
Hat-tip to Laban for the BBC screencap
“In TheEye’s day there were all sorts of exciting experiments with the potential do you a splendid injury.”
Me too!!! – I vaguely remember watching lots of green Chlorine gas wafting over the edge of the bench and out the lab door. Connecting the gas and water taps together to prove which had the higher pressure! There were plently more, but my brain isn’t working particularly well today. (Actually, neither is the rest of my body).
I remember us all pushing mercury around with our fingers…never did me any harm < twitch >
Shame about dissections being lost nowadays – they’d probably never let pig’s hearts anywhere near inner city sink schools now for fear of a jihad – but the reassuring rows of unidentifiable things in formaldehyde along the lab walls at least made you realise that you were somewhere serious with the aim of learning things.
Drinking straws & Frogs anyone ? …….. >:o =-O 😀 😀 😀
I’ve got a mercury tilt switch hiding in the cupboard less the 5ft away. I wonder if I should hand it in to the next council “Hazardous Waste” diposal day?? They probably aren’t expecting anything worse than a few cans of paint….
And talking of “Exciting Experiments” how about this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJqoRaphiEk
Practical biology was a hallmark of our school.
Our biology teacher was sleeping with the lad who sat next to me in our A-Level class and she got him a decent enough grade to get him on to a medical degree…despite the fact that he had all of the ability of an aubergine. He’s a doctor now. Scary.
Right, everybody scan the papers for microdave’s imminent arrest by the Health ‘n Safe Tea Division of the Anti-Terrorist Squad next week.
That is a seriously awesome video. The science is trivial of course but music is a great touch.
Nice graph. You can see from the graph the exact year when A Levels began to change from a selection type of exam to a criterion reference exam. Strangely the journalists who comment on the ever improving A Level pass rate have not spotted this obvious change. See Recaord A Level Passes Again for more discussion.
Indeed you can see precisely when it all started to go wrong. Good link, thanks – if it’s yours then that’s a well argued piece.