Why did the A-level algorithm say no?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
1) "The year-on-year rise in proportion of students achieving A or A+ grades was much higher at independent schools than state comprehensives"
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/13/england-a-...
Essentially, students lucky enough to be in private education were more likely to see their grades go up / stay the same, compared to students receiving free education seeing grades going down.
Has been explained away as a byproduct of a sensible algorithm, but considering the government's track record and private school backgrounds (85% of the UK's Prime Ministers have been educated at Eton, arguably the country's most exclusive private school) it's hard not to be sceptical that this wasn't intentional and class-motivated.
2) "Appears that Ofqual's algorithm caused today's A-level chaos. Ofqual chair Roger Taylor, also chairs the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation (CDEI). Cummings' fave AI consultants - Faculty, have some juicy contracts with CDEI. And Faculty's COO Richard Sargeant is on CDEI board"
https://twitter.com/milesking10/status/1293886007771893762?s...
(Ofqual is the department that oversees exams and responsible for this situation, they report to Gavin Williams the government's Education Secretary. Cummings is a controversial special adverse to the Prime Minister, and Faculty is a firm he used when he was leading one of the two primary pro-Brexit campaigns before the referendum. Subjective statement: Cummings is a vile, evil man.)
It's incredibly easy "not to be sceptical".
The teacher's predicted grades are, on average, unprecedented. And represent many times greater than any previous yoy increase. This is far less true at top-performing schools where teachers are predicting far more consistent grades (by the very nature of being a top performing school).
Teachers shouldn't have been asked to predict grades. That's the heart of the problem. Not some harebrained in-public conspiracy.
This whole thing is dumb. And the media are deliberately failing to explain basic facts about the education system to provoke this kind of nonesense outrage.
But if you're going to put this system in place, with months of planning, you should make damn sure that it isn't massively favouring the children who are already advantaged in life. Which it statistically is, whether intentional or not.
They screwed it up so spectacularly that the education secretary had to make concessions to it two days before the results, then a day after the results Ofqual made a statement about who could appeal that contradicted the education secretary, before withdrawing that statement a few hours later saying they were still deciding.
So sure it could be entirely down to incompetence not malice. But given either is possible, and this government's track record of cronyism I don't see why it's unreasonable to be sceptical.
Independent schools generally have fewer students and a wider range of courses and predicted grades were inflated across the board, so they ended up with better grades than larger colleges and academies.
I'm not sure how you could have avoided this bias without creating a lot of really weird outcomes.
https://twitter.com/queenofswords6/status/129447148835198566...
> A levels...short thread
> If anyone doubts who the winners are this year, here's a random selection of independent schools and the % of A*-A grades this year.
> 2019 figures follow in brackets.
Mayfield Girls' 66% (55%)
Sherfield School 70% (37%)
Leweston School 51% (37%)
Farlington School 62% (48%)
The Marist School 55% (52%)
Godolphin School 50% (29.2%)
St Mary's Cambridge 54% (51%)
St George's Ascot 63% (35%)
Rye St Anthony 48.1% (18.3%)Universities in England are funded primarily by tuition fees. There are consistently more university places than applicants, but not necessarily at universities you'd want to attend.
[1] to understand this locution it may help to understand that there is also a breakaway technical college somewhere off in the fens...
Those children were already going to get the highest results.
There is no incompetence here. The predicted grades are a good estimate of what the results would have been.
The issue is that all teachers significantly over-predicted their students grades, but less so at high-performing schools. (Why? because the grades are more consistent at those schools, so there's less room for error).
The algorithm didn't keep the gap between paid and unpaid education, it expanded it.
(Source for these numbers and more in my first comment.)
I was lucky enough to not only go to two private schools, but the second one was ranked #1 in England for exam ranks 2 of the 3 years I was there (and helped me get good grades despite being extremely unmotivated and lazy). But at least my privilege was to be given a good education that made learning / passing exams (the latter more) easy, not that the government decided my school deserved an artificial grades boost compared to state schools.
If the previous YoY was also 5%/2%, then it is just repeating the trend.
It isnt the job of statisticians to "fix" social inequality by BSing some grades. Its their job to estimate likely exam results based on previous performance.
