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One of the missions of language education internationally is to enable students to use language in a context-appropriate manner. Against this backdrop, students' ability to linguistically encode formality emerges as an important issue. Using extracts of writing produced by 16-year-old students in 2004 and 2014, this study sought to investigate whether the level of formality in students' writing changed over time. The 858 extracts of writing sampled were composed as part of a high-stakes examination in English Language. The linguistic analysis carried out focused on a number of features serving either as discriminators between spoken and written discourse (e.g. lexical diversity, lexical sophistication), or as markers of informal electronic communication (e.g. abbreviations, omitted stops, non-capitalised sentences). A statistical comparison of the prevalence of these features in the 2004 and 2014 corpora indicated that students' writing underwent informalisation. This trend was found to be stronger among lower attaining students.

In summer 2010, the A* grade at A level was awarded for the first time. This grade was introduced to help higher education institutions to differentiate between the highest achieving candidates and to promote and reward greater stretch and challenge. Exploring data from the Higher Education Statistics Service and making use of multilevel regression models, this research investigated for the first time the relationship between achieved A* grades and performance at the end of three-year courses in higher education institutions in the United Kingdom. The results of this work showed that, when prior schooling and other background characteristics were accounted for, the number of A* grades was a good predictor of achieving either a first or at least an upper second class degree. Specific subject-level analyses revealed that the number of top grades in some A level subjects was associated with good degree outcomes in specific degree subject areas.