It's not even August...

... but that hasn't stopped The Independent running an article about the old chestnut of exams getting easier.

The article claims, "high-flying GCSE students set for an A or A* pass scored zero points in a mock science exam which included old O-level questions."

The Royal Society of Chemistry, who ran the experiment are claiming that this is proof of a "catastrophic slippage" in exam standards.

Now, I would argue that this is not proof of easier exams or dumber students; simply that the curricula are different.

By the same token, how would the 1960s/1970s children score in today's exams?

You could point to any number of factors that have changed in the last 30 years to help improve performance:

1 - The introduction of qualifications based much more on course work (arguably teaching students more 'real world' skills than being faced with a question in an exam).

2 - Teaching methods, which have students focussing much more on what will be coming up in exams and preparing properly for them.

3 - Exams becoming criterion-based instead of norm-based. That is to say that students are marked against criteria laid out in the curriculum and not against each other.

The number of illiterate people leaving school has always been a problem. There are millions of illiterate adults in England today who were educated before the mid-1970s, largely because the education system didn't care as much if they never learned to read because the job market back then had millions of openings where literacy wasn't required.

It's grossly unhelpful, not to unmention unfair that the press seem to have an unwavering belief that exams are easier today and glory in these fictional higher standards from the past to put down the successes being had today.