There's absolutely no grounds on which to assume that growth in A*/A across these demographics would be the same; and of course, very many reasons to presume they'd be different.
How could +5% possibly be an actual trend? What new magic teaching innovation have independent schools done for this year's cohort, that wasn't available in previous years or to teachers in the state sector?
Table 9-10: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
It's only been a couple of days, we'll get more data journalists breaking it down better soon.
You know what would be really helpful? If the algorithm was released to be publicly reviewed. Oh, but the government is refusing to do that, and Ofqual made anyone consulting on this project sign a 5 year NDA or they couldn't get involved. Hmm.
Edit: and while I'm pretty sure the data will show schools weren't on track for that inflation, actually no I disagree with you that it would be fair to extrapolate previous cohort improvements to this year's anyway.
However more important than the algorithm is just the media reporting on what ofqual actually say. I've barely read any of their actual analysis in news on the issue.
Key facts: students are always ranked and graded on a curve. Student populations have a fixed number of grades awarded every year, etc.
The system is specifically designed in recognition that grades are positional goods, ie., they are valuable only to the degree that other people do not have them.
That's the view of the education system every year. And its the basic assumption of this process. They will never over-award A grades specifically because they want universities/business/etc. to index them to a percentile performance in the population.
I'm pretty sure that's not correct, please find a source suggesting that. There have been major reforms (primarily the changing A Levels back from the modular version that Labour had previously introduced) and these were specifically aimed at reducing grade inflation. If there were a fixed number of grades each year there wouldn't be any inflation to counter.
Yes, for the national cohort. This is different, the predicted results were weighted on a per-school basis. For example, a particular child taking, say, a history exam, in a school which had previously had no pupils that achieved A* in history over the past four years had probably no chance of getting an A*, even if that was their teachers' prediction. Purely on the basis of which school they went to. A weak cohort (compared to previous years) at a good school would be upweighted.
> The issue is that all teachers significantly
> over-predicted their students grades,
> but less so at high-performing schools.
There are teachers in comprehensive schools that are tough-markers, too. My wife, who is a teacher in a London school, was annoyed in both directions - there were teachers that she felt had given away high grades, but there was also a teacher that had given the kids in her class grades lower than she expected they'd get (as her identity is tied to being overly careful and she liked to grade kids harder in mocks, etc).
What she felt was bad was that cohorts of kids were often very different year upon year. Last year there were particularly bright kids doing Physics in her school, but this year there was only a few kids and they were much worse. But the algorithm awarded them grades above what she expected.
There were also kids that she expects would have worked hard before their exams and gotten results above what they were given. They didn't get given the chance to do this.
In both state and private schools, teachers over-predicted. But higher-performing schools have higher and more uniform results, so there's less room to actually over predict -- so there's comparatively less reduction.
That's just an in-built concequence of what it means to be a high performing school
I don't believe in the media conspiracy that the Tories created an algorithm that systematically awards higher grades to rich kids because of inherent classism or even by accident.
But I do really disagree with the insistence that all teachers in comprehensive schools were conspiring to give their kids higher grades than they deserved -- this view was frequently repeated on social media. Even if there were some that were doing this and it was apparent from the statistics, teachers are not a homogenous group and there are many teachers that take fair grading very seriously and even take enjoyment in being tough markers.
I don't know the data but my own worry is that this will have hurt the high variance or lazy kids that won't normally get high grades but would normally settle down and revise hard for such an important exam. I hope that these kids will be given the opportunity to resit the exam for free, since I doubt an algorithm could capture the variance that exists every year.
I just read this article, and it was interesting.
The bit you haven't understood is that teacher predicted grades were reassessed by the algorithm unless the class sizes were 5 children or fewer. This meant that the predicted grades that were not adjusted by the algo were overwhelmingly at independent fee-paying schools.
The social and cultural factors at play are not well represented by just looking at the mean.
And finally, so what if 2020 had had outlier grade average? It's the outlier year.
Doesn't it? What else would how students have been ranked in ability mean?
> And finally, so what if 2020 had had outlier grade average? It's the outlier year.
