Hello!

People studying Italian would have overall done better than those studying Chinese so you have more people getting higher than 72% in Italian

Ummm why

Ummm why

Maybe the exam was easier

First of all, I would expect people learning Chinese to find it a good deal more challenging than Italian, since Italian is a European language that shares a lot of similar words / sounds to English. Chinese not only has a whole new system of writing to learn, but is also non-European, which means that you can't really just 'guess' at what a sentence means by identifying words that are similar to English words.

I would imagine some of that skewing effect is also to do with native speakers. What you often find with the less common language A-levels is that native speakers often take them. In some cases, they go in expecting to find it very easy, and are then surprised because they don't really know how to write 'for the exam' in order to get high marks on the essays, or they aren't sufficiently familiar with the cultural references used. I can't speak for those languages specifically, but I know that in French A-level, we talked an awful lot about very specific environmental policy / terminology, and we did often come across words and ideas I wasn't familiar with in English. I could see how a native speaker going in blind could be thrown off.

Do you think British students will take Chinese?

If native speaker applies to Chinese I would think that it also applies to Italian, however it doesn’t. And so I was thinking of other reasons?

Yes, I learnt it over two years from scratch and took the exam. It is a much harder language as it uses characters, not letters. You have much more to learn in comparison to italian because of this. There aren’t 26 letters (as there are in language) rather hundreds of characters with only a very small section shared between characters.

If the exam was easier I think the grade boundary would be higher