Sebastian Bicen

But I think when we zoom into an individual level and we have a student who, for whatever reason, maybe don't have a stronger sense of resilience in an exam...

and they wanted to get a particular grade which they've been on track for, they might have panicked and it might have set them on a different kind of trajectory, which means they're not going to necessarily end up with that grade.

So we need to think about that difference between the bigger picture, nothing's really changed, the grade boundaries will be set accordingly, with maybe those individual cases of students who have panicked and not done as well as they could have done.

This is where it gets contentious.

I personally think that the current specification that we have, there was a reform in 2018.

I think it's much tougher than the specification that I actually went through A-levels with in the previous iteration.

The types of things we're expecting students to be able to do, the volume of things that we want them to have understood and learned is much higher than when I took my A-levels.

And that has been reflected in the exams themselves.

The questions are tougher.

But each year we do have a roughly similar proportion of students that are getting A stars.

So we don't actually get to reflect the fact that students are doing better.

They're able to learn these concepts better.

Teachers are getting better at teaching these concepts.

So there's a lot of things going on.

But I would not be of the mind of saying that things are getting easier.

I do believe that.

And there is nuance to that because if you go back sort of 50 years, 60 years, the A-levels were objectively more demanding with some very advanced kind of maths in it.

So I would say if you come across a question that's a show that where you can't quite work out what the numbers might be, have a guess at what those numbers could be in the first part of the question because then in later parts of the question you can still gather up lots of those method marks and show the examiner that you really know what you're doing.