A-levels: record pass rate expected

Another record A-level pass rate is expected to be announced this year, bringing closer the prospect of an exam that no one will fail.

Pass rates at grades A to E are expected to exceed 95 per cent and a further rise in top grades will make it even more difficult for universities, which rely on the exam, to choose between scores of applicants for each place.

This year's results are awaited with trepidation by ministers desperate to avoid a repetition of the crisis which last autumn rocked confidence in the exams system.

In the first year of the new A2 exam, which now completes the full A-level after AS exams in the first year of the sixth form, schools protested when their best students were suddenly marked down.

An inquiry established that one exam board - Oxford, Cambridge and RSA - deliberately cut grades in students' final modules to avoid the overall A-level pass rate going through the roof.

Nearly 2,000 students eventually had their grades raised and the affair cost Sir Bill Stubbs, the chairman of the Government's exams watchdog the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, his job.

Education Secretary Estelle Morris, who sacked him, resigned shortly afterwards.

Ministers insist that new safeguards mean the scandal will not be repeated. But exam boards are braced for a surge in appeals over A-level grades from students and parents whose confidence in the exams system has been shaken.

Today Education Minister David Miliband anticipated further accusations of grade inflation. No one complained, he said, when runners regularly improved on previous best performances. But the Tories said further steps were necessary to restore faith in the system.

They pledged that they would make the QCA independent of Governmentto protect the exams regulator-from political interference. Damian Green, shadow education secretary, also promised "tougher grading" to guard against further grade inflation. He also repeated the Tories' pledge to abolish AS-levels and promised a "simpler and clearer" way of testing.

With this year's results days away, it emerged that a government adviser is to recommend that most sixth formers should not apply to university until they have received their A-level results.

Professor Stephen Schwarz, vicechancellor of Brunel University, is expected to argue that applications should be made on the basis of actual rather than predicted grades when he reports on university admissions later this year.

Universities are expected to object that their admissions process, which currently takes months, cannot be crammed into a few weeks between August and October.