"Hey, we'll give everyone 40% better grades, because it was a tough year" won't do good. You'll get lots of people into university who will fail miserably, because the grades don't magically improve their skills. Unless, and that's a bad idea as well, you just tighten the criteria so the same number as before can go to uni. Grade inflation won't help anyone either.
I doubt many parents would have been made aware of the precise meaning of 'mock' examinations results either.
The next question then, was whether this emergency scheme was tested against results from previous years, rather than fashioning the algorithm to match results from previous school years.
It's not as bad as you might think. A large number of students are rejecting their offers with the intention of re-applying in 2021 and there has been a substantial reduction in the number of foreign students, so there are an unprecedented number of surplus places available through clearing. Even if your grades are substantially worse than you might have hoped, your chances of getting a place on a decent course are very good.
What you realize is that the school's primary deliverable is acceptance into a university program.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the private schools were actively lobbying to deliver the best result to their customers.
Part of the problem is that teachers often push the "prediction" slightly higher as a means of motivating the student. Now those predictions are being used as the real deal.
I am pretty convinced that most teachers with more than superficial experience will be able to predict grades reasonably accurately, after doing so for many tens of students 5-6 times a year .
As a comparative reference, we'd expect an at-most, 3% increase in IQ in the general population.
That would be an improvement if your luck of the draw was national rather than biased in favour of private schools, but it's still a pretty awful outcome.
There may not have been any solution available that would be 100% fair to both this year and other year cohorts, but at the very least they should avoid making any student feel actively screwed over.
I don't think teachers, or anyone else, can reliably predict results. I got the equivalent of an A* in most of my of my AS exams, but because I had bad GCSEs my results were ranked down for my predicted grades to AAB. Only after complaining did they change them to AAA. In the event I got two A*'s and an A - a whole grade above all of my original predictions.
The entire system is asinine because there's no reliable way of predicting future results from past performance, because of the unfair discretion it gives teachers and schools, and because it demotivates students to achieve above their prediction (because they cannot be accepted by any course above that prediction). It should have been abolished long ago.
I'm glad you got the grades you wanted eventually, but the finger needs to be pointed in the correct direction.
Students in “private” schools get a better quality of education than those receiving “free” education. And it isn't free, we pay for it through taxation. And over here the “private” schools are called “public”. While the public schools are called comprehensive.
And yes, obviously the better education leads to better grades, but that's a completely different issue.
The point in my comment that you replied to is not that independent schools got better grades than state schools this year; it's that their % improvement from previous years to this year is way higher than non-independant schools % change from previous years.
Using teacher's predicted grades is stupid: teachers use predictions in whatever way they think will best motivate their students. If the student is lazy, they'll under-predict to shock them into revising more. If the student is not very confident, they'll over-predict to encourage them.
Unless the students are actually allowed to take an exam, all methods are unfair. Using mock results is at least tangentially related to the students' abilities.
It's absurd to think a central exam gives a more accurate picture of... What? Aptitude? Effort? ...? Than the teachers can have from working with students often for several years, seeing their work ethics, involvement in class, personal situations, etc.
In short: the system was broken and biased to begin with (at least in England, Scotland is doing much better). Now this bias and favour of 'better' schools is explicitly enforced through this weighting algorithm.
Whether or not you can achieve better outcomes or get a better indication of capability with other means, that total anonymity and an absolutely common hurdle is a kind of fair that is tough to match in assessment. It shouldn't be under-vauled. We should be sure that any alternative really is better.
Let's not pretend that teachers' aren't subject to unconscious bias. I've also met a few who were just horrible human beings who had no business being in teaching.
There is kind of just a problem overall with comparing private schools to state schools. At the very least this process may have worked better if they had two data sets, one for private one for atate schools.
Beyond that though a stastical solution was never going to work, you cannot generate accurate discrete/quantized data, only representative random data.
private schools imho teach you to pass the exam, they are more cut throat about focussing on this than state schools. and the teachers seem to fight harder for their kids - the difference in personal statements from private school teachers compared to state schools on uni applications would be an interesting study.
