![]() This would probably see substantial reductions in the proportion of students getting top grades. ![]() There is also the all-important question of what to do next year: are this year’s grade distributions the right starting point, or should we be looking to return to something closer to the 2019 distributions? Is it possible to go back? And would we want to?Īssuming in-person exams are feasible next year, one possibility would be to return to 2019’s system as if nothing had happened. The much larger proportion of pupils getting As and A*s, at A-level, for example, may lead to universities relying more heavily on alternative methods of distinguishing between applicants – such as personal statements – which have been shown to entrench (dis)advantage. This year’s record high scores raise challenging questions. Differences between girls and boys have been particularly apparent this year, with girls seeing larger improvements than boys in performance compared with before the pandemic. Similarly, girls have been found to perform better at coursework, while boys do better at exams on average. Previous research has shown that Black Caribbean pupils are more likely than white pupils to receive a grade from their teacher that is below their score in an externally marked test taken at the same time. Using teacher assessment is likely to have disadvantaged some students relative to others. In short, it is unsurprising that grades based on teacher assessment are higher than those based on exams alone: while some have called this grade inflation, it may be more accurate to say that they are capturing different information.īut given they have been presented on the same scale, the stark increase in grades compared with pre-Covid times presents significant challenges for current and future cohorts.Įven making comparisons between pupils within the 2021 cohort may be challenging. This seems to have been particularly true at A-level, where grades have immediate consequences for university entry decisions. ![]() This year’s grades may also be capturing average or “best” performance across a range of pieces of work, rather than a snapshot from one or two exams. (I was among those who advocated a different approach, based on more flexible exams, in 2021.) This year’s approach has been rather more orderly than last year’s chaos, but the wide range of measures that teachers could consider – such as mock exams, in-class tests and coursework – inevitably led to variations in how schools assessed their pupils. But then the questions would come thick and fast: why are no students reaching the top grade, not even the best? Was the teaching somehow botched? Was the course under-resourced? Were the examinations misconducted? Were the marking criteria unreasonably ambitious? Were they made sufficiently clear to the cohort? These questions would come primarily not from the (notionally second-class) graduates but from panicking university administrators.To deal with this, the government chose an entirely different means of measuring performance: teacher assessments. If a cohort of 100 students one year produced no such performance, the principled result would be to award no firsts. To take an extreme, imagine a course that took a purist line and assessed its students only against an objectively, globally-acknowledged first-class standard. This debate about grade inflation also raises the broader debate of what university degrees actually mean: are they assessments against objective intellectual benchmarks, beyond the particulars of individual institutions or subjects? Or are they a classification of a given cohort of students in relation to one another? In reality, both of these factors are involved in classification, and in all but a handful of subjects they are inextricably linked.
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