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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 07:42   #1
Radical Edward
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these elite A level grades

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3753552.stm

what is this crap? lets have an A+ and an A++? why not just call the "A++" "A", call the "A+" "B", and call the "A" C instead? or in a hundred years time, results day is going to look like an ebay user feedback page "T0p Stud3nt A+++++++++++++++". Why the perpetual moaning about elitism, why can't the government just accept that some people are clever and other people are stupid, and that clever people should do clever jobs and stupid people should clean toilets. ok, that was harsh, but it is the point that some people are academically inclined and some are not, and it is important to draw the distinction between those groups and nurture the skills of the various individuals, or, in the name of freedom, allow people to nurture those skills themselves. While an academic, I fully confess that I have no idea what goes on underneath the bonnet of a car, or how to build a house. plumbing I can do since Ihave so much experience with vacuum systems, but that is besides the point. Some people are good at some things, others aren't. It's time for the government to just admit this and stop trying to pretend that everyone is academically excellent, but some people are a bit more academically excellent than others. Nobody would propose that all the competitors in the olympics got a gold medal, but some had GOLD+ and GOLD++ stamped on them, so why do it with exams?

It is bloody stupid.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 07:54   #2
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Re: these elite A level grades

From what i understand they can't change the percentage mark needed for an A upwards as that percentage is based on the understanding in the answer given and is not an arbitary percentage, ie if you just make an A the top 10% you'd exclude the people below that who answered to a very high level but were 'lumped downwards' what they're trying to do is differentiate between the highest tier of students ie between those who in their answers have showed a real understanding and those that have showed and exceptional understading.

I also don't get your argument dooder, surely by this policy the government are trying to stop pretending that everyone is academically excellent, and are differentiating as such.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 07:54   #3
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Re: these elite A level grades

why not just give individual marks?
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 07:57   #4
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Re: these elite A level grades

it would seem the sensible approach, theres probably a reason though.


EDIT

i think it might be to give an 'feel' of what level a person is at, ie saying A B C D etc gives a more instant assessment then percentage, this is a guess and i could be completetly wrong.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:02   #5
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Re: these elite A level grades

so looking at the article

Quote:
Part of the reason for the [increase in grade A's] is that, until the early 1980s, a quota system was in force.
.....
The Conservatives have proposed reintroducing something similar.
....
To the students at Allerton High this was an abhorrent idea.

Tom said: "If that's what they want to do, they must be ignorant of what's going on."

Julie BrownRigg, head of the 200-student sixth form at Allerton, puts the rise in grades down to improvements in teaching, which gives students a "more sophisticated" way of looking at subjects.
well that is all well and good saying that standards have increased, but the fact of the matter is that the top universities want to make sure their students are in fact from that top few percent, not just a bunch of students who have improved because of "improved teaching standards" so in effect, the quality of the top universities gets degraded, unless like Oxford and Cambridge, they have their own examination and testing, which many universities have netiehr the time nor the money to implement
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:04   #6
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nusselt
From what i understand they can't change the percentage mark needed for an A upwards as that percentage is based on the understanding in the answer given and is not an arbitary percentage, ie if you just make an A the top 10% you'd exclude the people below that who answered to a very high level but were 'lumped downwards' what they're trying to do is differentiate between the highest tier of students ie between those who in their answers have showed a real understanding and those that have showed and exceptional understading.
then why not just change the grades to reflect this, rather than adding in the pointless A+ and A++ and so on?
Quote:
I also don't get your argument dooder, surely by this policy the government are trying to stop pretending that everyone is academically excellent, and are differentiating as such.
by awarding so many people A, it makes the concept of A not very useful. A in the new system might as well just be C.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:06   #7
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Re: these elite A level grades

i still don't get your argument dooder, you're saying that the top tier of students should be distinguished but you're opposed to a system that would distinguish them?