I am not saying i have answers, just intereted in thw discussion. Overall i am always left with a few basic ideas to keep things fair (though i sometimes think some of these may be dumb and i am not suggesting do all of them):
-Zero charitable status or governemnt support for private education.
-cap the number of students a uni can take from one school (e.g. dont take the top 100 students, take the top 1 from 100 schools)
-ban people who were not state educated from governemnt positions. This is contravertial but imho you effectively live a different life when you go to privare schools (class sizes, support and oppourtunity are in comparable)
Mocks on the other hand are graded with a view to provide the desired psychological effect (i.e. either as a boost or a kick up the rear). So mock results may well be less fair. This is coming from my partner who is a secondary school teacher.
As always, the question when using an algorithm or test is, 'compared to what?'
One possible solution could have been if they do the same statistical estimation game and then offer a choice to each student: you can take your estimated grades or go for an exam. If you take the exam you get what you het there. It might go lower or higher than the estimate. This would have incentivised that only those who are certain of themselves and their estimated grades are insuficient towards their goals will go for the tests. And since these are outliers already there will be a lot less of them than the general population, thus it is easier to organise socially distanced exams for them.
Of course nothing is easy at scale and many details need to be ironed out but thats what we keep the Miniszry of Education for.
My point is that there are solutions other than “everyone sit exams as usual” and “everyone gets an estimated grade”.
But about the algorithm, it seems to be an impossible task. You cannot satisfy the requirement of the gross statistics being roughly the same, ie little grade inflation on average, while also identifying talented individuals.
The outline of the algorithm seems to be that you basically take the gross stats for earlier years from a school, and then you take the teacher's guesses about who will do well, and make up a distribution of grades around that. This is probably what most people would do if forced into such an exercise. And you can add wrinkles to it like a bit of grade inflation, adjustment for overconfident predictions, and so on.
But you can't get that piece of information that you really need, which is a mix of signal and noise about the true distribution of the kid's abilities. If you have a talented year in a low performing school, you'll never know. And vice versa.
The year before I finished the IB, two kids got the top 45/45. That's normally achieved by something like 1/400 kids worldwide, and it was a class of maybe 30 kids. That would never have been awarded without examinations.
In addition the other presumed goal, of having the grades as close to the predictions as possible, give the algo designer an incentive well known from machine learning: guess safely. Squish the distribution on the edges, that way you're not off much. This is bad for people who shoud be getting As, because many will get Bs. And it's good on the other end, though I don't know where the lump ends (C or D?).
> ...is awful at achieving a fair system [...] because schools are so stratified - by design of funding rules etc.
I'd say it was more down to the culture of parents in the poor areas mostly not giving a shit about their kid's education (and the roots of that aren't that the parents are intrinsically bad, it's a mindset of apathy inherited from their parents and the daily pressures that come with permanently worrying about money).
That said I also believe that the current UK government is far beyond any benefit of a doubt in terms of competence and maliciousnes.
But OMG the competence of the UK govt. It's like they literally can't do... anything without screwing it up. It is bizarre. Then they try to paper over it with words.
"I'd say it was more down to the culture of parents in the poor areas mostly not giving a shit about their kid's education"
Which sounds nasty, but rings true for a big part of England. It's also an uncomfortable truth, which basically always leads to downvotes.
Once a year (safe for this year, obviously) I'm in Blackpool at the Rebellion Punk Festival[1]. What you see in Blackpool and how people live there is very, very different from the impression you get when just visiting London.
People wouldn't believe how poor and destitute some areas in the UK are and the priority of a lot of people in such areas is not really education. Young women want as many kids as possible, since government benefits beat the shitty work prospects they have in such areas and the future for young people in general in those places are so bleak that it often leads to an understandable "why bother?" attitude.
And yes, this attitude is inherited, or actually worse. When there is a rare young person trying to be an achiever you can almost be sure he's mocked and bullied by his peers.
> rare young person trying to be an achiever you can almost be sure he's mocked and bullied by his peers
Yes. Someone on the web (maybe here, maybe slashdot) said that when someone tries, they're seen as trying to get above their station. Consequences follow.
I spent a couple of years on a sink estate in the UK as a kid. I know what it does to people.
