A-levels and O-levels?

Factual Questions
21

The O Levels and A Levels system is also used in Singapore. This is not surprising considering that the education system is also largely based on the British one. While Britain has done away with the O Levels and replaced it with the GCSE, Singapore has still retained the O Levels, and is probably the only country in the world to do so.

The O levels (O = ordinary) exam is taken at the end of secondary school education, as some Dopers have already pointed out, which is around the age of 16. All candidates sit for papers set by the Cambridge folks, specifically their Local Examinations Syndicate, which bases the papers on the local syllabus. However, the Ministry of Education sets the Mother Tongue papers (ie in Malay, Tamil, Chinese).

Examples of O Level papers are:
History (Southeast Asian)
History (post 1917 - 1990)
Geography
Literature (English, Chinese, the latter taken in Chinese, of course)
English Language
Mathematics
Chemistry
Physics
Biology

All candidates sit for at least 6 papers, English, Math, and 4 more subjects of their own choice. The grades of these 6 papers constitute the L1R5 – 1 Language, 5 Relevant subjects – which is needed for Junior College (a High School/College sort of institution) entrance. It is in Junior College where students sit for their A Levels papers.

There students will choose to focus in major areas namely Science or Arts. Science stream students will do the sciences (d’oh) like Biology, Chemistry, Physics etc. Arts students do literature, history, geography, economics etc.

These subjects, taken at A level, are crucial for entrance to local universities.

Other papers, like the General Paper (something like critical analysis of current affairs) and Mother Tongue, are Singapore-specific but just as important for university entrance as the A levels.

22

Simply because I’ve never run into anything like it in my schooling. I sat around in classes until I was 18, took the PSAT/NMSQT (for practice and scholarship qualification) when I was 16, the SAT and a couple SAT IIs when I was 17, and then got my high school diploma and used my GPA and SAT scores (plus some other things that admissions people look at) to get into college. You’ll never see me saying that I’ve got A-levels in this, this, and that, but you might hear me using my HS diploma (unlikely once I get out of college but good when I’m doing part-time work) or a BS (or hopefully higher eventually) for employment. You’ll probably never hear me mention my SAT score ever again, and definitely not the PSAT and SAT II scores.

In fact, I might never take another standardized test again. It’ll depend on whether or not I want to go to grad school and get a Ph. D.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone walks around asking about other people’s A-levels. But it seems to be a set of exams without any real practical worth in the long run.

23

Surely you’ve just contradicted yourself there?

You use your high school diploma, your GPA and SAT scores (plus some other things that admissions people look at) to get into college. That’s what we use A Levels for - that and/or to demonstrate academic ability to an employer if we don’t plan to go to college. Either both are “a set of exams without any real practical worth in the long run” or else neither is?

24

Surely you’ve just contradicted yourself there?

You use your high school diploma, your GPA and SAT scores (plus some other things that admissions people look at) to get into college. That’s what we use A Levels for - that and/or to demonstrate academic ability to an employer if we don’t plan to go to college. Either both are “a set of exams without any real practical worth in the long run” or else neither is?

25

Are “S” Levels still around? When I did my A levels an “S” level was offered as a sort of bridge between “A” levels and first year of university.

26

There are STEP papers, set by the Cambridge Board and mainly for people wanting to get into Cambridge University and special papers, set by most exam boards. Both are exams of greater difficulty, designed to test the most able candidates. However, special papers draw few candidates and most of them are from independent schools, so they are being replaced with another exam with a catchy acronym which I can’t quite remember at the moment.

27

Look, I’m sorry if I’ve angered anyone. And yes, that wasn’t the most carefully planned-out thing I said.

That’s it. I give up.

28

Not angry mate, I just didn’t get what you meant.

Plenty of people I’ve spoken to would agree that the exams they took at school have not been of much practical value to them during subsequent life. I have never been been asked to show my O Level certificate, A Level certificate or Degree certificates (although my university will have obtained corroboration from my school/examination board that I did pass the exams I claimed I had). I don’t have them framed and have frequently mislaid them after moving house.

