UK govt reboots A Level exam results after computer-driven fiasco: Now teacher-predicted grades will be used after all The UK government has performed a massive U-turn on A Level exam results, promising to use teachers' assessments of students instead of the computer-driven system that caused havoc and sparked protests over the past week. Shortly after furious teens chanted “f**k the algorithm” outside the Department of Education in London …
“However, the Tories’ handling of this situation has been a complete fiasco."
Yes, an utter shambles. Much like the handling of the exact same problem by the Scottish (SNP) and Welsh (Labour/Lib Dem) governments.
It's almost as if trying to award people grades without any solid evidence is a really hard problem.
Scotland took 7 days
NI took 3 days
Wales took 4 days
England took just under 5 days
"All this dick-on-table no-we're-not-changing-our-minds business going on in England has just caused further problems in the university applications process."
Its altered too many students for available places to too few initially with the rest dealt with via clearing/reviews. I suspect that is something the university application process can cope with better as students will drop out of the review process or the delays will put students off.
And no, it doesn't help you if you're a student who misses out, but a little divide and conquer quickly reduces a large group that is unjustly treated to a small group of moaners that will never be satisfied and should just re-sit the year if they actually deserve better grades.
And the system keeps grinding the meat.
>Scotland took 7 days, but that was a couple of weeks ago and the Tories just sat on their hands and did nothing while they watched what happened north of the border. The Education Select Committee was warned back in July that there was a problem.
Not quite nothing. Many of them were very quick to call for the head of the Scottish education system and Nicola Sturgeon in social media posts that were frantically deleted after Thursday.
It's almost as if trying to award people grades without any solid evidence is a really hard problem.
Given that Grades are based on a range of actual marks I cannot see how anyone can regrade a candidate without starting with the marks originally awarded or in this case estimated. For some the loss of a single mark will result in dropping a grade, for others it might require that 10 marks be deducted.
Perhaps one needs a PPE for everything to make sense; the whole thing is something of which Kafka would have been proud.
“However, the Tories’ handling of this situation has been a complete fiasco."
Depends how cynical you are.
Maybe low initial grads to aid university selection followed by high grades a few days later to calm the masses keeps the system happy without making life hard for the universities? Because lets face it, the grades are to decide University places rather than any greater long term educational goal.
And would it be right to assume that the magical algorithm is a standard distribution curve?
"It's almost as if trying to award people grades without any solid evidence is a really hard problem."
Fair point and that is probably why most other European countries have postponed exams rather than cancelling them outright.
The UK has four different exam systems. The system in England is set up in such a way that quite a lot of information is collected about students along the way. Each student has a Unique Learner Number (uln) and that allows information to be accessed by stakeholders as required although there are delays &c as with any govt IT system.
There were known issues with the specific adjustments in England - known through testing against last years results (only a partial test, see web site below). There were known sources of bias in the adjustments in England (small cohort exception, the taper for cohorts from 15 to 37 students, the process of ranking 1,200+ exam entrants in a large college &c).
And yet the ship ploughed ahead into the iceberg, with the band playing. A relatively small course correction (see second web site) could have produced a reasonable compromise.
https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2020/08/a-level-results-2020-how-have-grades-been-calculated/
http://thaines.com/post/alevels2020
Now of course, the problem has been booted down the road and landed in the lap of the universities. They have to sort out students who now meet original offers claiming places that have already been allocated to other students and students offered places through clearing who now meet their original offer. Sort of like rolling back a database after transactions from several servers(?).
PS: I think we need to get rid of grades - the process of binning scores on exams has always caused issues around the boundaries. Just publish the scores for each subject.
Icon: I'm so glad I retired from teaching last year. Spare a thought for your local FE College admissions staff on Thursday morning. It will be mayhem.
I'm told that in Wales A-levels are still split into AS and A2(conversion to full A-level). So anyone who sat the AS exam in their first year will have a fully taught and moderated course to use as a benchmark when challenging their A-level estimated grades.
Similarly, I'm told that some GCSEs in Wales are still modular, with coursework elements, again giving the exam board some benchmark to base the final grade on. They still grade A*-G as well. (No, there's no "CH" grade. Stop laughing at the back, and settle down.)
