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 ?

that’s The point people are missing

I dont think people are missing this point

The 12% increase for Alevel and 9% for gcse is all over the media

Its been ‘explained‘ many many times

In dds class 60% were ‘downgraded’

Children with Us have been upgraded!

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?

He said that he didn’t have access to the data until schools did which is simply a lie.

And when he said that he didn’t have access to the data until schools did, that suggests that he made his announcement about mock results counting without even having seen the data.

A liar and incompetent. Previous Ed Secs would have been on top of that data.

Oh yeah

I don’t think they did it on purpose

They just don’t think ...at all, not fit for purpose, any purpose!

@KrabbyPatties

Dont be so bloody silly

Do you actually think that they’re competent enough ?!

Best answer! No, I don't think they are. I don't think it's so much a conspiracy as they aren't that organised but certainly they are not bothered about the impact on the average person.

I dont think people are missing this point

Clearly they are, hence all the hysteria.

But it’s better to assume all the students working towards an A achieve an A than to randomly assume one of them will mess up on the day and give one of them a C at random.

They didn’t sit the exam. They didn’t have a chance to mess up, so can only assume they would achieve their potential. You can’t just decide one of them will have messed up and pick a name of of a hat to decide which one.

Oh and wasnt there something about certain schools having an increase of grades of 4.7% i think

Which is ‘huge’

And others having an increase of 0.3%

Keeping these at the same level would have had an affect on the overall 12% increase

I think it was pure incompetence and I suspect those that developed the algorithm may have a positive bias towards private schools assuming, maybe, unconsciously that they must be better and the teachers more accurate at predicting exam results. I would be interested in how many of them were privately educated. Just sharing a couple of things which show who benefited the most from the Ofqual algorithm:

This was what St Edmund Hall Oxford said yesterday explaining why they are hounouring all their offers:
Over the weekend, St Edmund Hall has reviewed the applications of all students who missed their conditional offers when A-level grades were released last Thursday. It is apparent that a disproportionally large proportion of those students that missed their offers were from the state sector. The college had already taken the decision to make offers unconditional for a significant number of students but, in light of the growing concern around the process by which grades were assigned and can be appealed this year, it has looked again at the cases of those students whose places were not initially confirmed. All of our offer holders made powerful cases for admission last December and had UCAS predicted grades from their teachers that would confirm a place. The college therefore believes that a very large proportion of them have strong grounds to appeal the grades that they were awarded

Paul Johnson in The Times today also confirms who was advantaged by the Ofqual system and who was disadvantaged
First, and most obvious, the process adopted favours schools with small numbers of students sitting any individual A-level. That is, it favours private schools. If you have up to five students doing an A-level, you simply get the grades predicted by the teacher. If between five and fifteen, teacher-assigned grades get some weight. More than 15 and they get no weight. Teacher predictions are always optimistic. Result: there was a near-five percentage point increase in the fraction of entries from private schools graded at A or AIn contrast, sixth-form and further education colleges saw their A and A grades barely rise — up only 0.3 per cent since 2019 and down since 2018. This is a manifest injustice. No sixth-form or FE college has the funding to support classes of fifteen, let alone five. The result, as Chris Cook, a journalist and education expert, has written: “Two university officials have told me they have the poshest cohorts ever this year because privately educated kids got their grades, the universities filled and there’s no adjustment/clearing places left

@Bluntness100

I think folks seem to forget that even with the alogorithim there were more passes than ever before. This is simoly a case of how over inflated the results were. Some folks are reacting like thousands and thousands of kids were given grades worse than they would have achieved, and everyone was downgraded, that’s not the case at all. Overall the grades given were still better and over inflated v previous years..

Yes some kids were penalised by it, but it was a tiny minority where the algorithm got it wrong as it attempted to standardise back to previous years.

What should have occured is teachers told to assess grades but keep it within a given percentage of the average of previous years Performance. That part was missing which is what’s caused this fuck up.

They over inflated too much, so the government tried to standardise it back but still kept it over inflated.

The whole thing is a mess but the media frenzy and the hysteria some folks are displaying shows a wholesale misunderstanding of what’s actually occured.

I agree - I would add to this the absolute media hysteria (which has been a feature throughout and STILL a feature now) that forced schools to close back in March and for the exams to be cancelled in the first place. This was the major error in my opinion - easy to say this with hindsight of course and the hysteria back in March - particularly from schools / unions I have to say - forced the GOV hand and ultimately led to this - we can now see the exams should have gone ahead - socially distanced etc - but better than this situation.
But there were unknown, unknowns back then - and there was no precedent to cancelling exams on mass and back in March we did not know how this whole thing would play out.

I do suspect that if the exams had gone ahead though - the radio airwaves/ media would now be full of teenagers saying they got worse results due to the stress of sitting exams in a pandemic and we'd be listening to loads of experts saying the exams should have been cancelled and an algorithium applied to the results and what a perfect solution this would be

The humans took a shot at it first and got it very wrong

The humans didn’t get anything wrong because there is no correct answer to ‘what did this student get in an exam they didn’t sit?’

