Exam grades ‘to be protected’ this year

EXAM bosses are planning to step in if this year’s GCSE and A-level results in Wales appear to be dipping too far below 2019 pre-pandemic levels.

Qualifications Wales previously said it will not be giving automatic help for students this year to compensate for “lost learning”, as has happened since the pandemic, and is expecting grades to be lower this summer.

However, it has now confirmed that it will step in and “protect” grades if they appear to be set to plunge too far below pre-pandemic results.

The regulator said grade boundaries will be “protected” if they look too low compared to results before exams were first cancelled in summer 2020.

“For general qualifications this year, we’ll closely monitor [exam board] WJEC as they determine grade boundaries. We know that the pandemic has had a long-term impact on learning for some, so there will be some protection to avoid results in individual subjects being well below pre-pandemic years, to provide a safety net if necessary,” a Qualifications Wales spokesperson said. Last week the regulator warned results would be worse this year.

GCSE exams start this week, with A-levels the week after in Wales.

For the past two years candidates and schools have been offered support to mitigate the effects of Covid closures and “lost learning” including some advance warning about topics.

Asked what “protection” would look like in practice, the regulator said: “The ‘protection’ will be applied, if necessary, during the awarding process, where WJEC brings together subject experts to form awarding committees. These committees set the grade boundaries for each exam or assessment in each subject.

“Statistics are used each year to support the awarding process, along with the committees’ views on learners’

performance in each exam or assessment. Statistics from previous years help to guide judgments around where grade boundaries should fall, to help maintain the value of learners’ grades.

“In any year, we see some variation in the grade boundaries that are set.

Exam papers vary in their level of difficulty from series to series, so some movement in grade boundaries makes it fairer for learners. It may be the case that in some subjects learners’ performance may not have fully recovered from disruption caused by the pandemic yet.

“So, this year, WJEC will implement additional protection as it sets grade boundaries in individual subjects.

“When considering all of the evidence available to the awarding committee, it will prioritise the statistical evidence that would lead to results similar to 2019 over examiner judgement where this would otherwise lead to results that would be substantially lower.

“However, that doesn’t mean that results in all subjects will be the same as they were in 2019 since other factors, like the cohort of learners taking each subject, can change what the national results look like.”

Asked to which subjects the “protection” would be applied, Qualifications Wales added: “This will depend

on learner performance.”

Candidates sitting WJEC exams in Wales for the past two years have had extra help, such as forewarning about which topic areas they would be asked about.

Exams were cancelled in 2020 and 2021 and results given based on teacher assessments, after public outcry when an algorithm downgraded hundreds of results.

Students in England saw a return to pre-pandemic exam arrangements this year and posted record-low results amid claims that it was unfair and too soon.

In Wales, A-level results fell overall last year compared to 2022 in the second summer of sat exams since 2019.

Top grades awarded dipped significantly, but were still higher than prepandemic with more than one in 10 results at the top A*-A grades.

A-level results for 2023 in Wales overall saw a 97.5% pass rate at grades A* to E compared with 98% in 2022 and almost exactly the same as the last pre-pandemic exam year in 2019 when the overall pass rate was 97.6%.

The percentage of entries graded at A or A* in 2023 was 34% compared to 40.9% in 2022.

At GCSE, the number of top grades awarded in Wales in 2023 dipped slightly, but results were still higher than pre-Covid.

In 2022, more than a quarter (25.1%) got an A* or A but that fell to 21.7% in 2023.