Wales may get through this fiasco a little better than England.
Much like the handling of the exact same problem by the Scottish
Which is even more inexplicable that the English carried on doing what they did - they had a very clear indication from what happened in Scotland that what they proposed was really, really not going to work and yet they carried on doing it anyway..
It's one thing to make the mistake yourself but it's a really special kind of stupid to see the process fail so badly and then CARRY ON AND DO THE SAME THING YOURSELF!
Did they somehow think the special magic of being 'English' would automagically make things work? Or, maybe, did they think that it would be bad for their image to be seen to be following one of the 'lesser'[1] nations?
Whatever. If there were any lingering doubts that Boris' shower of idiots were incompetent then those doubts are hereby dispelled. Yes, they *really* are that incompetent. And, even worse, the Education Minister still has his job and hasn't done the honourable[2] thing and resigned. And even, even worse, Boris hasn't grown a backbone and sacked him.
[1] Not my view at all. If I had my way, all the nations would be a lot more free (including Cornwall)..
[2] Not that most of this government would know what honour was if it dressed up in sparkly clothes and carried a big sign saying "I'm Honour"..
Is there anything that the succesive governments of the UK can not fuck up by bloody useless software ? And as for Kier Starmer, fuck off unless you have something constructive to say. I am sick of these idiots trying to make political capital out of everything, as though their party would not have done exactly the same mess.
Really? Magically coming up with grades by asking teachers to rank students in the class then positioning said students on a curve which start and finish points are based on previous years results in the same school is what other parties would have done?
Or perhaps they would have done what other countries did, which is hold exams with social distancing, only ask questions from the first two terms of the syllabus, etc...
And if that doesn't look like enough of a car crash, Ofqual did run the same algorithm on last year's students and compared with the real results and found it produced similar failures, so it was decided to go ahead and use it to generate this year's results anyway.
Someone signed off on this knowing exactly the result it would produce and the government tried to brazen it out. But they still haven't rowed back on Btec students yet, they're still hoping to divide and conquer and hang on to some small victory.
I'm. Sorry to agree with the OP, this isn't about the u turn which I totally support, but the sh1t awful state of politics in the UK, where one party berates the other for political score.
If as a politician you disagree with the other side, do that but with why, and what you would do differently. Otherwise keep it to yourself dichead.
(political neutral, so don't badge me either way, they're all out for themselves).
Starmer said:
"However, the Tories’ handling of this situation has been a complete fiasco. Incompetence has become this government’s watchword, whether that is on schools, testing or care homes. Boris Johnson’s failure to lead is holding Britain back."
It would perhaps be more interesting if you dropped the abuse and explained where you think that Keith Starmer got it wrong. Given the number of (ahem) unfortunate decisions this government has made (including their approach to the challenge of Corona) I would be very keen to hear what it is you feel was unjustified in Starmer's comment - explained to us logically and rationally of course.
I agree with Arctic Fox, Kier Starmer is doing a good job of being a grown up.
The current government is a complete joke, it is the D or E team with a few U team members. Do not though compare to drumpf he is evil, our goverment is just completely incompetent.
As someone who voted for the Thatcher government I really want Starmer to take over.
Now lets look at the current shower.
Cronus's handler, former fireplace salesman and total idiot. Was on TV recently saying he did not trust teachers.
Failing, so bad that people know who you mean, definite U team.
Bojo the clown, he is just playing at PM, he just wants to be loved.
Looking at the old guard, the last few PMs made us realise that John Major was actually quite good. And as a rail fan Portillos stopping some rail closures means he will aways have some popularity.
Starmer is the Leader of the Opposition. His job is to oppose the Government. The fact that the last 23 years has seen successive Opposition Leaders spend more time on in-fighting within their own party, or sitting on the fence so long they got splinters, means that the British public have largely forgotten this.
My mum told me some years ago that she'd asked my math teacher if he thought I would get a pass my A level class, apparently he told her, "Yes, he understands statistics and will answer enough questions to get an A."
I did, I got two A levels, in Abstract Art and Statistics, it's been great ever since.
