Are some subjects harder than others? Common sense would answer yes. Secretaries of state, Ofqual and Russell Group universities would seem to agree.
Hardness is defined in several ways, the most obvious being the amount of content covered in an exam syllabus. This should be constant across a suite of subjects, and at A-level the required number of ‘Guided Learning Hours’ is the same across the suite.
Then again hardness might be found in the assessment - the criteria used to allocate marks, and the decision on where to draw the grade boundaries. As long as it is possible to score and rank answers, the setting of grade boundaries becomes, in a sense, arbitrary. If you want to make an exam hard, ask a difficult question. It’s not unknown for a very tough maths exam to have grade boundaries set low, so that a mark around 40 per cent can still get you a good grade. In essay-based subjects it is possible to ask the same question (for example, the origins of the Second World War) at a variety of levels. You can ask an accessible question, allocate marks sparingly, and set the top grade boundary really high. Which of these approaches is ‘harder’?
Evidence from Durham’s Centre Evaluation and Monitoring and Ofqual suggests a hierarchy of subjects in terms of difficulty of getting a top grade (not to be confused with the percentage of top grades in each subject). In these terms, the natural sciences and modern languages are harder than the humanities, and much harder than drama or media studies. (These analyses are based on the probability of a student of a given ability, as defined by prior achievement and other subject scores, gaining a particular grade in a given subject.)
High grades are evidently easier to get in some subjects than in others, but this has to be balanced by the unequal value that universities place on some subjects over others - as evinced by the Russell Group’s schedule of facilitating subjects, and the lists of preferred subjects published by universities such as the LSE. In any case, the fact that it is harder to get a top grade in one exam compared with another does not mean that the subject itself is harder. It just means that the exam - more specifically the marking and grading - is harder.
The real locus of hardness lies in the level of demand of the content and concepts in a course. Yet it is difficult to compare subjects when an individual’s capacity to master a discipline depends on factors that are not easily weighed, nor readily related to any commonly accepted definition of ‘intelligence’. Proficiency in a foreign language depends on background as well as brightness. A maths or a music prodigy will, by definition, find her subject pretty easy, but might struggle in constructing an essay.
Why do we feel the need to adjudicate on the competing claims of physics, French and photography? Simply because, in our education system, we force students to choose between them so early.
Dr Kevin Stannard is the director of innovation and learning at the Girls’ Day School Trust. He tweets as @KevinStannard1
