GCSE, AS and A level students will soon be sitting their exams. Their goal will be the highest possible grades, for they know that good grades open doors; poor ones slam them shut, possibly for ever. ‘High stakes’ indeed.
If you’re involved in admissions, grades are important to you too. You may have used data on historic grade distributions to determine your criteria for entry, and you might use candidates’ actual grades to decide who gets in, and who doesn’t. Depending on the programme, and the matching of supply with demand, there may be some flexibility, but for highly competitive courses, such as medicine, there will be a sufficient number of applicants with certificates meeting the offer threshold of, say, AAA for A level Biology, Chemistry and Physics to fill all the places, so that student with AAB will be rejected.
Here’s a statement that might be significant:
It’s really important that people don’t put too much weight on any individual grade.
That’s very general. ‘People’ embraces students, parents, admissions officers. And the stress on the importance of ‘not putting too much weight on any individual grade’ is, as I will show shortly, code for ‘If a student has a certificate showing grade B for A level Physics, that B can’t be trusted – perhaps the student truly merited a C. Or even an A.’