Lucky you - my teachers were an ignorant lot who would give all their favourites good marks and me and my lot low marks. I half wondered if they really cared when they found out I got good grades in the exams and didn't have to leave education immediately. Probably not. It ended up being a struggle to get me out of education, but I eventually gave in after a PhD.
Needless to say I'm not a fan of the idea of teachers grades. If for nothing else then because of the vast variation in teachers and schools.
There was a far more stratified form of favouritism at my school. To be scrupulously fair, academic ability was always recognised and rewarded (it was, after all, what the school was noted for).
But that didn't stop them awarding all sorts of "special" arrangements for the sons of particularly wealthy parents, possibly in the hope of a bequest - we were always getting new language labs, or sports fields or, in one case a swimming pool which was then covered so we could use it in winter and then heated so their little darlings wouldn't get a chill while swimming - all from parental bequests rather than school funds.
These special arrangements resulted in my sharing Upper Sixth tutorials with boys who couldn't write their own names, let alone engage in any sort of meaningful discourse, and in one case, with an ace rugby player who couldn't build a coherent sentence and was "studying" English Literature as his only A Level course, so that he had plenty of time for rgby training.
Of course, a number of these thickos went on to daddy's old college at Oxbridge, and are now, presumably, running the country.
There running it alright.
Right into the ground.
I wouldn't trust Bojo to run for a bus, never mind the country. He cant even rig a comittee vote to get Chris Failing installed as chair, so fuck knows how the country is going to survive.
When was this? I was at Cambridge in the early '90s and the days of thickos buying their way in with a substantial donation to the endowment fund were over by then. Only just over, and fondly remembered by many of the fellows in my college, but definitely over. Daddy had to buy good A-level results by crammer colleges, private tuition and resits instead.
Rugby players and rowers tended to go somewhere else for undergraduate, and then do a Masters in Art History to get their place, once their ability at international level had been proven.
The 90s? A mere stripling! This was the late 60s and early 70s, A time when a boy from our school who ended up working under Roger Penrose didn't make it to the Roll of Honour because he went to an "upstart college" (Wadham College, Oxford, founded 1610), while a grunting gorilla who was 2 years ahead of me at the school made the Roll because he was a CUBC blue.
And I was a scholarship boy - a source of continual embarrassment at a school where official cricket whites cost north of £300!
Needless to say I'm not a fan of the idea of teachers grades. If for nothing else then because of the vast variation in teachers and schools.
Exactly. One schools mock exams aren't the same as anothers, and teachers opinions aren't always correct.
At least 1 news article, probably from Scotland, contained examples of students saying that their mock results weren't necessarily all under the same conditions, some teachers took it seriously, used past papers and marked it harshly, others "didn't care" and basically coached students to do well.
The justification varied from basically "trying to scare them into doing better" to "we want to encourage them".
Only really fair answer to it all would have been "no exam, no results".
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.... wait for how the story develops over the next few days as the Universities try to work out how to cope with the fact that their reliance on 20+% of applicants get lower than their predicted grades (someting they've seen for years) has evaoprated this year ... apparentlly Oxofrd and Cambridge each have 20% more applicants meeting their offer grades than there are places available. They and other Universities are already telling applicants that they've got a place, but not until next year, so next year's applicants are going to have even fewer places at the top Universities available to them + also probably having to use exam based results.
>I wonder how many students will drop out of their university courses over the next year?
20+ Years ago I worked in student registration, and typically 10-15% of a cohort would drop out before Christmas - this included changing course at the same institution or moving to another university - and roughly the same would drop out before the start of the next year.
Calculated grades can’t take into account external factors which lower results i.e.
Hay fever, illness, hangovers, bad exam hall conditions, broken hearts, depression, family upheavals and bad weather.
The other random factor is the exam itself, some are nasty, some are nice and on a regular basis questions come up in area’s your teacher didn’t bother with (as it never comes up).
So even the most diligent teacher estimate will be a little higher than the results generated by traditional exams.
Because other parties haven't made the same screw up... Who governs in Wales and Scotland again? Think the moment exams were cancelled rather than delayed this car crash was coming and all polictical parties bought into that decision.
