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Returned from holiday this week to find myself tipped headfirst into a pile of steaming exam manure. Well, to be fair, it was my two sons left floundering in the current A-level and GSCSE results mess, I was the one on the sidelines with a barge pole telling them to grab on.
The eldest was first up with his A-level grades. He sensed things may not be about to go too well when the first email he opened on exam results day was a message from his form tutor telling him the school was going to appeal on his behalf. Needless to say when his results arrived, he’d been downgraded. It was a day we would never forget, even if our brains were erased with mind rubbers. Which, funnily enough, was exactly what the Ofqual algorithm used had sort of done. Its result predictions for the majority of students have assumed that their brains would be erased of all the information necessary to get the grades their teachers fully expected.
Our Bradley told me that 82% of his school’s A-level teacher predictions were downgraded. “Disgraceful,” I told him. “That’s almost three-quarters!”
He didn’t appreciate the joke. Jeez, lighten up kidda. It’s not as if your future depends on these results… ah!
Of course, the results do matter. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to produce my A-level Art certificate. Not because it was the gateway result to a fantastic career in the creative industries, but because my family likes to laugh at my grade D. Tough love, you see.
My youngest son, Isaac, has been spared the algorithm rod after a particularly slow U-turn by the Government on GCSE gradings. Let’s see what tomorrow brings…
While we were away, the big news in Germany wasn’t exams, or the Covid pandemic, but a wild boar that stole a laptop from a man in a nudist colony.
A picture went viral of the boar racing through the nudist camp with the device in its gob while being chased by a naked man as crowds looked on in amazement. I like to think of the story as a metaphor for the Government’s handling of, well, most things. According to the report, the naked man successfully retrieved his laptop and returned to the nudist camp to a round of applause. A brilliant story, though I suspect that wasn’t a round of applause, merely the sound of the watching nudists sitting back down.