There are two competing models:
‘What do teachers who know the student’s capabilities think they would have got in this exam’

‘What do Ofqual need that student to have got to fit a national statistical picture’

The teachers obviously can’t answer the national statistics question so they didn’t get that wrong.

Ofqual got the national statistics bit right, but messed up on the individual student bit by ignoring the teacher assessment in favour of the algorithm where there was a big discrepancy between the two.

And Gav fucked up the whole thing further by a) throwing in the idea of a ‘valid mock result’ as a corrector which is just wtf
b) not realising he’d even fucked up even though people pointed this out immediately and letting the whole thing drag on long enough to mess up the entire university admissions process for a lot of kids

Hysteria? I don't think it's hysterical to be upset if

• you've always got top grades
• you've worked hard all year
• your teachers predicted top grades in all your A levels
• you had an offer for an extremely competitive course
• your grades awarded have been pulled down because your sixth form college hasn't had a student as brilliant as you for several years so your CAGs were regarded as invalid
• you lost your university offer and you can't get onto another course like that this year

Clearly they are, hence all the hysteria

Yeah to be fair some people did think the increase in grades was 40%

So they probably did miss the point

And ive seen comments about ‘everyone getting As’ and i think they probably don’t get it either

It is incompetence and lack of moral compass. Just look at Boris Johnson's personal life. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth and spoon fed along the way. He cannot think on his own two feet nor does he understand adversity. We are in an unprecedented situation all around where we need a leader who leads according to what would be the right thing to do. There is no textbook or cronie to follow. Compare Boris Johnson to how Angela Merkel has handled the situation and you have your answer. On the plus side, the right leaning conservatives have hopefully lost the votes of almost every one of those 17-18 year olds for life, including the independent school ones due to the inherent unfairness of the whole situation. It is important this generation goes to university and I expect long term political consequences from this fiasco.

I have to say - forced the GOV hand and ultimately led to this - we can now see the exams should have gone ahead - socially distanced etc - but better than this situation

Absolutely

Funnily enough we were talking about dd being pulled out of college just before lockdown due to illness

But she still would have sat the exams (she probably wouldn’t have agreed to leaving college anyway 🤔)

the radio airwaves/ media would now be full of teenagers saying they got worse results due to the stress of sitting exams in a pandemic

Except they’d have matched the results of previous years because what people don’t seem to understand is that they always run an algorithm over students’ results in order to generate grades to fit the national statistical pattern needed.

Ofqual got the national statistics bit right, but messed up on the individual student bit by ignoring the teacher assessment in favour of the algorithm where there was a big discrepancy between the two

Yes, its the stories of A level students being downgraded to Cs which is causing any ‘hysteria’ in the media

I doubt there would be much fuss if just one exam had been ‘downgraded’ by one grade

Never put down to intention that which can easily be explained by incompetence.

There was always going to be A-level grade inflation this year and employers know that. I think they will be looking at university grades and GCSE grades for that generation primarily in the future. For universities though the scenario is good because many were previously worried that places might not be taken up. So that issue has gone away.

just heard on radio a student saying she is not happy as her school predicted accurately and did not overmark so she is now at a disadvantage

maybe that will be the new battleground! schools that did /did not inflate their grades.

Although, I would say schools that obviously did inflate their grades will appear obvious to everyone next year when their grades drop by 15%

I think attributing anything other than rank incompetence to this government is unwise.

@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?

Absolutely spot on!

@noblegiraffe

the radio airwaves/ media would now be full of teenagers saying they got worse results due to the stress of sitting exams in a pandemic

Except they’d have matched the results of previous years because what people don’t seem to understand is that they always run an algorithm over students’ results in order to generate grades to fit the national statistical pattern needed.

but individuals would no doubt have been adversely affected - just like now - it is the individuals that matter as overall grades have gone up

those with shielding parents, those shielding themselves; those who had lost a parent/ grandparent to covid, those that can't get to the exam centre easily as no public transport etc , those with anxiety generally, those that had to study at home in a hectic household and unable to use a library etc etc
exams would have produced unfairness too - and that is what we would be hearing now

For a government that makes the Chuckle Brothers look like rocket scientists I cannot conceive for a moment that this is due to anything other than gross incompetence. If any of this shower of numbskulls actually had a real job they’d have been sacked a long time ago. This is just another example of the triumvirate of poor judgement, arrogance and entitlement we’ve come to know and let them get away with. I don’t know what’s worse, the relentless idiocy or the continual gaslighting and passing the buck. Morons, the lot of them.

Exams are always unfair, sasha, in that sense, particularly the Gove-mandated terminal exams where the weight of the whole course rests on a few hours.

The difference in normal exam years is that the students actually have input into their performance on the day.

Iam, thanks for It's definitely a case of Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Cherry, thanks for explaining that simple mistake!