For my A level students, the results for this year have been something of a surprise. Almost every student has been let down by coursework grades. Students who have performed consistently well in the examined modules (two of them with all A grades!) have ended up with overall B grades because C/D grades in coursework have pulled their averages right down. Strangely, this has happened over both AS and A2, and across the three exam boards I teach (OCR, AQA and Edexcel).

I overheard a chance conversation in my local Staples in Hemel Hempstead between two cashiers, one explaining to the other how many of her peers had lost out on their first choice university place this year because they had failed to achieve their predicted grades because their coursework had been so poor. Curiosity got the better of me in the end, having offered apologies first for earwigging, I asked what subject they were discussing. Yes, it was biology. This doesn't appear to be confined to Hemel either, it has happened to students in St Albans, Watford and Berkhamsted as well.

This has been the first year of the new syllabus where the "practical" modules are made up of written coursework and assessed practical ability - both graded by the schools themselves. I've not really involved myself in these modules apart from looking at coursework for glaring errors and omissions. The exam boards have offered training to the schools, and although there is a marking scheme available, the standards of marking aren't really apparent. As a private tutor, I have not had access to this training - information available to schools isn't necessarily available to tutors who access the examination websites as a member of the public.

This is also the first batch of A2 students to go through the new syllabus. The syllabuses themselves are not very different, but the structure of the questions and the underlying examination techniques are. While I tried hard to prepare for the different style of questions and was able to see my students do pretty much as I expected on the written papers, I am very sad that overall this year the grades have not met my expectations. It seems to me to be very unfair that a student with four As on the written papers then has a B overall because of a D grade for coursework/assessment. I await a copy of the Examiners Report with interest.