The exam shambles
In a humiliating climbdown, the Government announced on Monday that A-level and GCSE pupils in England would, after all, be able to claim the grades predicted by teachers for the exams they couldn’t sit this summer. The move, which brought England’s policy into line with that of the other nations of the UK, followed days of angry protests over a ministerial decision to allow an algorithm developed by Ofqual, the exam regulator, to “moderate” teacher-assessed grades. The use of the algorithm, based heavily on schools’ past performance, led to 40% of last week’s A-level results in England being downgraded. Large state schools were worse affected than smaller private institutions.
The Education Secretary Gavin Williamson had insisted on Saturday that there would be “no U-turn, no change”. But he came under mounting pressure from students, schools and Tory backbenchers, who claimed he had lost the confidence of teachers and should resign. He said he had changed his mind after realising there were “too many anomalies” in the algorithmic results, and said he was “incredibly sorry for the distress” caused to pupils.
What the editorials said
What a fiasco, said the FT. The desire of ministers to moderate teacher assessments in order to keep a lid on grade inflation was understandable. Whereas 25.5% of A-level pupils got A* and A grades in 2019, teachers predicted that 37.7% would this year – a sizeable jump. But the algorithm was unfair. Had it been used to flag up odd results needing investigation, it might have worked, said The Guardian. Instead, it apportioned grades arbitrarily to fit pre-existing patterns. Worse, by lending more weight to teachers’ predictions in the case of small classes, it stacked the odds in favour of private school pupils.
How the Government failed to anticipate this problem and do something about it earlier is a mystery, said The Times. It had nearly six months to “stress-test” the system. Ministers learnt nothing from the similar exam “debacle” in Scotland last week. They’ve belatedly put things right, but university applications are now in chaos as more candidates scrabble to get on courses. It apparently took an intervention by Boris Johnson, who interrupted his Scottish holiday for a conference call with Williamson, to bring this “shameful saga to an end”, said The Independent. The Education Secretary is clearly “out of his depth” .
What the commentators said
“Poor Gavin Williamson,” said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. “This year should have been his dream.” The A-level results delivered by the algorithm were an improvement on 2019’s, with 2% more A and A* grades; more British students than ever were set to go on to university, a record number of them from disadvantaged backgrounds. But these facts have all been forgotten in the row over the algorithm. Understandably so, said Tom Whipple in The Times. Ministers have fallen foul of the “ecological fallacy”: the error of making predictions about individuals on the basis of population data. They should have realised that basing pupils’ exam grades on past school performance would be “unfair to exceptional children in unexceptional schools”, and, conversely, “overly kind to unexceptional ones in exceptional schools”.
What this meant in practice, said Stephen Pollard in the Daily Express, was some unfortunate students who would have got an A or a B grade in an exam instead being randomly awarded a D, E or even a U by a computer. That this was done in the name of preventing grade inflation was ridiculous. Everyone, from pupils to employers and universities, knows that this year’s grades are something of a “fiction” owing to the unique circumstances. Erring on the side of generosity harms no one, but giving an A-grade student a C is “disastrous”. This affair is “a case study in how not to use algorithms in public policy”, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. The bottom line is that “you can’t generate exam results without exams”.
The A-level chaos has done great damage to the Tories’ image, said Rosa Prince in The Daily Telegraph. If you’re “a parent mopping the tears of a child whose dreams of attending university” have been shattered, or one of those many aggrieved pupils, this shambles will stick long in the memory. It has the potential to become another poll tax moment for the Tories, said William Hague in the same paper. To prevent that happening, ministers must learn from this mistake and prepare carefully for the reopening of schools in September, making sure that there are “no further unforeseen crises for pupils who have already lost crucial months of education”.
What next?
The Government this week lifted the cap on student numbers, to allow English universities to admit more students who initially missed out on places owing to their downgraded results. But vicechancellors warned that they wouldn’t have room to accommodate everyone, particularly given the need to abide by social distancing requirements. Medical and dentistry students face particular problems, as numbers on those courses remain strictly limited.
For students due to sit their A levels next year, says The Guardian, the fear is that their grades will look inferior, and that they’ll miss out on university places due to competition from students forced to defer this year.