Hacker News Reader

Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

I can't find that data easily, if I'm bored tomorrow I might try to do the research myself - all the data is available but raw not top level overview at https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk/downlo...

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.

View on HN

I agree. It should be published.

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.

> Key facts: students are always ranked and graded on a curve. Student populations have a fixed number of grades awarded every year, etc.

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.

Starting with the 2010 introduction of the A* grade, the proportion of grades awarded has been almost constant (25% A/A*, 25% B, 25% C). This is in contrast to the consistent 'grade inflation' visible for the previous twenty years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#UK_A-Level_cla...

Isn't that due to the attempted curbing of grade inflation working well? As far as I know they haven't returned to actually grading on a curve ranking like they did decades ago, in theory if next year every student somehow handed in the perfect papers they'd all get top scores.

>Student populations have a fixed number of grades awarded every year, etc.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com