If Scotland, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland had just announced grades based on teacher's predic ted grades the media headlines would have been about rampant grade inflation and variations in how the teachers predicted pupils' grades rather than the injustice of an algorithm. But this is the world today, negativity and dividing the world into them and us,
Or Labour in Wales, or the SNP in Scotland, or the DUP/SF in N.I., who have all got in to the same mess.
Instead vote for a party who hasn't got a chance in hell of getting in to power, so you can sit back and bleat on about how much better it would be if only your lot were given a chance. You know, like the Liberal Democrats did before they blew it by going into the coalition, and proved they were just as shit as everyone else.
[QUOTE}High-performing students in poorly performing schools were at risk of losing university places after they received A Level grades far lower than they expected, whereas private schools saw a significant increase in their student's estimated grades.[/QUOTE}
Some already have lost their place this year.
Universities will now have to review their chosen students some pupils who were awarded better grades than their mocks will now have only their mocks grade which might not be good enough for that university. Expect a lot of changes and a lot of anger. Luckily for universities they have got a slight get out of jail free card in that the number of foreign students are expected to be low, freeing up spaces for english students this year.
Apparently, the switch to teacher assements improve grades for students in more affluent areas more than for ones in deprived areas .... anyone remember when teacher assessments were first suggested that lots of people on the left were in uproar as "private schools always over-estimate grades" and were demanding some form of "moderation". to avoid an increase in the educational divide
The RSS had flagged up the problems of this back in June - but why listen to people who understand statistics?
https://rss.org.uk/RSS/media/File-library/News/2020/06082020-RSS-EPAG-statement-on-grade-adjustment-2020-exams-in-UK-FINAL.pdf"> Press release 6 August
2 Royal Statistical Society news story, RSS alerts Ofqual to stats issues relating to 2020 exam grading, 6 May
2020, accessed 5 August 2020,https://rss.org.uk/news-publication/news-publications/2020/general-news/rssalerts-ofqual-to-stats-issues-relating-to-2020/
Obviously haven't posted enough this year and lost my html privileges along with the silver badge...
Interesting anecdote from from Stephen Fry that he related in Sydney a few years ago.
Fry had worked bloody hard to get a scholarship to Queens (Cambridge College), and was working just as hard to keep it. He was, as we all know, highly talented as both a comedy writer and a performer, from an early age. He failed, twice, to gain entry to the Footlights crew.
Hugh Laurie was at cambridge to, as Fry put it, "study rowing". He was a Blue, and spent most of his time at the CUBC or partying (and, no doubt, occasionally partying at the CUBC).
After a bout of glandular fever, Laurie could no longer row, so it was suggested that, although he had no experience, he "might enjoy" running Footlights for the year. So he did.
That's privilege right there.
I'd like to see the evidence that shows the algorithm benefited public schools and state schools were penalised. It's very easy to say that happened, but I don't think there is any evidence to back it up at all.
From the stats I've seen, the algorithms lead to grade inflation already, with more students been given higher grades than they were likely to achieve.
Now all the results have been rendered meaningless, perhaps we should just give every student as many A* results in as many subjects as they want, regardless of what they actually studied for the last few years. Seems fair to me.....
I'd like to see the evidence that shows the algorithm benefited public schools and state schools were penalised. It's very easy to say that happened, but I don't think there is any evidence to back it up at all.
State schools were certainly penalised. The schools which feed PPE students to Oxbridge may not have even been subjected to the algorithm:
research by social mobility charity UpReach, which is due to be published on Monday, found subjects that are more commonly studied at independent schools, such as Latin and classics, saw 7.7 per cent more students awarded an A* and 10.4 per cent more for A*/A grades compared with last year.
This was due to nearly all schools that taught these subjects being given results that factored in teacher-assessed grades that Ofqual admitted were "over-optimistic", UpReach found.
"There's been rampant grade inflation in exams that are more prominent in independent schools because they're not subjected to the standardisation process, yet Ofqual's justification for standardisation was to avoid grade inflation," UpReach chief executive John Craven said.
He said Ofqual's standardisation process is only applied if there are enough exam entries and enough historical data in that subject at that school.