###################
I've spent the last two days dealing with very upset young people who have had their plans ripped up. Some will still be able to go to university, but not the one they planned on and have been forced into clearing, some won't be able to go at all.
So the story behind this is as follows.
Teachers at colleges and schools submitted grades to exam boards earlier in the summer based on their predictions as to how students would do in exams they would not take due to C19. The exam boards then mauled these with an algorithm.
Our current understanding is that subject cohorts of less than 10 have not had the algorithm applied and 15-20 only slightly. Most private and many small Sixth forms in schools fall in to this category, (note this is students in a subject at a provider not total numbers at that provider)
Some centre assessed grades (CAGs) will have been assigned optomistically (inflated) by teachers in an attempt to advantage them and their students but the vast majority will have been genuine assessments based on submitted work and teacher experience. They had no idea just how much adjustment would be applied, I'm sure if they had them they might not have been quite so honest!
[Edit: a colleague has pointed out that sometimes predicted grades are higher than achieved because there are unanticipated issues very close to exams such as illness, bereavement a stress which are not evident in year. This cannot be predicted by teachers and compensated for in advance, although many schools will have tried to adjust for students who experienced issues in year]
To compensate for this small amount of ingrained optimisation and unpredictability the exam boards have moderated down larger schools CAGs (but not the smaller cohorts). This includes many sixth form colleges with thousands of exam entries.
Sixth form colleges and larger sixth forms are very good at estimating grades and have been extremely thorough in their efforts to assign realistic grades. Our own teachers spent weeks compiling grades from previous work and tests to get the most accurate assessment they could. No one wanted their students to miss out, no one underestimated their CAGs.
The exam boards were not going to stand for a big increase in grades this year so they applied an aggressive algorithm to the larger subject cohorts. Our college for example has hundreds of A level maths students which makes us a target for harsh moderation despite having increadable value added and a history of very accurate (not over inflated) predictions; vast numbers of our students have seen their grades dropped by one or two grade boundaries, I have only seen one moderated up.
Many of our students have missed out on university places. Despite positive news stories about one Oxbridge University College most universities have not moderated their offers in light of this crisis and many students at private schools will have been able to swoop in on those places and adjust upwards to higher tarrif courses.
Now, whether you think this is a government fix up or not; it is not fair on poorer students at bigger schools and coincidentally some more 'privileged' students have been given another leg up.
Talk to your MP talk about it on social media and lobby to get this fixed because it's going to mess up a lot of young people's futures. These young people are now voters and I hope they will be registering their concern with their local MPs which may motivate them to put pressure on the minister and in turn the exam boards
If you think this was a fiasco then hold on tight because next weeks GCSE results will be based on less information and are likely to be even more skewed! We will hit a second crisis of students not being able to access A levels and colleges having to juggle the same situation as universities are this week. Many GCSE students will be awarded grades which either over inflate or under play their ability. Many will lose an A level place and others will end up on courses which they are 'qualified' for but are overwhelmingly too hard for them, causing distress and self esteem issues. This is on top of the emerging increase in youth mental health issues due to C19 and the lockdown.
If you feel the government's last minute addition of the 'tripple lock' and free appeals makes everything OK then I have disappointing news for you. Mock exams are internally administered in a variety of different ways. Allowing the use of mocks rather than CAGs will lead to even more disparity. September exams for students, out of education and in lock down for 6 months with no access to resources and who thought they had finished their A levels? I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about whether that will be helpful.
We in education will continue, we will pick up the pieces, we will do everything we can to make sure these young people have the best outcomes they can.
###################
I wonder if the effects are visible when comparing allocation of spots vs past years. Or is that what they are optimizing for? To achieve the same allocation across feeder schools as the year before?
You're right, and that's what is happening this year. Straight A students that had solid offers from major universities have found themselves with Bs, and seen those places vanish in the mist.
Stupidly, if they just accepted this year as a weird year where everyone did a better than normal, it would be less negatively impactful than what they've opted for.
Even worse, this was literally what Scotland just went through a few weeks ago. There's just no excuse for it.
But yeah, why would you bother learning when you can just make the same mistake?
