Alert over 'dumbed-down' A-levels

Startling evidence of the "dumbing down" of A-levels has emerged in a university survey.

Academics who have set the same basic maths test for new students over the past decade have found a dramatic decline in performance.

Students who arrive at university with a B-grade in maths A-level are scoring little better than those who failed the A-level 10 years earlier.

The findings at Coventry University raise further questions about the way maths is taught in schools and explain why universities are having to lay on remedial courses in maths, and other subjects, for new undergraduates.

They come after two government advisers - former chief schools inspector Mike Tomlinson and Adrian Smith, principal of Queen Mary University, London - raised questions about "literacy" in the maths and communications.

Professor Duncan Lawson, of Coventry University, said the multiple-choice maths test was introduced in 1991 to assess engineering students. "We take a lot of students who have vocational rather than academic qualifications but for subjects like engineering they do need a basic knowledge of maths," he said.

"The test is pitched at what we consider to be A-level standard and gives us an idea of where there might be gaps in their knowledge. But we now give the test to students with maths A-level as well, because we have found they know less than we would expect."

The test includes the "basics of higher-level mathematical literacy", including elements of algebra which have disappeared-from the curriculum. A review of tests from the past decade shows the average score for a student with a D-grade in maths A-level was

37.3 out of 50 in 1991, but by 2001 that dropped to 29.1.

More worryingly, students with a B-grade in maths A-level in 2001 scored only slightly better than those who failed the exam in 1991.

Professor Lawson said: "The past decade has seen students examined on aspects of the course as they study them. At the end, they may have forgotten aspects of what they were taught at the beginning."