So is "controversial" the same as unfair or bad? Journalists often use "controversial" to discredit something that is not in accordance to their ideology. Controversial politicians (which politician isn't controversial?), controversial university professors, controversial speeches, controversial thoughts...
It's controversial in the sense that a bunch of people are protesting about it. Whether it's actually unfair or bad is unknown.
Fairness is a complicated thing. A lot of it is based on feeling and relative status, rather than some objective measure of well-being. One person might find it deeply unfair that another person has a lot of money, relatively speaking. But take that money away and redistribute it equally between the two and now the latter person may find the situation unfair.
It is claimed that in any class where the chance of someone failing is judged to be > 0%, even if it is a tiny fraction of a percentage point, then the algorithm requires that someone in the class MUST be given a failing grade, even if it the weakest student in a very high performing class.
So is it? The guy is mining theoretical examples, but I wonder if in practice anyone has been hurt by this. And if they have (let's say a non-failing student was given a failing grade), why not handle those cases within a manual appeals process? After all, the exams weren't written, so no matter what mechanism you choose their will be students that get higher markers than they otherwise would have received and lower marker than they otherwise deserved - but I suspect, even in those cases, the marks will be in the same ballpark.
Of course children have been hurt by this is practice, there are numerous cases of children getting down graded from their predicted results so badly they're having University offer places withdrawn, and it's not by a point or two, we're talking straight A students getting demotd to Ds across the board because their school has a history of bad results, which are irrelevant to any given student right now.
Oxford have decided to ignore results and honor previously given offers because the process is so untrustworthy.
>Of course children have been hurt by this is practice, there are numerous cases of children getting down graded from their predicted results so badly they're having University offer places withdrawn
Yes. I understand there will be cases like this, but what numbers are we talking about?
And you were never going to prevent circumstances like those.
>we're talking straight A students getting demotd to Ds across the board because their school has a history of bad results, which are irrelevant to any given student right now.
That's not irrelevant. Schools don't flip their standards from year or another. A bad school this year, will be a bad school next year. And many students are hurt by mark inflation. It isn't fair that one school will give out B, while another A+ for the same academic performance - and that certainly happens. There was a case in Canada some time ago where it came out that Universities were scoring high-schools based on performance of their alumni and normalizing the marks of new applicants based on those metrics. It was a small controversy, but what else are they going to do? The alternative is to assume that 'A' from one school is the same as 'A' from another - which is grossly unfair.
>Oxford have decided to ignore results and honor previously given offers because the process is so untrustworthy.
Good. Everyone understands that this is a weird time and everyone is trying their best. This is why this does not worry me one bit. I fully expect all schools that rely on these marks to be a little bit more understanding.
Marks aren't awarded by the school per se, they're awarded by one of the agencies such as AQA. This results in a lot of angry and upset teachers as the marks just received are a surprise to them too.
The Scottish government SQA has already backed down on its "adjustment" and agreed to use estimated marks from teachers and mock exams.
>The Scottish government SQA has already backed down on its "adjustment" and agreed to use estimated marks from teachers and mock exams.
And you think that's more fair? Because to me that is a way worse method of ranking. Mark inflation exists and vary by school. That's a fact. Schools will low academic performance are more guilty of this because all schools and teachers will inevitably grade on a scale relative to other students in that school.
Listen, you can do whatever you want. The reality is that there are more applicants than there are seats at the universities. You can give everyone an 'A' and it won't change the fact that the same amount of students are going to get those spots. The method adopted by the Scottish government punishes students for going to schools and having teachers that don't inflate their marks.
To clarify this - as far as I've seen, so far, 3 of the 45 Oxford colleges/PPHs (Worcester, Wadham, and St Edmund Hall) are accepting all offer-holders regardless of results.
(Oxford, along with Cambridge but unlike many universities, has the results of interviews and, for many subjects, admissions tests to assess to whom to offer a place. They make offers expecting that the vast majority of them will be met, rather than over-offering and expecting A-level results to prune the numbers significantly. In previous incarnations of the admissions system, candidates who passed the entrance exam and interview routinely got an offer of two Es, i.e. a formality. So, providing places to all offer-holders would not seem an unreasonable course of action in the circumstances.)
> They make offers expecting that the vast majority of them will be met, rather than over-offering and expecting A-level results to prune the numbers significantly.
