SQA moderation of exam results nothing but a political points-scoring farce

I note the furore over the Scottish Qualifications Authority’s moderation of exam results this year which resulted in a ‘downgrading’ for many pupils.

My wife has worked as a teacher in an Edinburgh secondary school for the past 13 years and, as with the rest of the staff in her department, submitted their estimates of pupils’ performance to the school management a number of months ago.

This was realistic and based on both prelim performance and classwork; however, her school’s senior management were unhappy with these estimates and asked staff to revise them upwards on a further three separate occasions!

The school’s senior management openly acknowledged that this was a game that every school in Scotland would be playing, with the understanding that the SQA would downgrade results to more realistic levels. The hope was that if my wife’s school could push the boundaries that bit further that the school would still benefit overall despite the inevitable downgrading.

By the time the final (fourth) set of estimated grades were submitted by the school to the SQA, most staff believed them to be a vastly over-optimistic work of fiction. Now that disappointed pupils and their parents are complaining, those same teachers are passing the buck on to the SQA for going against their ‘professional judgment’.

The whole situation is a political points-scoring farce. Instead of awarding pupils an exam grade, the certificates should have given them a ‘corona estimate’. Either that or pupils return to sit the proper exam next year.

Can you imagine a lorry driver or crane operator being given a licence on the basis that they were getting on OK during the first 75 per cent of their training?

Neither can I, but it seems that youngsters can expect to gain entry to medical school based on this premise.

PAUL DICK Wakefield Avenue, Edinburgh

As a retired Scottish secondary teacher, may I convey my distress at the destructive, blind moderation policy of the SQA during the crisis we are all currently enduring.

The lockdown was triggered at a point when Scottish pupils had covered the vast majority of their course work. Teachers already had a good measure of their pupils’ potential. All that remained was the focused revision period and it is a wellknown fact that this produces radical improvements in a huge number of grades.

By following some misguided principle, the SQA has managed to both denigrate the professionalism of their highly qualified teaching force and destroy the trust and ambition of a generation of Scottish pupils.

JILL CHALMERS Munro Drive, Edinburgh