Dear Marthie,

 

Thank you for kicking off this discussion. We are also finding students with a mixture of UK and International A levels. UCAS have confirmed that HESA has agreed to code International A-levels as P92 (Level 3 qualifications of which none are subject to UCAS Tariff for QUALENT3 purposes) URL: https://www.ucas.com/providers/services/news/ucas-data-hesa-transaction-starj-2018.

 

However, if the student has one or more UK A/AS levels they will be coded as P94 (Level 3 qualifications of which some are subject to UCAS Tariff) overall as the UK A levels attract tariff.

 

HESA undertook analysis a few years ago looking at the impact of including P94 in league table calculations. The conclusion was that if the league table excluded mature (21 or over) students the impact was minimised as the number of young students with a mixture was minimal. International A levels will affect this considerably.

 

Should we work together as HE providers to request HESA / UCAS review the impact in good time for the 2018/19 student submission. The current Qualent3 league table guidance for the Times / Guardian will pull down institutional tariff where there are students with this particular UK/International A/AS level mix. Complete guide excludes P94. Suggestions could be  a) removing students with a P94 code from ALL league table calculations, or b) assigning tariff points to these International A levels.

 

In relation to reformed AS levels, the subject code with the highest tariff attracted the tariff points, the other is ignored. However, some International A levels are coming in with new subject codes, so even if there was some way to discount the AS if a non-tariffable International A level was held, it will not be easy to map e.g. Pearsons International Maths has subject code X17, compared with the usual Mathematics M11 code.

 

Does anyone else have any thoughts?

 

Kind regards

Emma (University of Greenwich)

 

 

 

 

As we crunch the numbers for Confirmation & Clearing, we have a lot of questions coming up about international A-levels and also reformed A-levels and their associated AS levels.

Now that international A-levels have been coded separately from 'vanilla' A-levels in the UCAS download this year they are correctly being excluded from our Banner tariff calculation. However, it is having a noticeable impact on our total tariff which is leading to lots of queries/challenges from academics and senior management. One issue is where students are now getting their tariff solely from AS levels, which are not coded as international AS levels (possibly because they were completed before the coding change, or because they really are vanilla AS levels), so they are coming in with low but non-zero tariff, so counting towards the institutional average.

Another issue is around reformed AS levels which our Head of Admissions believes should not count towards tariff if one follows through the logic of the reform, but is not currently excluded either based on coding or algorithm. Where the same student is then coming though with international A-levels e.g. with tariff only from (post-reform) AS levels, we have a strong push internally that there should be a way to exclude the post-reform AS levels from the tariff.

I hope I've managed to explain the issue clearly - it gets quite complicated with A/AS level, post/pre reform A-levels and international/vanilla A-levels in the mix, but I don't want to write an essay. Has anyone else had these conversations in their institutions, and does anyone have any insight into how the sector can respond to this issue?

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