To think that the government did this on purpose

[therhubarbbrothers]

The A level results fiasco seemed to penalise bright children from disadvantaged schools. Aibu to think the government knew that this would happen but saw it as acceptable ?

I think it was a massive cock up, not a conspiracy.

So many mistakes made - teachers not given better guidance on how to allocate their CAGs to avoid massive inflation in the first place (e.g. when to round down or up grades).
The problems with force-fitting of previous cohort distributions should have been spotted earlier and mitigated where the lowest 2020 CAG was much higher.
I have a feeling this whole shambles will make a fabulous case study for Computer Science and Ethics courses in years to come!

@JuniperFather

No they didn't do it "on purpose. It's easy to look for conspiracy theories when the truth is so preposterous and it's hard to envisage how someone could have got things so wrong.

With this Government though, their modus operandi seems to be

• Can we prevaricate and delay any decision making as long as possible?
• Can we test a soft policy through the media and see what the reaction would be, and "focus-group" it instead of using our judgement?
• Is there an outside agency or body we can use as the fall guy for any of this?
• Can we make money out of any of this by generating wealth in the private sector using agency support?
• Never mind a pandemic and the need for extraordinary decisions for these circumstances - how can we spin this so it serves the interests of the voter groups represented by Mail readers?

This sums it up

OP, do you think the Scottish and Welsh govts did it on purpose too?

I read a good book about maths in society, the utter power of those who write the algorithms, and how most of the time we don't even realise how much that controls us.

This utter fiasco is bound to be cock up. Even the private/state school divide.

The bit I've not seen answered anywhere though is: if they found overgrading in a subject at a school, did they get back to the school and sample the evidence? And adjust only in light of it - ie use an algorithm to determine potential grade inflation, and then go in and moderate the areas properly (using the marking/moderating resource they recruit for every summer). If not, why not?

@Bluntness I don’t think it’s as simple as that , because whilst it may have been only 40% of grades that were downgraded it was a much higher % of candidates .

In ds school 26% of grades were downgraded but that equates to only about 5/100 having no adjustment at all; 95% of the 100 in his small sixth form. You only need one grade out of three/four to drop and you have lost your university offer . So yes the cases of spectacular drops were probably less common than the media likes to make out but the number of people affected was much larger.

The critical mistake was that Ofqual broke the link between the individual and the result and once they had done that the integrity of the whole system was brought into question.

In these uncertain times for parents the removal of opportunities for their children and actually just yet more bad news was almost the final straw. People are tired, worried, and uncertain having to cope with this incompetence affecting their children was too much . The constant backtracking and apologising because ‘it’s difficult’ is making people feel insecure we quite frankly don’t know what’s coming next and who to trust.

This worst thing is that this didn’t need to happen, yes it’s difficult but it was not, contrary to what the Government want you to believe, impossible. Other countries have managed it, but we have a Government who lack rigour. They see Government as a performance, they want us to believe that we don’t actually need experts etc but actually what the last few months have shown us is that you don’t need Government to be your friend or your entertainer. You need them to be competent to govern, to solve the difficult problems, to take the long view, to make difficult decisions and to understand the implications for the population of those decisions. The idea that the government had to concede to sixth formers with placards frankly makes them look ridiculous . Not because the sixth formers were wrong but because they allowed themselves to be put in this position.

When things go wrong, it's almost always incompetence rather than intent.

It's also never enough for just one group to be incompetent. Teachers are over predicting (in fairness, they were expecting an algorithm to level things out fairly), Ofqual are incapable of writing a decent algorithm and understanding the capacity of the data they had, the government are incapable of looking at the detail and seeing all the unintended consequences for this year group and the year groups to follow it.

It was sparked by Covid which is no-one's fault but it has to be said that many people have done their jobs badly to contribute to the sequence of events that comprise this particular cock-up. Mostly government though.

I don't think you could accuse them of doing anything on purpose.

Our Welsh Labour government did the same thing, so no, I don't think it's a big conspiracy created to benefit private school students

@Frazzled13

I don't think you could accuse them of doing anything on purpose.

Well I think Boris goes on holiday on purpose..........

Maybe the whole U Turn was pre planned in order to placate the nation but make universities and future employers have little faith in 2020 grades.
The way they’ve done it has only further degraded the work of, and faith in teachers. I’d say that was on purpose.

Bluntness- That’s not how the algorithm worked. Schools that stayed within the bounds of their previous performance were still marked down.

Take Imaginary Academy. Every year for the last 3 years IA has had 100 students studying Maths and every year their classes have had the same prior attainment. In 2017 10% got an A, in 2018 20% got an A and in 2019 30% got an A. Are you telling me that if they predicted 30% would get an A this year they over-inflated? That the 10 students that the algorithm would have put down a grade deserved to be put down? What about if they predicted 35% A... that doesn’t seem unreasonable considering their pattern of improvement. Would the 15 students taken down a grade be due to overinflation by the school? Even if the school had tried to be really cautious and put 25% down for As, less than they had last year, they’d still have had 5 students marked down, is that their fault for trying to play the system and cheat extra As for their kids?. Just because the algorithm gave out the right amount of each grade nationally doesn’t mean it gave the right grades to the right students.

