A TEENAGER who aced his maths GCSE sat the equivalent O-Level and scored almost 10 percentage points fewer.

Magdalen College School pupil Eddy Grogan, 15, took part in the experiment to test whether exams are getting easier.

Eddy sat an International GCSE, the equivalent of a normal GCSE taken in at least 120 countries, in maths a year early this summer and picked up an A* grade, scoring 97 per cent.

To take on the critics, the youngster also s+at an O-Level dating from 1986, and was given 88 per cent – an A grade – despite having less than a day to prepare.

Now he has challenged anyone criticising standards to sit the paper themselves.

Eddy, from North Oxford, said: “It wasn’t a massively difficult paper, it was just different in style and a different syllabus – not harder, but different. The way it was worded left a bit more to work out yourself than in the GCSE paper, where it’s quite clear what they want you to do.

“I think criticisms about exams getting easier are unfair.

“I’d be surprised if someone looked at the paper, sat down and took it themselves, and still really thought it was a lot easier.”

Melinda Tilley, county councillor responsible for school improvement, said she thought exams were getting easier. The 67-year-old said: “I suggest that nearly 10 percentage points easier is about right.

“Yes I think exams are getting easier but I also think students work very hard and it is not their fault.

“I think nothing has changed with the capabilities of our students but we underestimate them.

“With O-Levels it was a set exam but now there is an awful lot of coursework and I am not sure that’s the best way of doing it.”

Eddy lost marks in a question on matrices, which were not covered in the current syllabus, and admitted it took him one hour and 20 minutes to finish the O-Level, compared to 20 minutes to finish the GCSE.

But he believed that was down to the way it was written, and the difference in the syllabus.

He said: “I don’t think the O-Level was harder at all. It’s possible people who are not so good at maths might find it a bit more difficult to understand the paper, but that could easily be taught.”

GCSEs replaced O-Levels in 1988.

Magdalen College School’s head of maths, Linda Earnshaw, who has taught O-Levels, CSEs, GCSEs and IGCSEs, marked Eddy’s paper and believed the level of maths expected was the same.

She said: “There used to be questions where you could learn it by rote, but now they have to learn and show the maths behind it because the calculator does it for them. So to achieve the top mark it’s certainly as hard, maybe harder.

“It’s unfair to say it’s very easy to achieve top grades now because they work extremely hard.”

This summer, 99.5 per cent of all exams taken by pupils at the school were graded A or A*.

Nationally, 23.2 per cent of papers achieved the top two grades, a rise of 0.6 per cent on the previous year.