AC Grayling’s elite university loses faith in A-Levels

The Telegraph 14 February 2014

An elite university established as a rival to Oxbridge is to ignore pupils’ final A-level results because of “increased mistrust” in the traditional sixth-form exam. New College of the Humanities in London is making “unconditional offers” based on pupils’ prior exam scores and performance in interviews, following concerns that the gold standard qualification fails to mark out the brightest students, writes Graeme Paton for The Telegraph.

Professor AC Grayling, the college’s master, said that A-levels in subjects such as English and history struggled to reward “individual judgment, interpretation and a little bit of creative thinking”.

The move has been seen as an attempt to make an early claim on the brightest candidates at a time of increased competition between institutions. It also takes pressure off students in their final year of school, it is claimed. Grayling, who set up New College of the Humanities in 2012, indicated that it was also driven by dissatisfaction with the A-level system.
Full report on The Telegraph site

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