Oh and apparently the Unis would like the percentages, the classification into grades is probably better and easier for industry or something.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:09   #8
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Re: these elite A level grades

by divorcing the grade from the percentage of pupils who attain that grade, you are losing information on the calibre of the students. i.e. if the exam one year is easy and everyone gets over 90% they all get A++ and it is impossible to pick who is the best student, however if the following year it is hard and only 2% get over 90% then you know that those 2% are the best students. it would be far simpler to remedy this by saying that only the top 20% of students get an A. you can still give them a percentage mark if you like as well, since that would give the full amount of information about their capabiities both as individuals, and also the information that the university requires i.e. who the best students are.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:12   #9
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nusselt
i still don't get your argument dooder, you're saying that the top tier of students should be distinguished but you're opposed to a system that would distinguish them?

the issue is the silliness in which it is being done; the addition of the A+ and A++. it's a botch job which doesn't really do anything apart from say who got above a certain percent. it still doesn't represent the bell curve distribution of exam results, and makes the concept of an A rather meaningless. Just shuffle the A up to 90% instead.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:14   #10
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Re: these elite A level grades

By divorcing the grades from the objective assessment of the understanding shown by the students you're messing with people for the sake of keeping the daily mail happy.

The percentages are based on the understanding shown, the grades on the percentages. The students who have shown a real understanding and an exceptional one have to be differentiated so you divide up the A grade.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:16   #11
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Radical Edward
the issue is the silliness in which it is being done; the addition of the A+ and A++. it's a botch job which doesn't really do anything apart from say who got above a certain percent. it still doesn't represent the bell curve distribution of exam results, and makes the concept of an A rather meaningless. Just shuffle the A up to 90% instead.

apart from the tories who noone really listens to the general consensuss has been in favour, messing with the understanding the students have shown in order to make it fit the statistical model you desire is sillyness.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:20   #12
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Re: these elite A level grades

It's ****ing stupid. Consider a potential employer's list of CVs in 5 years time or so. You'll have people with an A at A-level or A/S-level, and people with an A++ at diploma level. They're no better, but that A++ sure looks like it's superior.

One of the reasons is also because pupils are finding it easier and easier to get A grades, so there needs to be some distinguishment between someone who gets almost 100%, and someone who gets 85% or so.

It's still stupid though. None of the lecturers on my teaching course are for it, and neither are any teachers I've spoken to. Government again intervening and making things more complicated...
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:27   #13
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Re: these elite A level grades

What you should do is convert the performance of these grades into an overall rank of the candidature. For example, someone who does insanely well in hard courses gets a rank of 100. Someone who does insanely well in moderate subjects gets a 98 or so. If you do moderately well in the middle courses, you get a 78 or something. Thus, everybody wins
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:29   #14
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Re: these elite A level grades

Can someone tell me why everyone is arguing that more differentiation is needed but that greater differentiation between the top tier of students is bad? The holy sacrilege of splitting an A into an A, A+ and A++ aside, and without introducing subjective assessments of what an A is (2%, 5% or 10% etc), they're doing what you want comrades.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 08:48   #15
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nusselt
Can someone tell me why everyone is arguing that more differentiation is needed
I never said more differentiation is needed.

One person regurgitating taught facts is just as good as another - I couldn't care less if one is 85% good at retelling the textbook and another is 100%.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 09:40   #16
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Re: these elite A level grades

I think anyone incapable of getting all As at A level should instantly be put into a low intelligence vocational program, or something anyway.

but yeah, i dont see the problem with A+ and A++ etc... if your biggest complaint about it is that it looks stupid you dont really have that persuasive an argument.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 16:30   #17
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Re: these elite A level grades

The problem is, as implied in the first post, it is not politically correct to identify one person as academic, and another as incapable of enjoying or benefiting from academic study to the same extent.
An A++/A+ grade is not the answer to the difficulties of grading, because it is merely a means of differentiating between those who got an A grade. We shouldn't need everyone to be handed the top grade on a plate because it makes them feel good, and then have to split it up further (but as sympathetically as possible, of course) because it is impossible to distinguish the good from the bad through the mire of goodwill.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 16:31   #18
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Re: these elite A level grades

rather than introducing these new grades, why not just make the exams harder so that less people get them?

past a certain point you move out of the realms of knowledge and down to luck - who made a slight mistake, who read something the night before etc etc. i'd have said that the difference between 90% and 95% owed more to how a candidate felt on the day than anything else.

