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 ?

@RufustheSniggeringReindeer

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

Absolutely! The private sector enjoyed the 4.7% grade increase while colleges and large comprehensives saw a 0.3% increase. So the people enjoying this so called grade inflation are the private school kids!

I really do hope the governments and universities have a good hard think about the squeezed middle. The private school pupils have had the first pick of places at elite universities owing to the advantage the Ofqual algorithm gave them. The universities are now prioritising admission for the pupils which qualify for deprivation markers. However if your parents work in low paid jobs, don’t claim benefits other than child benefit and are just about managing then no one is championing your social mobility. These are also the pupils who can ill-afford to take a year out in order to take up their place at their first choice university if it was offered for next year; so their disadvantage is compounded by having to accept a lesser institution and/or course

Who cares now, they, like the other nations have backed down as the algorithm was wrong

Move on

To the PP who said they didn't expect GW to have looked into the algorithm and it was perfectly acceptable that he trusted his experts, his video shows why he should go. In the subject where the algorithm would have been most accurate (History) only 60% of grades will have been correct. In the subject where it was least accurate (Italian) the algorithm would have been correct a mind-boggling 25% of the time. Other subjects are somewhere in between these miserable figures. This is summarised in Ofqual's actual document, so something that you would have expected an 'Education Minister' to have read, FFS!

*Who cares now, they, like the other nations have backed down as the algorithm was wrong

Move on*

Easy for you to say. You obviously don't have any skin in the game

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.

But they weren’t given a C at random. Teachers had to rank students so the student who the teacher thought was most likely to get a C based on their performance and ability, not at random would have been given a C.

When we vote an Old Boys Club into government, we shouldn't be surprised that their primary focus in all decisions is what benefits the Old Boys and their families.

Vampires in charge of the blood bank...

Teachers had to rank students so the student who the teacher thought was most likely to get a C based on their performance and ability, not at random would have been given a C.

As I understood it, they didn't think they were "Most likely to get a C", they thought they would get the least marks in the exam. That might have been a lower A, it might have been a B. The computer decided that it must have been a C because in previous years that was the usual distribution of results. Nothing to do with the pupil's actual ability really.

Other countries have managed it

To be fair other countries either ran some sort of exam or accepted that grades would be inflated. The grade inflation is not due to teacher favouritism or incompetence , it is because of well understood factors always present when teachers mark work not based on a specific assessments.and then compare those to exam based grades. It is like comparing apples and pears.

The major problem with this government is their inability to clearly face up to the consequences of decisions and to manage expectations about those decisions.

It was clear to anyone with half a brain from the moment exams were cancelled that we would have quite a lot of grade inflation. Deciding we wouldn't is like saying I can decide to eat 3,000 cal worth of cake for a week and lose weight. Well I can if I hobble the scales so it just looks like I have lost weight.

Other countries understood there would be grade inflation if they cancelled exams. It isn't the end of the world. For some young people it will give them a chance to show they can do it antway. Some will rise to the challenge, some won't. After this shitty year they ALL deserve that opportunity

Universities would have understood this and planned for this if it has been faced early. Instead they are left scrabbling at the last minute yet again to deal with an inevitable outcome because the government was too cowardly to buy the bullet early on and just say ' we are cancelling exams, we trust teachers to do a good job buy we also know that some grade inflation is inevitable'

@TwentySixPointTwo

When we vote an Old Boys Club into government, we shouldn't be surprised that their primary focus in all decisions is what benefits the Old Boys and their families.

Vampires in charge of the blood bank...

When you put a clown in charge, you end up in a circus.

None of this is remotely surprising or unexpected. The only thing that is surprising is the number of people who think making Boris PM would have led to anything else.

Yes that makes sense SoupDragon, although that’s not how my school did it.

They aren't capable of being that organised. It was just a monumental balls up.

It was clear to anyone with half a brain from the moment exams were cancelled that we would have quite a lot of grade inflation.

Yes, however...

Many schools self-moderated to avoid grade inflation. These students are now at a relative disadvantage.

why on earth would they do that? They thought their system would be less biased but it didn't work. So they chose the fairer option.

they chose the fairer option after the university spaces were reallocated and didn't alter the grade increases, only the decreases

Many schools self-moderated to avoid grade inflation. These students are now at a relative disadvantage.
This.