1. Teachers submit both an estimated grade and a relative rank ordering for each student
2. Ofqual calculate a distribution based on the predicted grades
3. They compare it to grade distributions at that school from previous years
4. If need be, they shift the distribution up or down to be roughly in line with that school's prior results
5. They then use the rank ordering to assign students grades from that distribution (e.g. in a class with 20 students, each student is worth 5% of the distribution - so if it predicted 10% A* (highest grade), 15% A, etc., the top 2 students would get an A*, the next 3 an A and so on)
Here is the 319 page document published on results day. This is the totality of the current description of the 'algorithm'. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
There's some kind of predictive linear model (page 40) which is based on a student's prior attainment (i.e. GCSE and SATs 'data'), but then modelled at the level of the exam centre (i.e. school). These models are separately fitted for different bins (I think ten are shown at one point) of achievement.
The whole document is pretty incoherent. I suspect the 'algorithm' is a set of excel spreadsheets.
I expect many more to follow, so it's possible that the universities will clear up an awful lot of that mess - but while some academics are saying yes great bring them all in, others are strongly against the idea of expanding to let more people in this year.
As to whether they're significant apart from for UCAS applications (university) - I'm not too sure. Personally I wouldn't care much about them on a CV of someone I was thinking of hiring in the best of years yet alone if I knew their results came from 2020.
But with unemployment rising fast, and much worse soon once government gradually removes support offered over the summer to keep people furloughed (companies paid to have their staff not working but kept officially on the payroll until they could get back to work), we've already heard stories in some places or a shop or a pub advertising a job offer and getting 1000+ applications... and in a terrible job market, school exam grades could likely be a decider for who gets called to interview for many working class jobs. (They already are even outside a terrible job market, that just amplifies it.)
edit: Oh, and while I don't know what proportion of people doing A Levels don't want to go to university (or want to go, but fail) - we're also a few days away from this same situation happening with the GCSE exams, which pretty much everyone legally has to do around age 16.
“there was no direct connection between an individual's prior achievement and their predicted grade.”
Who wrote this algorithm and can we see it?
"In 2019, 21% (31,220) of accepted 18 year old applicants met or exceeded their predicted grades, a decrease of 3 percentage points. In addition, 43.2% of accepted applicants had a difference of three or more A level grades – an increase of 5 percentage points (7,190 applicants more) since 2018."
Teacher predicted grades are almost useless.
Now Scotland has caved to political pressure and wants to inflate grades
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-537...
"However, these grades, taken overall, would represent a significant improvement on previous years - including a jump of 20 percentage points in the pass rate for pupils from the most deprived areas."
"If the results had purely been based on the estimates from teachers, pass rates at grades A-C would have increased by 10.4 percentage points for National 5, by 14 percentage points for Higher and by 13.4 percentage points for Advanced Higher.
These estimated results would have led to a higher annual change than had ever been seen before in Scottish exam results if they had not been moderated by the SQA."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53636296
A really difficult situation when what you have to work from is already inaccurate.
Pirsig would have something to say here.
(Modular and coursework based A levels were popular under labour but reverted by the Tories)
What a horrible situation where a whole year group are reliant on their teachers’ opinion of them and the success of other kids at the same school the previous year. Neither of which these children have any direct control over.
Low-performing students at private schools are having their estimated Cs and Ds bumped up to As. Stellar students at schools in poor areas who got As in their mock exams and have teacher-predicted As are being awarded Ds instead.
Do you have an example of this happening? It seems basically impossible from my understanding of the process.
-----
Edit: I think I understand how it can happen. A school with a cohort that is small, but large enough to get the algorithm, and a previously exemplary results, has an unusually bad pupil. I can see this happening in a subject like Further Maths where only good students take it
Fairness is a complicated thing. A lot of it is based on feeling and relative status, rather than some objective measure of well-being. One person might find it deeply unfair that another person has a lot of money, relatively speaking. But take that money away and redistribute it equally between the two and now the latter person may find the situation unfair.
No students performance should be a sum based on how previous students have done at their school. That's literally reinforcing the postcode divide in education quality that were supposed to turn a blind eye to.