of course, this solution would give a huge downturn in A results (which is what this a+ and a++ thingy effectivly does anyway, by devaluing the a and replacing it with an a++) and blair then wouldn't be able to boast about the improvements in education, but this debate is clearly about the grades, not about politics

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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 16:45   #19
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Radical Edward
It is bloody stupid.
It's hardly new; this kind of general discussion is trotted out by all the newspapers every August, the only result being that some A-level candidates (no doubt with A's) say that saying that the A-Level, as a qualification, is being devalued is insulting to them as candidates and devalues their achievement. If I had my way, I'd strip those fellows of all their A-levels, just for being so mind bogglingly stupid in the face of overwealming statistical simplicity.

And that's not even mentioning the proposed reforms to the educational system.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 16:58   #20
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Re: these elite A level grades

If universities are having trouble distinguishing candidates with the same results, why can't someone just tell UCAS to give the universities their marks?
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 16:59   #21
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Re: these elite A level grades

Exams are a terrible idea in the first place, and making it harder to get the top grade can only serve to make matters worse.

The idea that someone's performance over 2 years can be accurately summed up by how well they happen to do within a 2 hour period on a given day is absurd. The "A++" proposal would just be adding plasters to an already broken system, except that it's actually likely to make things worse since it will help out those who only get their grade due to hard work at the expense of those who are actually gifted at the subject (and are hence more likely to do well at university). If we have to have exams at all (and we shouldn't), then it should be relatively easy for a bright person who does little work to get an A, and the differences between these candidates should be sorted out by universities themselves, preferably by interviews and something closer to American SAT style tests.

At the end of the day, you have to decide whether you want the top universities full of nerds who done nothing at school other than work, or those who are actually competant. Almost anyone will be able to get the top grade at A-level if they work hard enough, since the material itself isnt particularly difficult. If you really want the people who dedicate their lives to schoolwork to end up getting better grades (and hence to get into better universities) than those who are smart enough to take into account the law of diminishing returns and not study for an extra hundred hours just to increase their final score by 5%, then this seems an excellent way to go about doing it.

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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 17:03   #22
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nodrog
Exams are a terrible idea in the first place, and making it harder to get the top grade can only serve

The idea that someone's performance over 2 years can be accurately summed up by how well they happen to do within a 2 hour period on a given day is absolutely ridiculous. This proposal would just be adding plasters to an already broken system, except that its actually going to make things worse since it will help out those who only get their grade due to hard work at the expense of those who are actually gifted at the subject (and are hence more likely to do well at university). If we have to have exams at all (and we shouldnt), then it should be relatively easy for a bright person who does little work to get an A, and then the differences between these candidates should be sorted out by universities themselves, preferably by interviews and something closer to American SAT style tests.

At the end of the day, you have to decide whether you want the top universities full of nerds who done nothing at school other than work, or those who are actually competant.
Depends if those who are 'competent' will actually work to achieve anything at university. If not, they should not be there.
I have not failed to see the hypocrisy of that last statement.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 17:09   #23
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Boogster
Depends if those who are 'competent' will actually work to achieve anything at university. If not, they should not be there.
I have not failed to see the hypocrisy of that last statement.
Again, its a "diminishing returns" thing. Getting an A does require _some_ work, but getting 95% would involve wasting (yes, wasting - exactly what use does it have?) an absurd amount of time just to memorise every single detail of the syllabus inside out. What's the point? What does it prove? The only possible correlation between 'how much you are prepared to memorise for a school exam' and 'how smart you are' would be exponentially inverse.
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 17:17   #24
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nodrog
exponentially inverse.
Is this not logarithmic?
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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 17:19   #25
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Re: these elite A level grades

Not in this context (I meant 'inverse' as in 1/e(x) rather than the actual inverse function)


edit: http://img96.exs.cx/img96/2222/ALevels_Are_Stupid.jpg

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Unread 25 Oct 2004, 19:02   #26
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Re: these elite A level grades

Why not tell people the bloody percentages they got?


