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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

If some students would prefer to take exams and some not, it seems obvious to let only those students who want take the exams. Propose the model’s grades to the student. If they accept it, you’re done, if they refuse then let them do an exam. Likely 80% or more of students would accept the proposed grades and it would make it doable to organize socially distanced exams for the rest.

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Students will only opt to take the exam if they think that doing so will improve their grade. The end result would be grade inflation.

An update: they're now going with a scheme whereby students get to keep the better of the two grades given by two different methods, with teachers' predictions on the one hand, and the 'standardisation' system on the other.

Presumably this will lead to grade inflation.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53810655

See also Wales seeming being the first to switch to this approach: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53807854

Yes, it will lead to grade inflation. The important question is: does that matter? Exams already have their flaws such as being far more likely to give a flawed bad grade to someone than a flawed good grade. How much grade inflation would you see purely from eliminating that effect? And that would largely be desirable.

There are exams taking place in the Autumn, so this is kind of what is happening.

That’s too late for university admissions this cycle, and next year’s Oxbridge admissions cycle will be a nightmare given the large number of reapplicants. It’d have been necessary to use the time saved in not having to mark exams to run the algorithm early.

They will have missed this cycle of admissions, and not all students have the luxury of taking a gap year. The students have also missed a term of tuition, and so have probably not covered the course material necessary to pass or do well in autumn.

Children/adults in care (people without families that can support them) might not be eligible for support for another year, and will often be expected to go out and work to support themselves. Poor families often rely on the extra financial support that ends with "finishing" education.

There are a lot of stories out there of children/young adults in exactly this situtation that should be off to skilled work training or university that might end up having their entire education wrecked over this despite being able academically. And this is all with the context that private school students often have not been subject to any "standardisation" process due to their small class sizes, or have had their awards upgraded above predicted grades.

We just need to give this year a free pass in much the same way as workers have been given a free pass with the furlough scheme. We can live with one year of inflated results.

Its a particularly bad time for students not being able to take a gap year as well - traveling is pretty much of the cards for those who would have otherwise have done that, and for those who would have spent the year working they're being thrown into that amongst the highest unemployment rates in decades, and up against people who have extensive experience doing the sort of jobs they'd be applying for.

Exams are already "social distanced". That was never an issue! Has everybody forgotten what exams are like?

It wasn't just about the exams; students missed out on months of teaching, which would have put them at a huge disadvantage if they were then expected to sit the originally-planned exams.

So we'd need exams tailored to just the part of the curriculum that the students have actually covered -- which would be different for each school, making any kind of standardisation impossible.

Another thing people don't seem to be considering is the knock-on effect on universities, which -- if students who didn't complete the A-level course are given a hypothetical grade, whether based on teachers' predictions or modified exams or "mocks" or whatever -- will get an intake of students who are less well prepared than normal, and will need some kind of remedial support if they're not going to flounder in their degree courses.

Just giving students generous grades now, to calm the current storm, means storing up trouble for the future when university teaching staff are faced with a cohort that includes students who shouldn't be there and can't cope -- but their teachers gave over-generous estimates -- or who in principle should be OK but arrived woefully under-prepared because they missed a bunch of key A-level content.

I agree with most of the points you're making, but I do not think that the exams would need to be tailored to just the part of the curriculum that the students have actually covered.

If one student does not know key parts of the curriculum and the other does, then this should be reflected in the grade no matter what caused that difference, whether one of them got more schooling or studied on their own or took some out-of-school tutoring.

And if a diligent student who got all A's before missed out on key parts of the curriculum that's required for further study, then the final grade should reflect that they do not (yet) know the subject as expected and are going to need remedial support, i.e. their final grade should not be an A, the exam should ask for the expected content (no matter if it was not covered in school due to Covid) and the exam results and grade should illustrate whether the students have learned it otherwise or if there's a gap.

I'm inclined to agree, in principle, but this would mean that many students would end up with a lower grade than they could expect to have achieved normally. This would particularly apply to less-advantaged students whose schools and/or families have been less able to fill in the gap.

While that'd result in grades that would be far more meaningful than any of what's currently being done -- and universities, employers, etc would just have to take account of the special circumstances surrounding 2020 results when making admission/employment decisions -- I don't think it's politically tenable.

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