My home town school has historically refused to even put children in for exams if they didn't get at least a C grade in their mocks because they valued league table position so highly (helps with investment and alumni donations etc). That cynical and should-be-illegal approach clearly benefits their students in this situation more than schools in the area that do right by their children.
And more than any of that, this is the real world effects of the bullshit algorithm peddlers have been pushing for the last few years. Algorithms can solve any real world problem given the data. Well they can't. They can give the proposition of an answer to the problem, but at costs to some that are too high to bear.
It is claimed that in any class where the chance of someone failing is judged to be > 0%, even if it is a tiny fraction of a percentage point, then the algorithm requires that someone in the class MUST be given a failing grade, even if it the weakest student in a very high performing class.
So is it? The guy is mining theoretical examples, but I wonder if in practice anyone has been hurt by this. And if they have (let's say a non-failing student was given a failing grade), why not handle those cases within a manual appeals process? After all, the exams weren't written, so no matter what mechanism you choose their will be students that get higher markers than they otherwise would have received and lower marker than they otherwise deserved - but I suspect, even in those cases, the marks will be in the same ballpark.
Oxford have decided to ignore results and honor previously given offers because the process is so untrustworthy.
(Oxford, along with Cambridge but unlike many universities, has the results of interviews and, for many subjects, admissions tests to assess to whom to offer a place. They make offers expecting that the vast majority of them will be met, rather than over-offering and expecting A-level results to prune the numbers significantly. In previous incarnations of the admissions system, candidates who passed the entrance exam and interview routinely got an offer of two Es, i.e. a formality. So, providing places to all offer-holders would not seem an unreasonable course of action in the circumstances.)
Notable exception to this would be Cambridge maths, who over-offer significantly for Mathematics (last year: 541 offers, 253 acceptances). Quite a lot of people miss their STEP offer so colleges can choose on results day who to take based on STEP, UMS, interview, etc. Though STEP unlike A-Levels was sat this year, so they're still able to do that selection.
Yes. I understand there will be cases like this, but what numbers are we talking about?
And you were never going to prevent circumstances like those.
>we're talking straight A students getting demotd to Ds across the board because their school has a history of bad results, which are irrelevant to any given student right now.
That's not irrelevant. Schools don't flip their standards from year or another. A bad school this year, will be a bad school next year. And many students are hurt by mark inflation. It isn't fair that one school will give out B, while another A+ for the same academic performance - and that certainly happens. There was a case in Canada some time ago where it came out that Universities were scoring high-schools based on performance of their alumni and normalizing the marks of new applicants based on those metrics. It was a small controversy, but what else are they going to do? The alternative is to assume that 'A' from one school is the same as 'A' from another - which is grossly unfair.
>Oxford have decided to ignore results and honor previously given offers because the process is so untrustworthy.
Good. Everyone understands that this is a weird time and everyone is trying their best. This is why this does not worry me one bit. I fully expect all schools that rely on these marks to be a little bit more understanding.
The Scottish government SQA has already backed down on its "adjustment" and agreed to use estimated marks from teachers and mock exams.
And you think that's more fair? Because to me that is a way worse method of ranking. Mark inflation exists and vary by school. That's a fact. Schools will low academic performance are more guilty of this because all schools and teachers will inevitably grade on a scale relative to other students in that school.
Listen, you can do whatever you want. The reality is that there are more applicants than there are seats at the universities. You can give everyone an 'A' and it won't change the fact that the same amount of students are going to get those spots. The method adopted by the Scottish government punishes students for going to schools and having teachers that don't inflate their marks.
As always, students who are unhappy with their results have the option of (re)-sitting their exams and re-applying for university; given the substantial uncertainty over whether universities will be able to offer anything like a normal level of teaching in the next academic year, deferring might be a sensible option regardless of results.
The scheme is flawed, as it clearly penalises some students, and benefits others. And many are rightfully outraged by that.
So yes. 'Controversial', I think.
In the big picture, the good students are going to get good markers, average students are going to get average markets, and bad students will get bad markets. Again, it is what it is.
>"bad" schools get bad marks.
