The awarding bodies and their regulator carry out research to maintain the equivalence of examination standards. However, some criticisms remain, suggesting that examination boards may be lowering standards in specifications (syllabuses) in order to attract more centres (schools or colleges). This article reports our investigations on whether centres that decide to change their specifications do so to a specification with a higher percentage of candidates achieving grade C and above, based on the argument that such specification is easier. Using GCSE English data for the years 2000-2003, we show that there is insufficient evidence for this assumption; instead, alternative explanations may be more plausible. We then consider whether centres that changed their specifications improve their mean level of performance more than centres that did not change. There was not enough evidence for this second assumption either.