Mr Craven explained: "If you're in a sixth form or further education college, where there are hundreds of students with, for example, one or more regular-sized cohort for your subject, you're going to be subjected to standardisation with your teacher-predicted grades ignored.
"But if you're in a smaller subject cohort, they'll use the teacher-predicted grades, and may not use the standardisation at all."
Channel 4 Fact Check here https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-did-england-exam-system-favour-private-schools
TLDR, the algorithm worked best normalising large class sizes and the teacher assessed grade plays a smaller part in the final result in those cases. So the smaller the class size the greater the weight given to the teacher assessed grades. This doesn't just favour private schools but also Local Authority schools who tend to have small class sizes at sixth form, it does though mean the teacher assessment plays less part in the grades for those at Sixth Form and FE Colleges.
The issue being if you applied the algorithm equally to all class sizes the smaller classes would be even more disadvantaged because you're extrapolating from a much smaller data set. Which would also affect Local Authority schools not just the posh thickos everyone gets so enraged about.
My question is why everyone is so sure they'd get their predicted grades when they've missed several months of school...
The algorithm wasn't applied to groups with small cohorts in each subject, with teacher's predicted grades applied instead. Private schools are the most likely to fall into that group because they already have much smaller class sizes.
The results are only meaningless if you think that all teachers are idiots. Now, I know many people do think that, because they saw teachers in action when they were at school so they know exactly what the job involves. They don't, any more than I know what my GP does because I've been in his consulting room.
https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/8409/Predicted-grades-accuracy-and-impact-Dec-16/pdf/Predicted_grades_report_Dec2016.pdf
Independent schools correctly predict grades. State schools overestimate by one or two grades. Disadvantaged pupils have the highest overestimate of predicted against obtained.
Sounds like the results as they were on the 13th, but let's ignore the evidence and all pretend it's a Tory plot to smash the working classes.
Everyone is equal, no one must be seen to be worse than everyone else - give A* all round and the world's woes will be fixed.
That document shows that there isn't much difference between school types (see figure 3. why they say there is a good deal of variation is beyond me). In particular all school types are more likely to overpredict by 2 grades than get the right grade, and all school types are more likely to overpredict by 1 grades than get the right grade
A school entering less than 10 pupils for maths A level is a very small school, regardless of the state vs independent argument.
The fact still remains, that you can't criticize the algorithm for benefiting small public schools by using teacher predicted grades because the stats show that independent schools tend to predict the correct grades.
The algorithm actually discriminated against most independents because they have a large enough cohort to be assessed against the general results. This meant their students, who are shown to be statistically above the general education average, had the general average result adjustment applied to their results. The kids in the state sector dragged down the kids in the independent sector, but the bash the tory snobs mob won't/can't comprehend that.
We need to scotch that one. The grades submitted for the exam substitute were far more carefully applied, checked and moderated by schools than normal ones. They weren't just the usual teacher assessment. They weren't down to one teacher's judgement. These were treated as an exam substitute . As near as possible a realistic assessment, checked and signed off by a series of professionals. So to downgrade these assessments on the basis that traditional predictions are unreliable is inevitably going to be unfair and unreasonable.
As to the fairness and reliability of traditional exams......
Oh dear. You must have had a bad experience of education. Or maybe education had a bad experience of you.
As for your comment. Teacher assessments are as open to bias as any profession forced to make a summary judgement. And of course there are some. I have stories, even working with primary teachers on SATS. But they are the few.
But also, teacher assessments don't and can't take into account the differences between working in a classroom and sitting in an exam room. Exams have different variables; nerves, memory, technique etc.
The question is which is the truest test of a child's knowledge and understanding of a subject. Is it two or three years working on challenging tasks or two or three hours regurgitating preformed answers in a big room. Add in the students that have special arrangements because they have parents or a school better able or more capable of pushing for those, and those who need them but don't get them because they don't have a school or parents who push the right buttons. Mix in a bit of random chance ( which questions come up).
I probably had the same experience as a lot of people. But teachers didn't go on strike back then (yes, I'm ancient) and weren't focused on bringing down tory governments instead of teaching kids, so I probably had a much better experience than kids these days.
