Joe Harker
Yesterday (17 August) was A-Level results day and it had pretty much everything you'd expect from the annual occasion.
Jeremy Clarkson yet again reminded us that he turned out alright despite not getting good grades at school, the UCAS website struggled to deal with the number of students wanting to know their grades and plenty was on offer for those going for a celebratory meal.
However, after a return to a pre-pandemic grading system, pupils have seen their results drop compared to previous years.
The way students were graded changed during the pandemic, first to the disastrous clusterf**k cooked up by Gavin Williamson and then to a grade based on teacher assessment.
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Now exam grades have returned to the pre-pandemic system and the drop off in results has been noticeable.
The number of students getting the top grades are actually up on 2019, but they've fallen sharply compared to last year.
In England, 26.5 percent of students got an A or A* grade, up on the 25.2 percent in 2019 but quite some way down from the 35.9 percent last year.
Wales has gone from 40.9 percent to 34 percent, while Northern Ireland has fallen from 44 percent to 37.5 percent of pupils with top grades in their exams.
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There are always students who get disappointing A-Level results, but this year that cohort is somewhat larger than it has been for awhile and some are feeling hard done by, or as one student told the Daily Telegraph 'completely screwed over'.
They added that they 'hadn't actually done any real exams' before sitting down to do their A-Levels so they didn't have the experience with taking tests that students pick up over their time in school.
“I didn’t really realise how much my education had been affected by Covid until I reached exam season." they said.
This latest group of A-Level recipients have spent the past few years receiving their education in Covid-disrupted conditions and now they've hit the double whammy of a lack of exam experience and the grading system going back to the way it was.
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On top of that, some experts reckon that this year's exams were particularly difficult for certain subjects.
Physicist Dr Peter Edmunds said he takes the A-Level tests every year and this year got 90 percent on his physics exams, which is 'comfortably an A*' but set his alarm bells ringing.
He explained that given that he's a physicist and head of physics at a 'highly selective school', he should be doing better than that, arguing that the tests had 'extremely prescriptive mark schemes'.
Other scientists taking the tests for themselves agreed that this year's papers were 'too difficult'.