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Comment by weego | Hacker News Reader

Of course children have been hurt by this is practice, there are numerous cases of children getting down graded from their predicted results so badly they're having University offer places withdrawn, and it's not by a point or two, we're talking straight A students getting demotd to Ds across the board because their school has a history of bad results,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.

Oxford have decided to ignore results and honor previously given offers because the process is so untrustworthy.

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To clarify this - as far as I've seen, so far, 3 of the 45 Oxford colleges/PPHs (Worcester, Wadham, and St Edmund Hall) are accepting all offer-holders regardless of results.

(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.)

> 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.

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.

>Of course children have been hurt by this is practice, there are numerous cases of children getting down graded from their predicted results so badly they're having University offer places withdrawn

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.

Marks aren't awarded by the school per se, they're awarded by one of the agencies such as AQA. This results in a lot of angry and upset teachers as the marks just received are a surprise to them too.

The Scottish government SQA has already backed down on its "adjustment" and agreed to use estimated marks from teachers and mock exams.

>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.

Disappointment on results day is par for the course. Grades awarded this year were higher than last year across the board, so it can't be argued that the system was unreasonably harsh. The centre-assessed grades provided by schools and colleges were unrealistically ambitious, so if they were taken at face value we would have seen an unprecedented level of grade inflation.

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.

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