People are very trusting that you’re telling the truth when you fill in an application form, and in the end you’re judged on what you can do, not what pieces of paper you have in a drawer somewhere.

29

asterion,

What you don’t understand is that A-levels and O-levels are the equivalent of high school grades in the U.S. There is nothing in England like a final grade in each subject which can then be used to calculate a grade point average. The scores you get on the A-levels and O-levels are the only thing that can be used to evaluate how well you have done in high school courses there. During my time in England (1987-1990) I only rarely heard anyone discuss their A-level or O-level scores. It’s certainly no more common to boast about them than it is to boast about high school grades or SAT scores in the U.S. A-levels and O-levels are mostly what are used to get into a university and to get a good job (if you don’t go to a university) in the U.K. They’re important to people for precisely the same reason that a good high school grade average and a good SAT score is in the U.S.

Is it really true now that most students don’t drop out at 16 in the U.K.? When I was there, I was told that only about 30% of the students stay in school past 16. In any case, it’s certainly true that a larger proportion of students stay in school until 18 in the U.S. than in the U.K. I believe that more than 80% of students in the U.S. stay in high school until 18 and get their high school diploma (which certifies that you have passed enough courses of the right type). If you include people who drop out but later get their G.E.D.'s (which is a way of passing a test later to show that you have the equivalent of the knowledge for a high school degree), more than 90% of Americans eventually get a high school diploma or a G.E.D.

30

It’s going to take a bit of searching for the equivalent stats, Wendell, but in the meantime, I’m confident that any school leaving qualification that was passed by 90% of the students would be widely condemned over here as “too easy” and therefore worthless.

I can tell you that the national average percentage of pupils gaining five or more GCSEs with Grades A* to C is 52.3% based on most recently published figures. There are eight GCSE pass grades ranging from A* to G. The starred A recognises outstanding achievement.

31

This site shows statistics for performance in examinations for 1999/2000.

It includes a table of students in England who took O Level equivalent exams at various ages (under 15 to 17+) and how many of those exams they passed at various grades. I’ve summarised the results:

Of 785,008 students who attempted the exams,
96.8% passed one or more
66.8% passed five or more
36.7% passed five or more with grades A* to C

I haven’t found a figure for the number of kids who didn’t attempt any exams.

Another table shows results in England for A Level students:

Of 237,037 students who attempted the exams,
The average number of exams they took was 2.9
60.1% passed three or more
16.7% passed two
16.8% passed one (the table doesn’t give grades)

I’ve excluded figures for mature students - you can take evening classes for GCSE and A Level exams for your own entertainment at any age, although naturally you have to pay for them. The above stats also indicate that about 30% of the students who attempted O Level equivalent exams carried on to the A Level stage.

32

BTW, I realise that the post above contradicts the figure I quoted previously. The second post is likely to be more reliable.

33

O-levels as exams are harder than GCSEs. At my school people in higher sets took Maths and French GCSE a year early, and then took French and Maths AO along with the rest of their GCSEs the following year. AOs were the equivalent (so we were told) of the old O-levels. They were much harder. They were NOT AS-levels (those were done in the lower sixth).

I can’t speak for exams in the last 10 years, since I left school, but certainly up to that time exams in the UK were getting easier, year-by-year. Our teachers deliberately made us do practice and mock A-levels from several years previous, so we would find the actual A-levels easy by comparison. In subjects like Latin, when we actually did the real A-level exam, our standard was so much higher most of us finished the 3-hour paper in 45 minutes.

GCSEs can’t fairly be described as “easy O-levels” because they do have different components and students often take more of them. But ignoring coursework - in terms of a final end-exam, they were a hell of a lot easier.

Taking Latin again, we used the “Boys Latin Primer” for practice translations, a really old textbook from decades past. It had three sections: (1) pre-O-level standard, (2) O-level standard, and (3) A-level standard. The translations we actually did for our A-levels - in the early 1990s - were similar to those in section (1).