Introduction to ALIS

The Advanced Level Information System (ALIS) provides performance indicators for post-16 students across all sectors of education and includes analysis of A level, AS level, Applied A-Levels, BTEC National and International Baccalaureate Examinations. ALIS is the original member of the family of value-added monitoring systems run at the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM) at Durham University.  It has grown from only 12 schools in the northeast of England in 1983 to cover over a third of all A-Level entries in the UK and international schools sitting UK exams in this present year.

The value-added approach provides fair comparisons between the progress made by your students and the large sample of similar students in the Alis project. In order to make these comparisons, all students need to be measured against a common baseline representing their ability before starting their post-16 courses. The average GCSE score is the baseline for Alis.  This has repeatedly been found to be the best single indicator of post-16 performance. For students with no GCSE results, we also provide two alternative baselines, the Test of Developed Ability (TDA) and the Adaptive Test.