Notable exception to this would be Cambridge maths, who over-offer significantly for Mathematics (last year: 541 offers, 253 acceptances). Quite a lot of people miss their STEP offer so colleges can choose on results day who to take based on STEP, UMS, interview, etc. Though STEP unlike A-Levels was sat this year, so they're still able to do that selection.
Disappointment on results day is par for the course. Grades awarded this year were higher than last year across the board, so it can't be argued that the system was unreasonably harsh. The centre-assessed grades provided by schools and colleges were unrealistically ambitious, so if they were taken at face value we would have seen an unprecedented level of grade inflation.
As always, students who are unhappy with their results have the option of (re)-sitting their exams and re-applying for university; given the substantial uncertainty over whether universities will be able to offer anything like a normal level of teaching in the next academic year, deferring might be a sensible option regardless of results.
It's very clearly unfair, I'm not sure what your example has to do with anything.
No students performance should be a sum based on how previous students have done at their school. That's literally reinforcing the postcode divide in education quality that were supposed to turn a blind eye to.
My home town school has historically refused to even put children in for exams if they didn't get at least a C grade in their mocks because they valued league table position so highly (helps with investment and alumni donations etc). That cynical and should-be-illegal approach clearly benefits their students in this situation more than schools in the area that do right by their children.
And more than any of that, this is the real world effects of the bullshit algorithm peddlers have been pushing for the last few years. Algorithms can solve any real world problem given the data. Well they can't. They can give the proposition of an answer to the problem, but at costs to some that are too high to bear.
My high school had one person 3 years prior to my senior year get into an Ivy, and then before that it was no one in recent memory. In my senior class, 6 of us got into Ivies. I can only imagine what my life would be like if we only got the "fair" allotment of zero Ivy spots in a system like this.
Similar happened to me (UK) - my school went from performing under the national average for the preceding three years to being notably above for my year group, and no one could remember anyone going to Oxbridge, but there were two of us in that year (the school barely even knew about the extra exams we had to take - required for one, optional for the other - so the prep. was more or less entirely self-taught).
Low-performing students at private schools are having their estimated Cs and Ds bumped up to As. Stellar students at schools in poor areas who got As in their mock exams and have teacher-predicted As are being awarded Ds instead.
> "Low-performing students at private schools are having their estimated Cs and Ds bumped up to As"
Do you have an example of this happening? It seems basically impossible from my understanding of the process.
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Edit: I think I understand how it can happen. A school with a cohort that is small, but large enough to get the algorithm, and a previously exemplary results, has an unusually bad pupil. I can see this happening in a subject like Further Maths where only good students take it
I wanted to use the word 'contentious', but I felt that would bend Hacker News rules. 'controversial' certainly feels like the right word in this case.
The scheme is flawed, as it clearly penalises some students, and benefits others. And many are rightfully outraged by that.
And then, after that, this algorithm nonsensically applies an enormous upward or downward adjustment depending on what someone decided was the quality (read: prevalent socioeconomic status) of the school they attend.
The algorithm took the teachers' recommended grades and used them only to rank the students at that school. The actual grades were calculated based on past years' performance for each school. So if you were the top performer at a low-ranking school, your grade would be in line with top performers at that school in previous years.
No. The system aimed for no nationwide grade inflation. When it then took a number of private school’s predictions at face value (no alteration if you paid for a small class size), meaning fewer high grades available for other schools. So lots of state schools had across the board drops from previous years.
1. Teachers submit both an estimated grade and a relative rank ordering for each student
2. Ofqual calculate a distribution based on the predicted grades
3. They compare it to grade distributions at that school from previous years
4. If need be, they shift the distribution up or down to be roughly in line with that school's prior results
5. They then use the rank ordering to assign students grades from that distribution (e.g. in a class with 20 students, each student is worth 5% of the distribution - so if it predicted 10% A* (highest grade), 15% A, etc., the top 2 students would get an A*, the next 3 an A and so on)
There's some kind of predictive linear model (page 40) which is based on a student's prior attainment (i.e. GCSE and SATs 'data'), but then modelled at the level of the exam centre (i.e. school). These models are separately fitted for different bins (I think ten are shown at one point) of achievement.
The whole document is pretty incoherent. I suspect the 'algorithm' is a set of excel spreadsheets.
Here's a write-up of the situation, shared on Facebook publicly, from a friend involved in careers at a UK Sixth Form college (where students take their A-Levels):
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I've spent the last two days dealing with very upset young people who have had their plans ripped up. Some will still be able to go to university, but not the one they planned on and have been forced into clearing, some won't be able to go at all.
So the story behind this is as follows.
