Too many students, too few spots
The calls to Newcastle University started early this week, flooding in at the rate of 1,500 in a day. At Reading University, staff were forced to set up a makeshift phone bank in the library. Durham University, facing overwhelming demand for places in September’s freshman class, offered a cash reward to some young people if they deferred their education for a year.
Across Britain, colleges have been scrambling to deal with the fallout from a debacle over examination grading that plunged the world of education into turmoil.
When the coronavirus pandemic made traditional testing impossible for A-levels — the qualifications that decide college entrance in England and Wales — a temporary grading system was put together in England using an algorithm to predict what results individual students would have achieved.
But that lowered around 40% of estimated grades, hitting students from poorer families especially hard and prompting such an outcry that the system was scrapped Monday in favor of assessments made by teachers. Separate systems in Scotland and Wales have undergone similar retreats.
While the shift was widely welcomed, it left universities with a problem. In the British system, young people list their preferred colleges and are offered places on the condition that they attain specific grades in their final school exams.
Suddenly, thousands of students who had been rejected under one set of scores were clamoring for what they regarded as their rightful university places under a second, higher set. More selective colleges found themselves with too many acceptances, while the less selective risked having too few.
“I have never seen anything like this,” said Professor Julie Sanders, a senior manager at Newcastle University, who described a situation she would once have thought “totally unimaginable,” as overworked staffers fielded calls, their morale maintained by supplies of ice cream.
For students caught up in the confusion, recent days have been like riding an academic roller coaster. “Students had dreamed of being here, and they felt that was slipping away before their eyes,” Sanders said. Then the despair for some turned to relief and, shortly thereafter, confusion.
The crisis has underscored the country’s reliance on a narrow examination system that shapes the future of many young people by deciding whether they can enter the university of their choice.
And it has hit home at a moment of unusual disquiet. “For many families, it compounds all the other uncertainties the U.K. is facing,” said Professor Mark Fellowes, a senior manager at Reading University. “There is COVID, and people trying to adapt to that. And there is a recession around the corner, with worries about whether people will have jobs. It has added another layer of uncertainty.”
The politician responsible for the confusion in England is the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, who initially did not want to accept grades estimated by teachers because experience suggested that such judgments were overly optimistic.
Williamson instructed the exam regulator, Ofqual, to create a system that protected against “grade inflation” by adjusting teachers’ predictions to reflect the past performance of their schools. Teachers’ assessments of those in smaller classes were given more weight, but that helped fee-paying schools with better resources, and it tilted the system against some bright pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The chaos deepened as Williamson insisted he would not change course only to be forced to do exactly that by a fierce backlash.
“They didn’t understand until too late how people would feel, and that this tapped into a real sense of unfairness,” said Judith Judd, a former editor of The Times Educational Supplement and former chairwoman of the governing body of Essex University.
And universities already were facing serious problems before this turbulence. Many rely heavily on tuition fees from international students, who may be deterred from traveling by the coronavirus, while also facing extra costs as they implement new physical distancing rules.
One recent report suggested that as many as 13 were in danger of bankruptcy, although it did not name them.