Drop in top grades next year
PUPILS sitting exams in Wales next summer will be awarded fewer top grades than this year’s cohort but papers will be adapted to take into account “lost learning”.
Grade boundaries for A-levels, AS-levels and GCSEs and the Skills Challenge Certificate will be set to halfway between pre-pandemic 2019 and 2021’s record results after exams were cancelled for a second year and replaced with teacher assessments.
Announcing the plan, exam regulator Qualifications Wales said exam board WJEC will award grades for its summer 2022 exams unless they have to be cancelled again.
If exams are cancelled there will be a return to teacher assessed grades, but with slight alterations.
Summer 2022 exam grading will run as a “transition year” before returning to 2019 pre pandemic grading in 2023.
It is expected that those at the start of their GCSE and A-level courses won’t have suffered so much Covid disruption to their learning.
It is hoped the transition will subdue what has been seen as grade inflation during Covid without a sudden fall in exam grades.
The regulator announced in March that exams would go ahead next summer but the specification for WJEC GCSE, AS- and A-levels and Skills Challenge Certificate qualifications would be reduced and adapted in recognition of “lost faceto-face teaching and learning time during the pandemic”.
Contingency plans are being made in case Covid worsens and exams have to be ditched again next summer.
If exams are cancelled, schools and colleges will be asked to award centre determined grades to learners. The centre determined grade approach would be similar to that used in summer 2021 “but with some improvements to take account of the learning from this year”.
Exams were graded on teacher assessments after outcry when results for 2020 were downgraded by an algorithm used to ensure they didn’t clash with results from previous years.
Critics said that led to high achieving pupils in schools with historically lower results unfairly losing out.
Philip Blaker, Chief Executive of Qualifications Wales said: “Next year we will see a return to normal assessments which provide a fair and consistent approach for learners.”