However, returning to the point, I guess if the teacher doesn't actually bother to understand how the kids they teach react to exam conditions, they will just base predictions on the level of work the kids produce in the classroom - that might well be why they are generally poor at predicting actual results. You are just making excuses for teachers who usually can't be arsed to get predictions right.
Exams are a test of learning and everyone is given the same chance to demonstrate that learning. It must be shit being in a school full of teachers who won't help their kids get the help they deserve, but blaming that bad performance on teachers at other schools who actually help their pupils is slightly missing the point.
But teachers didn't go on strike back then ( "back then" undefined).
What strikes are you talking about, and why would that have relevance?
weren't focused on bringing down tory governments How are teachers focussed on " bringing down tory (sic) governments"? In what way are they? Have you been reading conspiracy web sites by any chances?
doesn't actually bother to understand how the kids they teach react to exam conditions . In what way could teachers modify their assessments of the kids to replicate the negative effects of exam conditions? Penalise nervous kids? And anyway, what makes you think anyone can predict how individual kids performance will vary? Let alone by how much. Could anyone determine that child A will lose 7% of his/her marks due to exam stress and downgrade those marks accordingly? Even if it were objective and ethical.
Exams are a test of learning and everyone is given the same chance to demonstrate that learning. No they are not. And no one who has ever had anything to do with exams ( or learning) would claim otherwise. And that's without even bothering to discern what you mean by "learning". Exams are a test of recall, resilience, concentration, effort, and sometimes even understanding. And for that matter, what definition of "learning" would be appropriate to selection for University or employment? Assuming that there's even one such definition that serves for all/most subjects.
You seem to have a lot of resentment in you. And that's something you need to sort out for yourself. I've pointed out the irrational nature of your comments. That's all anyone can do.
"You seem to have a lot of resentment in you. And that's something you need to sort out for yourself. I've pointed out the irrational nature of your comments. That's all anyone can do."
Thank you, Dr Psychobabble, your efforts to help sort me out are greatly appreciated.
Let's check the irrationality:
James12345: "State schools overestimate (predicted grades) by one or two grades."
Terry6: "We need to scotch that one. The grades submitted for the exam substitute were far more carefully applied, checked and moderated by schools than normal ones. They weren't just the usual teacher assessment."
James12345: "So is your argument that teachers know they can usually get away doing a shit job, but this time made a bit of an effort?"
Terry6: "teacher assessments don't and can't take into account the differences between working in a classroom and sitting in an exam room."
James12345: "if the teacher doesn't actually bother to understand how the kids they teach react to exam conditions, they will just base predictions on the level of work the kids produce in the classroom - that might well be why they are generally poor at predicting actual results."
Terry6: "In what way could teachers modify their assessments of the kids to replicate the negative effects of exam conditions?"
Oh, I don't know, maybe the most irrational way would be to compare how they do in school exams vs how they do in class?
As I'm just a resentful, irrational conspiracy theorist, who had (or maybe gave) a bad education, please keep dishing out the "insults" when you can't put forward any proper counterpoints.
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Clearly you are determined to find fault with and insult teachers. Equally clearly you won't accept any argument that shows the lack of logic or objectivity in what you write.
Normal teacher assessments are never more than a subjective estimate, they are not standardised in the way that exam marking is with the teachers who are btw also the exam markers spending a lot of time comparing marks and answers together. Nor are they intended to be. They re a guide. And some schools/teachers will estimate higher, to give confidence ( and to get better uni offers). Some will estimate lower, to make sure the kids don't get over confident. Some schools do mocks early, some later. Some more than once.
But you just want to attack teachers.
Live with it. It's your problem, no one else's. (At least not any more).
.
You vote in a bunch of amateurs and charlatans and this is what happens. It's also a logical outcome of the tenure of the Govey 'n' Dom era at the DfE. (Exams, exams, exams!) They must be chuckling in the cabinet about all the ex-labour voter beyond the red wall who are only now realising they've been had. My hat's off to TeamBoris. This is the new politic now.
> You vote in a bunch of amateurs and charlatans
Well thats what happens in a two party system, and the three part system we had before the (who were they again, oh yes I remember) lib dems committed political suicide live on BBC parliament. You have 2 choices of amateurs and charlatans who only seem different during the campaigning but after the vote...