PS Competent people will always get past their exams with whatever results they need nod. That's why they're competent.
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 00:50   #27
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
PS Competent people will always get past their exams with whatever results they need nod. That's why they're competent.
This assumes people are going to bend over as much as they "need" to. If the entry requirements for a University presume a stupidly heavy workload (and not in a good way) then perfectly able students may simply choose to go somewhere else, or indeed do something else with their time.
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 00:52   #28
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Re: these elite A level grades

That does not appear to me to have happened yet, at least in Ireland.
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 00:54   #29
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
That does not appear to me to have happened yet, at least in Ireland.
While you might be able to measure a drop in university admissions I doubt it's that easy to measure if you're getting the most "competent" students filling elite universities.
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 02:10   #30
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Re: these elite A level grades

**** it, I think they should mark on the curve
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 10:04   #31
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by mist
rather than introducing these new grades, why not just make the exams harder so that less people get them?
Quote:
Originally Posted by JonnyBGood
Why not tell people the bloody percentages they got?

Because it's hard to get exams standardised from one year to the next without them being "the same". The grade you get isn't based on an exact percentage before the exams are done - it's worked on based on how well everyone else did in the same exam.

That's why they can't just make them harder also. Someone who gets an A one year might easily have just got a C another year if the grading was the same or there were lots of intelligent people in their year throughout the country - simply because the exam was easier or harder.

They had a big problem with this during the "baby boom".
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 12:15   #32
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Re: these elite A level grades

so, what you're saying is that exams can't acually be that much use, and we should ignore them all?

-mist
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 12:30   #33
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Re: these elite A level grades

sooner or later we shall see A--, A-, A, A+, A++

this way everyone gets an A no matter what they get in a test, ho ho ho
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 12:54   #34
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by mist
so, what you're saying is that exams can't acually be that much use, and we should ignore them all?

-mist
There's 3 types of assessment:

Norm-Referenced - Not used so much anymore in schools. It's where you're ranked in class against your peers. So someone clever in one class might be only average in another.

Criterion-Referenced - The norms and criteria are the same all over the country. Someone who gets an A-grade one year will be more or less of the same level in that subject as someone who gets an A-grade in another year.

Ipsative - Comparing yourself against yourself (say, over time). So you do "better" or "worse", it isn't judged against other people.


The exams are done in a Criterion Referenced way. So they have to add on a few more levels at the top, as just down-scaling all the grades a bit (so the As are say, the top 10% now instead of the top 20%) would mean that people who took the regular A-levels would look like they're at a higher level than people who took them after, at the diploma level.

It's hard to explain. Am I making sense?
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 14:05   #35
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomkat
There's 3 types of assessment:

Norm-Referenced - Not used so much anymore in schools. It's where you're ranked in class against your peers. So someone clever in one class might be only average in another.

Criterion-Referenced - The norms and criteria are the same all over the country. Someone who gets an A-grade one year will be more or less of the same level in that subject as someone who gets an A-grade in another year.

Ipsative - Comparing yourself against yourself (say, over time). So you do "better" or "worse", it isn't judged against other people.


The exams are done in a Criterion Referenced way. So they have to add on a few more levels at the top, as just down-scaling all the grades a bit (so the As are say, the top 10% now instead of the top 20%) would mean that people who took the regular A-levels would look like they're at a higher level than people who took them after, at the diploma level.

It's hard to explain. Am I making sense?
Of course you'd then have the problem that someone who scores more highly than anyone else in the country and gets an A this year might look like they'd done worse than someone in five years' time who gets an A++++. It'd be a bit silly to have to keep writing "this was back when A++++++++s didn't exist" on your CV.
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 14:08   #36
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dante Hicks
While you might be able to measure a drop in university admissions I doubt it's that easy to measure if you're getting the most "competent" students filling elite universities.
I'm not exactly too sure where all the competent people who aren't attending university in ireland or abroad are going.
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Unread 27 Oct 2004, 17:04   #37
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Re: these elite A level grades

Quote:
Originally Posted by Proteus
Of course you'd then have the problem that someone who scores more highly than anyone else in the country and gets an A this year might look like they'd done worse than someone in five years' time who gets an A++++. It'd be a bit silly to have to keep writing "this was back when A++++++++s didn't exist" on your CV.
The new things are going to be called diplomas, not A-levels, so there will be a difference...
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