The Student Room Group

A-Levels are Too Easy

Hi guys, as you can see from the thread title, I pretty much agree that the new a-level exams are too easy, I mean it's not our fault, but obviously the education secretary should change up the a-level playing field. Exam boards are asking ridiculously easy questions, and this is obviously unfair as previous years have sat daunting, but well set exams while we can just essentially sit "Mickey Mouse" exams. It honestly just defeats the purpose of calling these qualifications "A-Levels", the difficulty of these exams are incomparable with the difficulty of GCSE exams. The qualifications should be renamed to General Certificates of Secondary Education because it's honestly quid pro quo.

EDIT:
For the record, I'm actually studying Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry.
(edited 7 years ago)

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Reply 1
Is this a joke or are they actually easy?
Good for you :smile:

Meanwhile everyone else is struggling.

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This is likely going to be an unpopular opinion I'll say that much...
I'm doing the new A-Levels next year, but are you being sarcastic? I con't tell...
Which subjects have u taken tho?
OP probably didn't take hard enough subjects? (ps, don't try and make them harder for us next year! :colone:)
Do you mean the A-Levels that year 13s are currently sitting, or the new specimen papers for the "New A-Level Courses"?
Reply 8
Not what I've heard .....

Spoiler

Original post by Pi/2
Hi guys, as you can see from the thread title, I pretty much agree that the new a-level exams are too easy, I mean it's not our fault, but obviously the education secretary should change up the a-level playing field. Exam boards are asking ridiculously easy questions, and this is obviously unfair as previous years have sat daunting, but well set exams while we can just essentially sit "Mickey Mouse" exams. It honestly just defeats the purpose of calling these qualifications "A-Levels", the difficulty of these exams are incomparable with the difficulty of GCSE exams. The qualifications should be renamed to General Certificates of Secondary Education because it's honestly quid pro quo.


Oh dear me, well you can't generalise your own experience to all other subjects. I can tell you that from doing the first year of the old spec and the new spec, they old spec is undeniably more difficult in Psychology A-Level.
Reply 10
The new specification AS Levels, and FYI, I'm doing Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry.
I'm on the old spec but I'm not jealous of you new-spec-ers at all. You have to sit 2 years worth of stuff in one go!
Original post by Pi/2
Hi guys, as you can see from the thread title, I pretty much agree that the new a-level exams are too easy, I mean it's not our fault, but obviously the education secretary should change up the a-level playing field. Exam boards are asking ridiculously easy questions, and this is obviously unfair as previous years have sat daunting, but well set exams while we can just essentially sit "Mickey Mouse" exams. It honestly just defeats the purpose of calling these qualifications "A-Levels", the difficulty of these exams are incomparable with the difficulty of GCSE exams. The qualifications should be renamed to General Certificates of Secondary Education because it's honestly quid pro quo.


Do you mean the A-Levels that year 13s are currently sitting, or the new specimen papers for the "New A-Level Courses"?
The spec for maths hasn't changed at all


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I can tell you for a fact that all the Modern Language exams are considerably more difficult
Reply 15
Original post by cfbillingham
Do you mean the A-Levels that year 13s are currently sitting, or the new specimen papers for the "New A-Level Courses"?


I'm referring to the new AS's.
Original post by Pi/2
I'm referring to the new AS's.


Don't try and make out that you're too intelligent for the new AS exams when you don't know how to correctly use an apostrophe.
Reply 17
Original post by Pi/2
Hi guys, as you can see from the thread title, I pretty much agree that the new a-level exams are too easy, I mean it's not our fault, but obviously the education secretary should change up the a-level playing field. Exam boards are asking ridiculously easy questions, and this is obviously unfair as previous years have sat daunting, but well set exams while we can just essentially sit "Mickey Mouse" exams. It honestly just defeats the purpose of calling these qualifications "A-Levels", the difficulty of these exams are incomparable with the difficulty of GCSE exams. The qualifications should be renamed to General Certificates of Secondary Education because it's honestly quid pro quo.


I was looking forward to the harder exam questions on new specs but just recently in my physics exam i was honestly asked what the distance between 2 points on a ruler is for 1 mark.......

or the "plot these points on the graph"
"Draw a line of best fit"
2 (marks)

Having done 23 past papers from the old spec for a subject such as chemistry and then going into the exam seeing questions that ask me to rearrange
Mass/Mr = moles

Yes i can agree the new spec is easy in the exam papers , even the specimen questions have all been harder than the papers..
Reply 18
Original post by fuzz13
Not what I've heard .....

Spoiler




So true, by what have I've heard of the Physics, it seems to have a got worse, where they have merged the ISA paper into the exams, sounds like its got so much harder, and A Level Physics was hard before!!! Good luck to the ones that have to go through that.

Original post by Pi/2
Hi guys, as you can see from the thread title, I pretty much agree that the new a-level exams are too easy, I mean it's not our fault, but obviously the education secretary should change up the a-level playing field. Exam boards are asking ridiculously easy questions, and this is obviously unfair as previous years have sat daunting, but well set exams while we can just essentially sit "Mickey Mouse" exams. It honestly just defeats the purpose of calling these qualifications "A-Levels", the difficulty of these exams are incomparable with the difficulty of GCSE exams. The qualifications should be renamed to General Certificates of Secondary Education because it's honestly quid pro quo.


Even if they had got easier, which isn't really something you can just say coz you've generalised every subject by every exam board and said they've got easier, but lets say they had, it wouldn't matter, the grade boundaries depend on how people preform and I presume they go by a mean population chart where the upper 5-10% get A-A* and the lower 5-10% of the population get D- Fail, so whether an exam is hard or not doesn't really matter, it where the person can do the best to be in that upper 5-10% or at least the middle range.

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