THIS HASTY SOLUTION IS STILL NOT A TRUE TEST OF ABILITY

JOHN Swinney took the easiest way out of the exams fiasco yesterday. He simply proclaimed that it had never happened. That may work politically. But whether it is satisfactory from an educational point of view must be seriously doubted.

There will be relief by thousands of young people that they have not suffered the indignity of being labelled by their school’s history. It was not their fault that they were landed in this mess in the first place.

It is not their fault now that the Scottish Government’s attempt at a solution is flawed educationally.

This argument is now not about young people but about the system.

The core of the issue facing the Scottish Government before yesterday was how to be fair to each individual student. That’s crucial. Any system of assessment is about individuals. Not their school, not their teachers, not even their families. It’s about each student’s knowledge and skills.

What was deeply unfair about the original SQA grades was the fact that students were not being judged as individuals.

YET what Mr Swinney has now done is overturn the SQA’s grades by an equally crude judgment in the other direction. He has decreed that every teacher in every school has impeccable judgment.

Perhaps they do. But the problem is that we don’t know, because there is no evidence to prove that either way. The original grades have been reversed by a decision as sweeping and lacking in evidence as the algorithm that gave the grades in the first place.

The reason to be worried is that we know from lots of research evidence that we are all, as teachers, not very good at predicting the grades of our own students. That’s why we have external checking. That’s what quality control is all about.

This is as true of university teachers as of anyone else. My grades are checked every year by people from other universities, and other parts of my own university. We know from the SQA’s own figures that school teachers in normal years get only about one half of predictions right.

In fact, according to the SQA, teachers normally underestimate their pupils’ likely attainment.

No one has yet explained why, in contrast, teachers this year seemed far more optimistic.

Perhaps, like Mr Swinney in parliament yesterday, they wanted to be kind to people in the midst of coronavirus.

That’s humanly understandable. But it’s not education.

There are other things that the SQA could have done to deal with the problems. They could have said that teacher predictions which were based on prelim exams would have stood, and that the SQA would do some light-touch quality assurance on each school’s standards in the prelims.

That approach would have respected students’ own work. It would have trusted the essence of teacher judgment. And it would have applied proper professional standards to everyone.

In some disputed cases, the SQA could have marked students’ coursework that had already been submitted to them before schools closed in March.

These moves would have left a remainder of difficult cases that would have had to go through the appeals process. Teachers would then have had to submit other evidence in support of grades, and the quality of it would then have been assessed in the usual way with appeals.

None this would have been easy. None would have solved the political problem with the magic wand that was waved yesterday. But at least some semblance of respecting the individuality of each student’s attainment would have been maintained.

So what happens now? The immediate future is to prepare colleges and universities for many entrants who do not, in reality – despite their ostensible grades – have the necessary preparation.

Something good may come of this. It might force universities, especially, to pay attention to the quality of their first-year teaching, and to give students more than a few hours a week of contact with lecturers. That’s long overdue, for every university student.

BUT, for the future, the task now is to rediscover why exams are fundamental to any system of fair assessment. Exams are not an arbitrary imposition on young people’s imagination, despite some of the wilder rhetoric we have heard during the past week. Exams were invented as a way of being fair.

The problem with all our judgment is that we can readily be biased. We can underestimate the shy student who says nothing but learns a lot. We too readily judge people by their accents, or their sex, or the colour of their skin.

Exams, historically, have been the great liberator. They have enabled millions to escape unfair judgments of these kinds. Mr Swinney insisted yesterday that his decision was not a precedent. We have to hope that he is right.