Although the Tories did make my dream come true, the one I have had since I was 12 and forced me into the EU in 1992 without bothering to ask me. Hmm that argument sounds familiar as if it came up recently.
Well, at least we kept the Corbyn at bay.
The algorithmic system was implemented after examinations were scrapped as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.
No.
Examinations were scrapped (and also three month's teaching and revision) because of lockdown.
We can't make the outcome fair with any amount of hand-wringing.
I think you'll find lockdown was caused by tw@ts in power who saw an opportunity to tighten the surveillance state, normalise martial law and population control and destroy the economy so the rich and powerful can make grab more money from the government contracts, clean up on distressed assets once the recession and joblessness really kicks off and generally fuck everything up for poor and middle class people.
FTFY.
Actually, Patient Zero is from the future and time-travelled back to 2019 to see what the big fuss is about with some virus everyone in their time treats as our common cold; we are a bunch of pussies, they think.
Little did they know they unleashed the virus onto the rest of us.
As an interviewer, I generally couldn't give two hoots what grades someone picked up 20 years ago. The system exists purely as a university admissions filter and is pretty poor for education purposes - GCSE is too easy, A-level crams far too much in. Many university lecturers I've chatted with openly admit the 1st year of your average bachelors degree is spent catching up on the quantity of stuff that often isn't covered. Differences between exam boards and the syllabus contribute to the problem. Home schooling will hugely be contributing to this problem, especially for students who don't have access to the right people to talk to to learn from (or aren't good at using the internet to fill in the gaps).
The number of fantastically qualified people I've interviewed is rather long; yet if they lack basic communications, analysis, writing and computer skills they will struggle to get started. Not saying you can't learn these things but in both my own, and others that I've interviewed experience there were severe gaps left right and centre at age 21.
I'll say it again, the "default" expectation to leave A-level at 18 should be thrown in the bin; the amount of material one needs to learn today deserves the extra time. And the last thing I want anyone to have to do is follow the Chinese middle-class example of putting kids through 70-hour weeks of hell for years so they can "get ahead".
As for the farce that is assigning grades, well, that only lends even more credence to the argument the whole system of grading is a middle-class filter. Go to the right school with the right nobby background; automatically improve your chances of coming out better. Doesn't necessarily mean you are more intelligent than others - just you had the right teacher and opportunity. Some of the best analysts I've ever worked with had no qualifications whatsoever. Sure, a Maths degree or A-level would mean they had a spent time looking at the toolboxes available; but anyone with the patience and ability can go away and look up the tools needed down the line whether they did the degree or not. I find the whole premise that social rank and postcode privilege dictate your odds in education utterly disgusting and again, it one of the major reasons why I will consider interviewing just about anyone for any role if they exhibit the right skills and behaviours.
"Sure, a Maths degree or A-level would mean they had a spent time looking at the toolboxes available; but anyone with the patience and ability can go away and look up the tools needed down the line whether they did the degree or not. "
Good luck to you.
How do you detect ability?
(I'm assuming your enterprise is not involved in civil engineering or similar.)
Ability is detected by giving people a chance to do stuff and learn on the job. There's a place for academic ability, but a room full of ivory towers does not lend itself well to getting stuff done. You would be very surprised if you knew what I worked on. A physics degree and a few years in banking were my ticket through the door. Others I've introduced to the company came from wildly different backgrounds. Database hackers with no formal maths training make excellent analysts when given a shot and appropriately trained on relevant statistical methods.
One of the best tell-tales for the sort of abilities I happen to need in my department are interests in traditional war and/or grand strategy games. The ability to absorb large ranges of information and draw conclusions from it are very different abilities to being able to prove equations that were developed 50 years ago, that don't fundamentally change.
> As an interviewer, I generally couldn't give two hoots what grades someone picked up 20 years ago
A few years back I was being interviewed for a job in C# development where the interviewer thought that my CV (2 pages) was suspiciously too breif because it did not include my GCSE grades that were not relevant for the position I was applying for.
As an example I said that he didnt really need to know my result for GCSE drama or humanities for this kind of position.
