'Grade inflation IS a problem' says Scarborough and Whitby MP
Former Education Minister Robert Goodwill wants exams back to determine A-Level results
Scarborough and Whitby's Tory MP and former Education Minister Robert Goodwill says grade inflation IS a problem.
The government's been playing down concerns about the issue as record numbers of students collected top grades in their teacher-assessed A-level results yesterday.
There are concerns it makes it harder to distinguish between them when it comes to academic university courses.
Robert said: "I'm pretty sure we'll be returning back to exams which are probably the fairest way of assessing students. Some don't get on with teachers and some students are very quiet in class but actually work very hard, so whilst they've done a good job this year and we've had record grades, we need to return in my view to the exam system.
"If you're looking at some of the courses like medicine, universities do want to be able to get the top 10 or 15 percent of students because otherwise they may well find that they're out of their depth during the course and at the moment that is quite difficult for the universities.
"Because we've had more A grades, more students are being accepted for top universities and most of those courses are oversubscribed and that has a knock-on effect that some of the other universities, they will have problems filling their courses."
Robert says he agrees with two issues which have been raised by the Labour Party:
"The first is that maybe in some fee paying schools, where people are paying large amounts of money, that maybe there are pressure on teachers to give high grades and the other issue is if in a class, you've got a student that maybe isn't intending to go to university and the teacher might think 'well it doesn't matter if we give these students a lower grade.'"