Exam fiasco shows a complete disregard for teacher integrity

'Computer knows best' approach sees hundreds of thousands of A level awards downgraded.

Once the decision was taken to abandon A level and GCSE examinations it was clear that whatever grades were awarded to students in 2020, they were going to be 'special'. The best that could be hoped for was that those grades would reflect the ability and diligence of the pupils.

When the Education Secretary Gavin Williamson announced on 20 March that there would be no exams in 2020 he said that 'The exam boards will be asking teachers … to submit their judgement about the grade that they believe the student would have received if exams had gone ahead.' He added there would be controls 'to ensure that the distribution of grades follows a similar pattern to that in other years, so that this year's students do not face a systematic disadvantage as a consequence of these extraordinary circumstances.'

In fact, it is this year's students who face disadvantage from these 'controls'.

Although A-level teachers have made enormous efforts to produce 'Centre Assessed Grades' that they believe accurately reflected the ability and diligence of their students, it appears that the actual grades they gave were not the most significant part of the data fed into the algorithm. For a distressingly large number of candidates the only data of interest to Ofqual was the rank order of the students in each subject.

It seems that the number of each grade, A* to U have been determined largely by the average performance of that particular school in that A-level subject over the past 3 years. Little to do with the ability of this particular cohort in their sixth form subjects but instead of the cohorts of 2017-2019. Pupils were in effect competing amongst themselves for a fixed number of each grade.

What has driven this apparently absurd way of doing things? It seems that the obsession of Ofqual is to prevent 'grade inflation' - the tendency for the number of students given top grades to increase year on year. In normal circumstances this does make sense and exam boards are quite adept at adjusting grade boundaries to try to prevent this. However what works statistically for large numbers nationally just does not work for the typical numbers studying A level subjects in most schools. Even Ofqual has realised that the 'algorithm' approach will not work with small groups and this is why for these they have simply allowed the grades awarded by the teacher to stand. This is where some fee paying and grammar schools have 'benefited'. They had small groups in several of their A-level subjects and so their 'Centre Assessed Grades' were allowed to stand.

It is not hard to predict where the most disappointed students are to be found.

Able students in a school where typically no-one has been awarded a top grade for the last three years had no chance at all of gaining one in 2020 if their A-level subject had more than 15 candidates. Even if they had been placed first in the rank order by the teacher and been predicted an A* they would still not have received a top grade, simply because their predecessors had not achieved this.

This is perhaps an extreme example but the inability of the 'algorithm' approach to deal with a more common occurrence will serve to underline its weakness. Schools often have times when (say) a new teacher joins and sparks the imagination and motivation of a group of students. They go on to obtain top grades in this subject at GCSE and decide to take it for A-level. Here they do well and are predicted top grades by their teachers but because their predecessors in the last three years did not have that spark / motivation / new teacher, they are denied their top grades. The computer cannot deal with individual progress or ability.

Surely if Centre Assessed Grades are acceptable for some, they should be acceptable for all and probably the best 'guess' that can be made of the potential of a student in these difficult circumstances. Any resulting grade inflation seems to be a reasonable price to pay in a year when grades will be 'special' for the simple reason that they were awarded without exams.

Where is the justice in your university place being awarded to someone who was allowed to keep their Centre Assessed Grade when yours was downgraded by the Ofqual computer?