Why the quotes? There are schools that are at the bottom of academic rankings. That's a fact of reality.
>students are finding their grades marked down, almost regardless of their performance.
What numbers are we talking about here? No matter what algorithm or heuristic they chose, some unfairness was going to happen and my argument is that these cases are overstated. I'm sure they exist because we're talking about hundreds of thousands of students all in different circumstances. Having said that, in cases of egregious outcome, an appeals process would make sense. Also I'm sure many universities will take the pandemic into consideration and the fact that this was a best attempt at replicating standardizing test result without a test actually being taken.
In my year, I and one other student had to go significantly beyond the support provided to get the grades we needed. I studied one A-Level entirely outside school as they couldn't make the timetable work, and then added another to be done in a year (typically a two year course) because my school had given me bad advice about which were required. If it were this year, and my school were known for overpmarking, I'd face getting downgraded for something I had no control over. I was predicted, and needed, the top grades (AAA) in specific subjects, and even dropping to AAB would mean not getting into my university of choice. It can be a kick in the teeth for anyone who has put the extra effort in.
The minister of education's reason for downgrading the grades was so that pupils did not end up in jobs they were not capable of doing. Delicious irony.
Fake news, sorry. https://fullfact.org/education/gavin-williamson-fake-quote/
Solidarity clearly means nothing here.
Look, nothing I've seen here changes the base fact that if you were a good students getting good grades, you are going to be OK.
It also doesn't change the base fact that mark inflation exits. That some schools will grade higher than others for the same academic performance.
So no, you don't have a 'right' to a mark you haven't earned. If you had weak course marks in a school that inflates marks, you don't get to the spot of another student that worked hard during the term and was in a school that did not inflate marks.
I have yet to see a good argument that this model is bad (and it may be), or percentage of students have gotten a grade that is out of line with expectations. Also, I do support an appeals process for the cases where the algorithm just got it completely wrong.
>I was at best average in secondary school and I had to kick it up a few notch for the national exams (Portuguese A-level equivalent)
If you were a bad students, or a student on some margin, you were always going to rely on luck to get through. What if the the set of questions on the standardized test just so happen to coincide with areas you were weak in? I was in situations where I had a weak grasp on course material, but the exam just so happened to have questions in areas that I was strong in and I got a higher mark than I probably deserved. It happens. But again, things just average themselves out over time and students will end up where they 'deserve' to be.
>Under your "meh" style, I'd have lost at least a year before I'd be able to enroll in un
I'll play along. Let's say you had weak course marks and you were hoping to use the test to boost your final score to get into the school of your choice. Then covid happened and you weren't able to. Well... take that as important life lesson. Don't slack off until the end and hope that you can make up your grades with the exams.
I'm not sure why what you mean by "weak course marks" - something like A-Level Maths is assessed entirely in exams at the end of the two year period. There's no formal assessment prior to that.
> If you had weak course marks in a school that inflates marks, you don't get to the spot of another student that worked hard during the term and was in a school that did not inflate marks.
Alternatively, if you _did_ work hard, but it's assumed that your predicted grades have been inflated, you face getting knocked down through no fault of your own. I also query the notion that you can reliably know which schools get predicted grades wrong. Teachers, and teaching methods, change every year - the people making the predictions are not necessarily the same year to year.
Mark inflation is a real thing by the way. You can ignore it and assume all teacher-assigned markers across the country are roughly the same, but then you will punish those pupils who come from school where the standards are higher and higher grades are harder to get. Is that fair?
>I also query the notion that you can reliably know which schools get predicted grades wrong.
That's actually not very hard to do. There was a minor controversy a few back in Canada where a number universities were found out to have correlated the marks students got in university with the marks they got from the specific high school they came from. They had that kind of historical data on every local high-school. They then normalized those marks. People got offended but without provincial standardized testing and grading, you're just going to punish schools with highest academic standards.
>Teachers, and teaching methods, change every year - the people making the predictions are not necessarily the same year to year.
I agree it changes. I disagree it changes every year, especially in aggregate. A low performing academic school this year is going to be a low performing academic school next year. Maybe in 5 years it will be different, but year over year, the changes are going to be inconsequential.