I was actually all for the standardisation. It could have been done. They should have generated a confidence interval range for each school and left teacher predictions alone as long as they fell within range. It would have led to more grade inflation than the algorithm they applied but would have been fairer and only marked down schools that were out of range. What you have to remember is that teacher predictions were done a month before the exams without the teachers seeing their final exam papers. It’s easy to be scathing about teacher predictions being wrong but Ofqual has in the past admitted that they can’t guarantee that they are giving out the right grades even after marking their final papers and seeing who fucked up, who had a good day, who misread a question and wrote about the wrong Henry, because according to them more than one grade might be valid based on their performance. If Ofqual can’t guarantee that the grades are the right ones after the kids have actually sat the exams then it’s a bit rich to criticise teachers for not being able to perfectly predict them when the courses were cut off two months from the end.

I don't think it was deliberate, no. Partially because I don't trust them to be competent enough to achieve a desired result at anything complicated, and partially because the optics are so obviously appalling. It has been a huge gift to the opposition parties. What I do think is they just didn't give enough of a fuck to give any thought to this outcome being a possibility, as if it isn't obvious when you think about it who's going to benefit more when only the smallest classes are left with teacher assessed grades.

Unfortunately I have been a civil servant for decades.

This is how it works generally, with some exceptions:

The higher up you go, think grade 7 and over, the less you actually do, or know.

You rely upon lower grade technical staff to answer factual questions.

However, should those technical staff point out that you are doing something illegal or ridiculous, you ignore them.

With austerity most of those experienced technical staff were replaced by tick sheet computer systems and call centres. Those that weren't were repurposed to numpty positions where they could be ignored legitimately.

Laws are drafted without full reference to the existing legislation. They then breach the laws they in fact drafted.

But because of the lack of qualified technical staff, nobody listens.

One of the higher grades points in a corner and all of the yes people run there saying what a fantastic idea that is. Dissenters are marked and moved. The person who had the smart idea gets awards and is promoted. Then their smart idea falls over for the reasons identified by the dissenters many moons before.

So no, it is not deliberate, it is numpties doing what numpties do. But, some of the independent technical advisors have agendas which are not in the public interest and I believe Boris is deliberately sidling up to the USA in order to have a similar economic structure.

Pease, I’m not sure I agree with you, because the point I am making is even with the drop the grades were still over inflated v previous years, that’s The point people are missing.

Even with the alogorithm moderated results those results were still over all much higher than ever before. So it is simoly a question of How over inflated. At no stage were the over all results down year on year or even equal to previous years. Both sets of results are over inflated.

So the point remains it is still a very small minority of students who were Penalised, who were the outliers, because the overall results were still inflated by the government.

And now we have a situation where the cags are being blamed, we are already seeing the comments on here about it,

The issue is an exam performance can’t be questioned, but anything else, when it’s not what a child wants or needs and is adrift from the initial prediction parents are kicking off. The only way to further stop the complaints is to not use either the cags or the algorithm and use the initial predictions and even then folks would complain they were wrong.

YABU

I think governments are generally much more anxious to be seen as competent than further any ideological standpoint. I think there are studies which show that people are far more likely to forgive governments for policies when they otherwise appear competent than when it's all starting to slip away.

It gets to a point where every decision starts to go wrong and all the opposition have to do is look a bit more competent.

As PPs have pointed out, the same error was made in England, Scotland & Wales, this points to a consistent error of judgement and as the senior levels of the civil service across the UK are over-represented by people from a privileged background who attended private school, it's hardly surprising.

Without sounding like I am wearing a tin hat, I do think the OP has a very good point. I came back to live in the UK a few years ago after being away for many years and one of the first thing that hit me again was the class system. Where are you from, what school did you go to, where is that accent from?

The best example I can give is at my private primary school. There is about a 50/50 split of a) old money or people whose dads/ grandads made a fortune and they now think they are posh and then there are b) people who came from nothing and are self made. a) will be cordial to b) for the sake of school harmony but wait till something happens and then you will see what old money/ posh really think of working class done good.

Honestly, I've heard it all. People complaining to the head that they are lowering standards, that the school should vet parents before they accept them, complaining when certain children get picked for teams or get academic awards because they cannot believe that someone like them would be doing better than their own child. My favourite is when I hear them say "I'm just not having it.." If there is an issue between old money and new money, old always gets their way. I've seen it a thousand times. I've seen parents try and take down hard working, very academic and talented children because they were doing better than their own, rather average children. It's like a Lord putting his servants in their place.

Anyway, back to the point. Our class system is no different to the micro example above. The people running our country are no different to the parents in our school. They are terrified of the people below them getting power, changing our class system, having money and influence because if we did, that would be the end of our class system and end of hundreds and hundreds of years of these peoples families and their friends dominating our country at our expense. Discrimination against the lower classes in this country is no different to the racism in this country. It may not always be direct but it is most certainly covert.

There are terrible inequalities in this country and it will never change whilst these people at the top have their foot against our throats.