His response? "How do I know you are not hiding something?"
Suffice to say I knew working there would probably have me nearly throttling him every morning so I walked out.
Consider myself incredibly lucky to have been interviewed by a manager with just such an outlook.
Having never bothered with Uni (after the metaphorical and literal car crash that was my college education scuppered that plan) and drifted into an IT based career, I was given the chance to show what I had done before as well as being more than able to switch languages quick enough (software development is just a process of asking questions. The trick is learning how to ask them) I was given a chance.
It still shocks colleagues when they ask what I did in uni and respond "nothing, didn't go" since I'm seen as being competent, adaptable and source of guidance for others in my team.
Sometimes you do get lucky and get an opportunity to prove yourself, sometimes you have to give someone else a shot to show you what their capable of.
Anon because I'm not revealing to you lot which interloper I am...
Grades should be abolished and instead the UMS itself is used (why band scores into grades, just release the score) and let universities and employers decide what is acceptable.
ULNs are a red herring though, as there's not always much tracked in the two years of A level or GCSE that could be robust enough to use. Plus you have to be very careful basing things on past performance, as anyone who's negotiated value added in post 16 will appreciate (which I'm guessing you have).
The individual systems employed in various institutions will result in large discrepancies in how in year tracking is captured and awarded, as the OFSTED expectations often fly directly against what AOs [exam boards] would have us do, especially in vocational land, which still hasn't been addressed.
The problem s were caused by algorithms designed to do what they've done, and guidelines sent out made little reference to this other than we had to rank the grades awarded in class; for example of all the grade As awarded, Johnny was the most likely yet Fi-Fi would be the weakest (so they could move learners up and down). Nothing was mentioned about the drop of grades from say a C to a U, and nothing about grammar schools taking a larger percentage of the allocation.
Finally these problems were known a long time ago. Grades had to be submitted months ago, not a couple of weeks back, so for the lying toad to make out the issues only came to light last Wednesday is bollocks. We had the grades ourselves then FFS.
There is a reason why when I took my exams my teachers did not decide my final grade.
A very good reason.
I wonder if these students will find they are pigeonholed into a "covid grade" category that will affect how employers will consider the grades.
Will next years students march and complain when they have to go back to the old system where the teachers dont have a say? I bet I will hear next years A level students on the radio saying how unfair it is that some stranger marked them where last years students got the marks the teachers wanted to give them.
Still dont know why Uni's couldn't just honor their offers to students leaving any students who want to, to actually resit the exam after a period of revision. That would at least be more sensible.
GCSE's next. I did not so well at those, maybe I can have my grades retrospectively reassessed based on my aging teachers memories? I'm sure I can make it worth their while to remember good memories ;)
Am I the only one who thought that the word "algorithm" became very, very popular very, very quickly over the last few days? At lunchtime yesterday, it was being used on the main news pages of the Guardian, BBC and Telegraph websites. I know "algorithm" is a common enough word in software circles, but it's not that commonly used by the Muggles. I wondered if someone in Goverment (Dom, probably) was telling the press to use it as a way of diverting attention away from the fact that this mess was caused entirely by human beings. Y'know, make it sound like the computer broke everything and ran away.
(I did wonder about observer bias, but I'm sure it wasn't used when we (Scotland) were having the same problems earlier in the month. Our government just said "Yeah, we screwed up. Sorry.")
Yes "algorithm" is being used as a magic word. As if the computer chose to balance the results in some clever computerish way. We know that an alogorithm is just a string of calculations and comparisons, chosen and weighted by the hoomans and then pushed through a computer to do the lots of hard sums repeatedly and quickly. The computer didn't make the decisions, it just worked them out for the people.
But you wouldn't think that from the BBC/politicians.
To be honest I don't think the maths was that hard, there was just alot of it to work out.
Really, due to how the system appears to have been applied (all students graded in each class from top to bottom, historic results etc etc) it seems like the sort of algebraic equation that I used to toy with in GSCE maths (I got a B, would have been an A* but I was shit at coursework...as in 10 pages of it...I still hate documentation to this day).
A maths grad I know said it was the thing he could work out in the student bar on the back of a beer matt after sampling this week's cask selection.
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