Make It Make Sense!
The students banner reads ‘Make It Make Sense?’
Student Power - the government makes a U-turn!
The 2020 exam marking system used by Ofqual turned out to be a fiasco - a lottery, because as we now know the algorithm (the scoring system used) had an inbuilt bias that put pupils from state schools at a distinct disadvantage. Some of these high achieving students saw their A-level marks disproportionately downgraded, compared to pupils who attended private schools.
In some cases, the downgrade was significant – up to two grades lower than expected, which inevitably has an impact on pupils immediate futures – including university offers which are dependent on students A-level grades. It wasn’t fair to leave universities to decide whether to give pupils who had ‘achieved’ lower than expected grades a conditional offer!
This weekend saw students protest up and down the country and the MP’s reported a surge in the number of complaints from their constituents. There were demands that the rest of the UK adopt Scotland’s approach and drop the controversial algorithm and instead use teacher assessments to determine student’s grades – we learnt today that the government has made a U-turn and agreed to use teachers assessments and scrap the results determined by the controversial algorithm.
There were calls to delay the publication of GCSE results (due for release this Thursday) because the same algorithm used to determine A-level grades had been used for GCSEs, however the U-turn announced today extended to GCSEs – though not yet to BTECs.
This has been a tough year for young people.
Not only might this exam marking chaos negatively affect a large number of young people, but the COVID-19 crisis has greatly impacted the youth as well. Redundancies and business closures mean there are massive restrictions on the fluidity of student internships and placements and less employment opportunities.
Young people from ethnic minority communities and the poor are hit the hardest. This is due to the increased risk of contracting the virus and the bias associated with the algorithm. Young people from poorer communities were also at risk of missing out on effective learning during the COVID lockdown due to a lack resources which they relied on the schools to provide such as access to computers; as well as also being equally affected by the algorithm bias.