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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.