It's A level results time. I began to suspect that A levels were getting easier some years ago when I saw the number of local sixth formers who were sitting 4 A levels, and passing them with good grades. Actually, given that Colchester has some of the best state schools in the country, my initial thought was that they must be exceptionally bright youngsters, and I was rather in awe, then I realised that there were so many of them that grade inflation must be involved. I went to an academically selective school in the west country. It wasn't as good as the best public schools, but it was pushy and very exam focused, and had its pick of the offspring of the local professional classes. Sitting 4 A levels was a big deal, and most stuck at three. I sat 4. I'm reasonably bright, and fairly conscientious, and I managed A,B, B, C (which still puts me ahead of Toby Young).
There is public joy and self-congratulation that more children are taking science A levels, on the grounds that more scientists and engineers are What This Country Needs. Well yes, up to a point. I did science at A level, because it was deemed to be more intellectually stretching, and to open more doors. I certainly found it stretching, having an arts brain, to which story telling came as naturally as breathing, while my understanding of pure mathematics packed up completely two thirds of the way through the A level syllabus, at the point where the square root of minus one found its way into the analysis of vectors. Once you hit the wall in maths, you've had it. No bluff or bullshit will save you. The fact that I got a B grade in A level physics proved only that A levels measured nothing of any validity, because I really didn't understand physics. Still don't. I scrambled through the exam by learning a lot of stuff off by heart, but the behaviour of even the most basic electrical circuit seemed to me entirely arbitrary. The only time I ever got any use out of A level physics was in a job interview with an advertising agency, when comparing the jumping of electrons between energy levels to the music of J S Bach got me through to the final selection round. And biochemistry with those circular diagrams of molecules with umpteen carbon atoms turning into other similar molecules bored me to a state of idiocy, so that I found them very difficult to remember, let alone understand why one turned into another and not something else. You wouldn't want to take any drug or cross a bridge designed by me. Trust me, you really wouldn't. You can encourage people to do science A levels and degrees as much as you like, but unless they have genuine aptitude in the first place I'm afraid you won't necessarily get scientists out of the process who are going to take on the Germans and the Indians and the Chinese.
Anyway, I would never have made it into the higher echelons of science, as I would never have got a doctorate, because I couldn't do statistics. Successive educators have tried to teach me statistics, and I have found it utterly, incomprehensibly baffling every time. In desperation in my university finals first time round I wrote an essay about the analysis of variance, because it was a marginally less awful question than any of the other remaining questions. Apparently I wrote a brilliant essay, as I discovered in my viva, where I also discovered I had used the wrong statistical test in my final year dissertation. Unfortunately, once the examiners began to cross question me, they rapidly discovered that I couldn't do statistics, just write lyrically about it.
After the A level results comes the panic over university places. I feel deeply for those students, and their parents, who having missed out on a place this year will be hit by the fees hike next year if they go then, but I still worry that What This Country Needs, as well as the individual students, is to send fewer and more carefully selected people to university, then we could afford to pay for it and not cripple the chosen many with debt. We saw friends recently who are both academics. One of them has to field complaints from students about other students using laptops in lectures to update their Facebook pages, which is distracting if you are sitting behind them. I protested that the offenders were paying loads of money for their courses. Our friends looked at me wearily. 'They won't pay it back. They're just deferring the moment when they go on the dole'. Oh dear.
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