@chickenyhead I think management consultants have a lot to answer for and too many organisations believe what management consultants tell them without checking.

@JuniperFather

No they didn't do it "on purpose. It's easy to look for conspiracy theories when the truth is so preposterous and it's hard to envisage how someone could have got things so wrong.

With this Government though, their modus operandi seems to be

• Can we prevaricate and delay any decision making as long as possible?
• Can we test a soft policy through the media and see what the reaction would be, and "focus-group" it instead of using our judgement?
• Is there an outside agency or body we can use as the fall guy for any of this?
• Can we make money out of any of this by generating wealth in the private sector using agency support?
• Never mind a pandemic and the need for extraordinary decisions for these circumstances - how can we spin this so it serves the interests of the voter groups represented by Mail readers?

This^^ ....in spades.

@Ifailed

As PPs have pointed out, the same error was made in England, Scotland & Wales, this points to a consistent error of judgement and as the senior levels of the civil service across the UK are over-represented by people from a privileged background who attended private school, it's hardly surprising.

This is illogical.

The same error was made because not all kids achieve their predicted grades. If they did there would be no point in conditional offers. You’d simply get a place based on the prediction. The error was made because it’s impossible to predict which kids will not achieve on the day.

There are three sets of predictions

The initial ones which offers are made on.
The cags which will be lower. But are grossly over inflated v previous years,
The government moderated, again hugely over inflated but less than the cags,

The over whelming majority of kids got what was predicted, the issue is the outliers were downgraded by a computer program, which had to pick based on an algorithm because the teachers were unable to do it based on their own knowledge. Because as said, it’s impossible to predict which kids will achieve on the day and which won’t.

It is nothing about privilege or private school. It’s about bringing the results down to a more normal level because not all kids achieve their predictions, in fact in an average year only 15 percent of teacher predictions are correct. In the absence of a teacher being able to predict which will not achieve, they had to create a computer program to do it for them, and that by its very nature was always going to be problematic.

madameminimes totally agree with everything you have said . It was possible, and in answer to a previous poster who asked did they go back to schools to investigate inconsistencies; no they did not. They mostly didn’t attach grades to individuals, they did not say; that grade E for a candidate with 9s at GCSE and a CAG of a B looks odd because they did not interrogate the results in that way.

If they had run the model and then gone back to schools to check the evidence where the results fell outside of the confidence level then they would have been able to accommodate outliers both at individual and cohort level .

Anecdotally I heard that they didn’t look at the results at centre/candidate level until really late in the day. They concentrated totally on the broad trend so it looked ok. It was only when they ran the results by candidate and centre that the scale of the issue and the sheer randomness of the results became clear and by then it was too late to change.

I thought Roger Taylor’s comment about how they had backtracked after seeing how upset the individual candidates were was very telling. It showed how they had not attached any weighting to the individual’s results at all, and it would appear that neither GW or Ofqual understood how this would impact on the University Admissions process. One wonders what we are paying them for .

@JuniperFather

No they didn't do it "on purpose. It's easy to look for conspiracy theories when the truth is so preposterous and it's hard to envisage how someone could have got things so wrong.

With this Government though, their modus operandi seems to be

• Can we prevaricate and delay any decision making as long as possible?
• Can we test a soft policy through the media and see what the reaction would be, and "focus-group" it instead of using our judgement?
• Is there an outside agency or body we can use as the fall guy for any of this?
• Can we make money out of any of this by generating wealth in the private sector using agency support?
• Never mind a pandemic and the need for extraordinary decisions for these circumstances - how can we spin this so it serves the interests of the voter groups represented by Mail readers?

This is spot on. And if all else fails - find the nearest fridge and hide.

I'm not a fan of GW, but to the PP saying he was incompetent, do you think he should have looked at the computer and data science behind the algorithm in detail?

It's perfectly acceptable to trust the experts. If this is a Tory conspiracy, Labour and the SNP were in on it too.

Teachers predictions are not widely accurate. It would be an impossible task for them to accurately predict ALL grades. I'm sure they expected some work to be done at a national level to help with it.

It feels like with this government, shouting the loudest gets what you want. Now a whole year of exam results will be over inflated in many cases.

No conspiracy is needed to benefit private school kids, they are already well ahead by the mere virtue of smaller classes, better facilities, better access to technology and a social environment that gears them towards success. All of these I wish state schools could offer to our kids but which are beyond their financial means.

The grades will change but the damage is already done for thousands of students who have lost their places at their first choices and won’t get them back as most universities are full.

Of all this fiasco what I don’t get to understand is why Williamson is now trying to place the blame on Ofqual claiming he only became aware about the problem this last weekend. Does he even read the news? The problem was evident since the grades were released to universities on Saturday 8 July, and it could have been a much smaller problem if they had acted there and then immediately. Students were already rejected or released to their insurance universities by the time they announced the “triple lock” and most university courses were full and closed for Clearing when they decided yesterday to use the teachers’ assessments.

The damage is done, and for many is irreversible and that goes before considering the humongous feeling of racism thousands of people are feeling at being graded on the basis of their postcodes rather than their own performance.