Anxious wait for A-level students

About a dozen subjects will have a grades review

Students who took A-levels this summer are waiting to find out just how many of them are to have their papers re-graded upwards.

It is likely to be tens of thousands - victims of the "perception" by examiners that they were being told to produce results in this year's new, two-stage A-levels that were in line with last year's.

It appears AS-levels taken this summer were also affected by the same issues.

But it could be some time before it is known who is affected.

The review of about a dozen subjects was the key recommendation of the interim Tomlinson Inquiry report into this summer's grades fiasco.

Mr Tomlinson was meeting the three main English exam boards - OCR, AQA and Edexcel - on Monday.

'Methodology'

It had been thought he would announce on Tuesday which units of which subjects with which boards need re-grading.

But a spokesman has now said he will simply announce the "methodology" by which he expects exam boards to carry out the re-grading.

It will then be up to them to go away and do it.

In his report on the way exam boards - especially the OCR board - manipulated this summer's A-levels, Mr Tomlinson said chief executives had overruled the grades recommended by their chief examiners.

Trust

The chairman of the QCA exams watchdog, Sir William Stubbs, was sacked on Friday by the Education Secretary, Estelle Morris even though the report by Mike Tomlinson had cleared him of wrongdoing.

She said he had to go because he had lost the trust of the exam boards and schools.

Tomlinson - new A-level system was 'accident waiting to happen'

Mr Tomlinson - the former chief schools inspector in England - attached no direct blame to anyone in his report.

He said the new A-level system was "an accident waiting to happen".

But because the code of guidance on the maintenance of standards was vague, the exam boards were not operating outside it.

Wider complaints

The dramatic sacking of Sir William Stubbs - who is complaining he was dismissed unfairly - temporarily drew attention away from the questions left unanswered by the Tomlinson report.

But there are signs that it has not satisfied everyone.

For one thing, he specifically did not look at the marking of papers - only the subsequent assignment of grades to those marks.

Many students believe they have been marked unfairly.

The issue of otherwise A-grade students failing one of their exam modules was simply not mentioned.

The word "coursework" - believed by many to have been a particular target of downgrading - is not in the report.

Also, there has been a steady string of "what about us?" complaints about this summer's AS-levels, whereas the Tomlinson Inquiry looked only at the second stage of the new A-levels, the so-called A2s.

As results

But Mike Tomlinson also has his suspicions about this summer's AS-levels.

He has asked the exam boards to include data on those in his effort to establish the extent of the re-grading that needs to be done this week.

On the face of it there are reasons for doubt.

In OCR's English Literature AS-level coursework unit, for example, the proportion who got an A grade last year was more than 36%.

In that unit this year - when teachers had had more experience of the course - the A grades were just under 30%.

The overall pass rate fell from 98% to 94%.

Mike Tomlinson is to go on to consider the wider issue of whether the standard of the A-level has been maintained, with a further report due in November.

But there are also calls for a more far-reaching investigation, taking in GCSEs and even national curriculum tests.

The Conservatives' spokesman, Damian Green, has called for the QCA to be replaced by a "truly independent" exams regulator.