Universities "Prestige" Ranking

Have you always been able to resit portions of your A-level to improve the grade?

No, module systems were kind of trialed in my years but in some cases you could resit and others you couldn't, mostly you couldn't and resitting was very unusual in subjects that you could (I think maths might have been a possibility). You could, however, resit the whole A-level if you wanted to - a far cry from the resitting of various parts at various times which seems commonplace now.

That kind of thing is very disheartening. I understand why A-level students who work hard to achieve their top marks get annoyed when people say 'A-levels are getting easier'; I'm sure I'd be annoyed too. But when you look around you, objectively, and see more and more students getting top grades, and the record being broken year upon year, I think I would have to admit, even if I was still a sixth former stressing about meeting my university offers, that getting AAA is not as special an achievement as it should be, and used to be.

Over that period A levels went from 2 3hr exam paper + coursework assessed at the end of 2 years to modular exams taken throughout 2 years with the option to retake modules to improve grades.

It's no soruprise that pass rates and A grades increased - if you're 2 marks off an A then you're obviously going to retake a module or two (in the past you wouldn't have known you were that close to the boundary or had the opportunity to resit), if you've failed the AS level of got a D or and E then chances are you aren't going to bother continuing with that subject to A2 (in the past you would only know that you were going to get a D, E, N or U after working towards an A level for 2 years).

Alevels pass rates pre and post curriculum 2000 cannot be compared - they're two completely different qualifications.

Also, I'm wary of saying A Levels are getting easier. I wholeheartedly agree that A Level results get better year on year, but I don't think it's to do so mouch with intelligence as it is with preparation. Questions are largely the same or similar year on year and you could do pretty well from learning previous question.

I think it would be best left with a distinct separation between AS and A2 Levels. I think it's easier to keep a track of your own progress then as well as beneficial for universities. It means you can keep your options open by taking 4 subjects and still have something to show for it if you drop down to 3 for full A Levels.

I think it was like that before wasn't it? You could do ASs but no one really did. Other than that I think it would probably be better left as it was previously. Not really sure how I feel about the A* for a Level though.

I think they used to have the S Level or something, which was sort of like an extra thing you could do (like STEP for Maths).

But why wasn't this the same when I sat my A-levels? We had past papers, questions seemed similar between years too. Such preparation techniques were widely used for revision back then too. Unless we were all just stupider or less prepared I can't see how to really justify that as a significant reason for grade inflation.

Also there´s a reason foreign people tend to be better than their age peers at maths, it´s because they´re way ahead of us in terms of what´s on the syllabus. When one of my friends first came to the UK from China he told us that the reason he always got 100% in tests was because he had been taught what we were covering 4/5 years previously. Same with my friends from other countries too.

I guess top end material has slowly been phased out as well which doesn't make much of a difference over a year but explains huge jumps over longer peroids of time. I think a few years back Calculus was removed from the GCSE Maths and Ad Maths was shifted to AS over time.