As yourself if a Tory government would ever disadvantage children from elite schools either deliberately or as collatoral damage.

@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?

A*

Teachers are the experts on predicting grades. They do it all the time. Every student already had a reliable prediction, free of charge.

Asking the students' own teachers for their likely grades right away would have worked but instead the government went for the farcical algorithm option.

Doesn't the government trust teachers, or does it think they are incapable of assessing their own students' grades? It's a massive insult either way.

I really do hope the governments and universities have a good hard think about the squeezed middle.

Why on earth would they do that ? Seriously. After all, if they don't what are you going to do ? Write a letter ? Have a march ? Because those have done so well haven't they.

Face facts here. We have an incompetent and corrupt government that have their feet under the table till 2024 at the earliest - although even if there were an election today, they would still get back into power.

So rather than whinging about them, people should just get used to it and divert their energies elsewhere. Maybe baking, or reviving plainsong ?

TL:DR - if you don't want corrupt and incompetent governments it's much easier not to elect them than it is to elect them, and try and shame them out of incompetence and corruption when they're in power. That's never ever worked in all of human history.

Imagine how bad things could be if this shower were responsible for negotiating the most important deals in the UKs history - phew, we dodged a bullet there ....

They create situations where people are outraged then they are seen to back down to due to public pressure.
I think it's contrived deliberately to create an illusion of democracy and whilst we are being distracted we don't notice how our democracy is right now being systematically dismantled by these Tory truth twisters.

Many of the schools that moderated to avoid grade inflation would still have been marked down. They are at a relative disadvantage already. If you had large cohorts you could moderate your results to an obviously reasonable level and still be marked down. See the example I posted upthread. If your last three years results were 10%, 20% and 30% A grade and you had more than 15 students in the cohort, the algorithm would only give 20% A (assuming similar cohort ability). I would argue that any teacher prediction between 15% and 35% A would be reasonable based on that school’s record but the algorithm would only allow 20% in a cohort over 15. If you had 4 students doing a subject you could predict 100% A* and have no change even if for the last 3 years everyone got a U and not have your results changed. If you had a cohort of 7 or 8 you could get away with some increase on the average of the last three years. Schools with lots of smaller cohorts could do no moderation and the system would allow for their grades to go up. Schools with all large cohorts could scrupulously moderate and then find that their results went down, not just from their predictions, but from their performance last year.

No. I think it is a measure of their incompetence and stupidly and arrogance. They listen to no one, refuse expert help, eg from the Royal Statistical Society, or subject to unacceptable NDAs to avoid accountability and transparency, don't have the balls to change course until they are forced to.
Cummings seems unaccountable and driving almost everything but is no where near as clever as he thinks he is. The Cabinet is made up of the most hopeless ministers ever seen. Just look at what Nicholas Soames said of Williamson.
They simply don't have the wit to carry out some sophisticated conspiracy. Or the wit to understand how to analyse the pros and cons of using such an algorithm.

@SoupDragon

Teachers had to rank students so the student who the teacher thought was most likely to get a C based on their performance and ability, not at random would have been given a C.

As I understood it, they didn't think they were "Most likely to get a C", they thought they would get the least marks in the exam. That might have been a lower A, it might have been a B. The computer decided that it must have been a C because in previous years that was the usual distribution of results. Nothing to do with the pupil's actual ability really.

Yes thats my understanding

The ranking doesn’t explain why some dropped two grades

Unless the suggestion is that the teacher did

A
A
A
B
B
A
C
C

Many schools self-moderated to avoid grade inflation. These students are now at a relative disadvantage

Those schools would be at a disadvantage before in any case as the downgrade would have applied to them as well . They are a disadvantage either way.

I personally don't think it is a teachers job anyway to try to make grades from one sort of assessment fit the statistical profile of another sort of assessment.

Their job is to state where a child is academically as accurately as possible using the measuring criteria and tools they have available So whilst I understand why these schools did this I think it was a mistake.

If the school's had been given guidance on how to make that statistical fit and everyone had done the same, it would have been better. I still believe however that we are better treating this year as a blip and not trying to compare with previous years.