Why trust the exam boards?
In theory, the exam boards could publish results by simply returning the percentage of the papers marks received and the percentile of the year group this puts the student in. Like so:
Maths 80% -4th percentile
Biology 72% -23rd percentile
English 54% -40th percentile
But instead we ask our exam boards to unify these two figures into a single grade; presumably because this kind of results return is too complicated to be understood by students, parents or university admissions tutors.
So we ask the boards to ‘editorialize’ the results, to give us their opinion on what these two statistics imply about the ability of the student. No one seems to be asking why, even though there are very few people who if it was put like this would now trust the exam boards opinion. It appears as though the only remaining reason for the A-E grading scheme is so that the government can continue to obfuscate the actual ability of students.
Publishing the raw results like this won’t mean that exams will become harder, but it will allow the universities to distinguish the better pupils. Offers from universities could become a mix of grades and percentiles. Cambridge could require very high percentile marks in all subjects, Russell group universities could require a high percentile in the chosen subject and simply high grades in all papers etc.
This would also lend some transparency to the system, which would put pressure on boards to explain the justification for the gradings.