A-Levels - What the...?

Has the world gone mad? No, don't bother with that one - too easy. The question is rather one of when. When did the publication of the A-level results become the biggest story on the news agenda, filling page after page of the 'news'papers and taking up fully the first ten minutes of the BBC's ten o'clock 'news' on TV (at least on radio it was by then relegated to second story)? Back in my day, nobody took much interest - even those of us who had just slogged through the wretched exams (wretched except that they allowed you plenty of leeway for termtime dossing if you could pull it all together in time for the exam). Only the slightly weird or swotty made any attempt to find out their results before getting them in the post, and, as far as I recall, when they arrived they were greeted with little more than a raising of the eyebrow, unless something had gone seriously awry. There was never any mention of these matters in the news - it would have seemed absurd if there was. How times change... The increasing hysteria about A levels seems to have been whipped up by the insane drive to get half the population into 'university', despite the state school system having turned most of them out uneducated and ineducable (in any real sense of education). At least, with all those thousands of A-grade students 'deprived' of a university place (not to mention the ever growing numbers of graduates unemployed or flipping burgers), that's beginning to fall apart under the weight of its own absurdity. Hey ho - funny old world.