A Level Cliches

Today is A - Level results day, and for the 29th year in a row the pass rate has gone up, and for 13 years the amount of A grades have also increased. This being the case, we know this allows the press to wheel out a few annual results day cliches that I tried to list in full here, what with August being a slack season news wise, and the right wing press being indulgent in a bit of generational bashing - well that's an added bonus! So with this in mind, I decided to a bit of "cliche bingo" to see which of my predictions got printed. I didn't get them all, but like many students today; I was impressed with the results I got.


1.) PICTURE OF THREE POSH LOOKING GIRLS JUMPING UP IN THE AIR CLUTCHING THEIR RESULTS PAPER FULL OF STRAIGHT A'S.

If we only relied on the press coverage we'd think that only 7 lads in the country ever passed exams at all. As usual, no ugly girls ever pass exams at all. There must be some Logan's Run for mingers going on in our sixths forms!

This is a well known cliche, and the blog below has collected a load of pictures of pretty posh girls getting their results. So I award myself a zillion points so far.
http://sexyalevels.tumblr.com/

4.) PRECOCIOUS KID PASSES EXAM.

Self explanatory. More points.

6.) THEY'RE GETTING EASIER.

Now was there really any chance of this one getting missed? I predicted the following being brought up.

*"A-Levels were once the gold standard".

*"New Labours attempt to get half of people in university." and "social engineering"

*"grade inflation."

I don't personally think A-levels are a walk in the park these days. But predicting the cliched narratives of a Mail editorial certainly are. They truly were the gift that kept on giving here:

*"But what does it tell you about our ‘gold standard’ exams, when some 3,500 students who win three straight As today are expected to be rejected by universities?"

Gold standard. Ding.

*"For 13 years, Labour cynically raised their hopes, tinkering with the exam system to cast a rosy light on its own record, while promising to find university places for half the nation’s school-leavers."

"But that attainment gap will not be closed the Labour way – simply by disguising it or rigging the university admissions system, in a botched attempt at social engineering."

Labour; 50 percent in uni. Social engineering. Ding. Ding.

"How is anyone to distinguish between the brilliant and the merely excellent, when at least 60,000 papers are predicted to be awarded the new A* supergrade for scores of more than 90 per cent?"

Inflating grades. Ding!

Oh yeah, they try and shirk off that they are not belittling the students, with this opening statement, and other lame platitudes to duck out of their argument. (which is really just a rehash of the "I'm not racist but...", put into another context.)

"With their required grades achieved and their university places secure, the Mail offers every one of them our warmest congratulations."

they're still a piece of piss though!

"The Mail has nothing but admiration for those who have scored top grades."

Bollocks.

Well it's GCSE results next week. Same old score then. Oh well, eyes down.

A - Level Results Day Means Only One Thing

Oh God I've just remembered it's A-Level results day tomorrow. I'm not worried about it for the usual reason people are, as I did them myself 13 years ago. But because inevitably the papers will be full of the following cliches that get printed every single year results day arrives, of which one in particular pisses me off quite a lot. (students doing well and celebrating isn't one of them I might add. I'm not quite that dead on the inside yet!!) . So lets refresh on the usual cliches that get wheeled out:

1.) PICTURE OF THREE POSH LOOKING GIRLS JUMPING UP IN THE AIR CLUTCHING THEIR RESULTS PAPER FULL OF STRAIGHT A'S.

This picture always inevitably gets printed. The three middle class girls (they look like head girls.) caught mid jump receiving the good news. One always has a white cardy and a floral dress on. In fact I'm sure they are the same three girls that are used every year, reliving an acceptable face of home counties totty for the Mail readers; posing for an exam day photoshoot type of Groundhog day, that is locked in some kind of infinite temporal loop for all time. Weird stuff indeed.

2.) CLEVER LOOKING FOREIGN STUDENT GETS LOADS OF A's.

This is almost a given for any A-level results coverage. We get the heartwarming tale of the foreign born student (almost always with accompanying picture of an "archetypal" studious looking student with glasses.) who could speak no English when they began a course, but managed to bag a full house of A grades at the end of it. Sometimes they even knew no English a year before taking them. Sometimes they even learnt English on the bus on the way to the exam hall, or even learnt English during the exam itself. This kind of story, when done in the Mail is a good example of the weird ambiguity, the and all over the place application of prejudice the paper likes to tap into. On the one hand, foreigners are a bunch of sponging terrorists, but they are also good at showing up our "drunken dumbed down yoofs" as well. That insight over we got to:

3.) I GOT 8 A's.

This is one of the few opportunities for young men to be photographed on exam day (you might swear that none ever passed from the photos.), and they are usually all lads in this category. The mug shot will be a white student version of the archetypal photo mentioned in 2). A gangly academic student who passed 8 A-levels, including the less popular disciplines like further maths, or even the classics. Usually off to a red brick to do something sciencey. An old lecturer of mine had a bugbear about colleges allowing someone to take up such an extra large workload, when even the best universities only have a three or four discipline entry requirements. I admit its pretty bloody impressive to pass all that, but I have to agree that's a hell of a lot of work to pile on someone still in their teens.

4.) PRECOCIOUS KID PASSES EXAM.

There is often a story about how a precocious 12 year old kid wonder passed their physics A-Level about six years before most students do. Again there is the picture of a slightly intense looking kid holding up his pass paper for the whole world to see. Shouldn't a twelve year old really be perhaps doing more 12 year olds kind of stuff than this? There is going to be a lot of exams and deadlines, and stuff in their future life. Cut them a bit of slack. One always wonders if it was 100 percent the kids desire to take the exams so early, or does the whole thing, and accompanying picture all have the air of an attempt by the kids parents to look good at the school gates, what with their little genius. Hmmmm..?

5.) MY LEG FELL OFF AND I STILL PASSED.

Or I fell off a mountain, (often these are tales of sporty people who got injured.) broke every bone in my body and still came top in Chemistry. Extra points if they display their results wearing a plaster cast / war wounds. I can't think of anything much more interesting to say about these ones. Triumph over adversity and all that.

6.) THEY'RE GETTING EASIER.

There is no point ignoring this one, and God I would like too. It will inevitably be mentioned and brought up. It always does. Phrases such as "A-Levels were once the gold standard". "New Labours attempt to get half of people in university." "social engineering" "too politically correct to let people fail." tend to pop up, as does "grade inflation." Sometimes they employ the use of showing the easiest bit of a "new" exam, with the hardest section of an older one. These kinds of article seem to be written by journalist who haven't seen an A - Level paper since 1973, and don't take into account the greater role of the changing nature of society and tertiary education approaches. Anecdotally, the new papers I have seen, don't seem much different [in difficulty] to those of 1996 and 1997 (they were saying they were easier back then as well.), which would be odd if they get easier every year. So it seems more bullshit inflation than grade inflation.

As I said I am no expert on exams so I won't comment further on it, but I suspect many who like to bang on about how easy they are would fail horribly if made to sit an "easy" exam of today. Again just a hunch, but there we are.

Lets hope everyone gets what they want though. I doubt that many students would be downcast by the tabloids bellyaching over this (they have better stuff to think about for a start.) Glad I haven't had to go through that day for a while though.

*I'll do a form of "A-Level cliche bingo" over the next few days. See how many of my six get printed by the papers. (and perhaps see for others I missed out.)