Teachers at colleges and schools submitted grades to exam boards earlier in the summer based on their predictions as to how students would do in exams they would not take due to C19. The exam boards then mauled these with an algorithm.
Our current understanding is that subject cohorts of less than 10 have not had the algorithm applied and 15-20 only slightly. Most private and many small Sixth forms in schools fall in to this category, (note this is students in a subject at a provider not total numbers at that provider)
Some centre assessed grades (CAGs) will have been assigned optomistically (inflated) by teachers in an attempt to advantage them and their students but the vast majority will have been genuine assessments based on submitted work and teacher experience. They had no idea just how much adjustment would be applied, I'm sure if they had them they might not have been quite so honest!
[Edit: a colleague has pointed out that sometimes predicted grades are higher than achieved because there are unanticipated issues very close to exams such as illness, bereavement a stress which are not evident in year. This cannot be predicted by teachers and compensated for in advance, although many schools will have tried to adjust for students who experienced issues in year]
To compensate for this small amount of ingrained optimisation and unpredictability the exam boards have moderated down larger schools CAGs (but not the smaller cohorts). This includes many sixth form colleges with thousands of exam entries.
Sixth form colleges and larger sixth forms are very good at estimating grades and have been extremely thorough in their efforts to assign realistic grades. Our own teachers spent weeks compiling grades from previous work and tests to get the most accurate assessment they could. No one wanted their students to miss out, no one underestimated their CAGs.
The exam boards were not going to stand for a big increase in grades this year so they applied an aggressive algorithm to the larger subject cohorts. Our college for example has hundreds of A level maths students which makes us a target for harsh moderation despite having increadable value added and a history of very accurate (not over inflated) predictions; vast numbers of our students have seen their grades dropped by one or two grade boundaries, I have only seen one moderated up.
Many of our students have missed out on university places. Despite positive news stories about one Oxbridge University College most universities have not moderated their offers in light of this crisis and many students at private schools will have been able to swoop in on those places and adjust upwards to higher tarrif courses.
Now, whether you think this is a government fix up or not; it is not fair on poorer students at bigger schools and coincidentally some more 'privileged' students have been given another leg up.
Talk to your MP talk about it on social media and lobby to get this fixed because it's going to mess up a lot of young people's futures. These young people are now voters and I hope they will be registering their concern with their local MPs which may motivate them to put pressure on the minister and in turn the exam boards
If you think this was a fiasco then hold on tight because next weeks GCSE results will be based on less information and are likely to be even more skewed! We will hit a second crisis of students not being able to access A levels and colleges having to juggle the same situation as universities are this week. Many GCSE students wi...
Thank you for information. As a Scot, with a relative involved (she got what she needed), I am grateful, that the Scot gov changed their minds and used teachers grades without moderation. Even though our mocks (“prelims”) are produced by the SQA who also do the main exams.
It’s a unprecedented situation, let’s cut some slack and base it on the best info that we have, the teachers view.
I hope English gov see sense but so far they don’t have demonstrated much.
As I commented on his post, you'd have thought that after seeing the mess in Scotland there would have been alarms bells ringing among senior leadership "Abort, abort, abort!"
But yeah, why would you bother learning when you can just make the same mistake?
There isn't an English Government. There is no English Parliament equivalent to those in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. We English are (mis)ruled by the UK government, including by MPs from those other nations.
You've described a system where, if an exceptional kid comes from a lower-performing school, there is nothing they can do to gain entrance to the top universities.
I wonder if the effects are visible when comparing allocation of spots vs past years. Or is that what they are optimizing for? To achieve the same allocation across feeder schools as the year before?
> You've described a system where, if an exceptional kid comes from a lower-performing school, there is nothing they can do to gain entrance to the top universities.
You're right, and that's what is happening this year. Straight A students that had solid offers from major universities have found themselves with Bs, and seen those places vanish in the mist.
Stupidly, if they just accepted this year as a weird year where everyone did a better than normal, it would be less negatively impactful than what they've opted for.
Even worse, this was literally what Scotland just went through a few weeks ago. There's just no excuse for it.
Who is to say your method is any more fair? There's nothing they can do to please everyone. Someone is going to benefit. Someone is going to lose. In the big picture, good students will end up with good marks, and bad students will end up with bad markets.
What a horrible situation where a whole year group are reliant on their teachers’ opinion of them and the success of other kids at the same school the previous year. Neither of which these children have any direct control over.
A big pile of 'meh'. They are trying to make a statistical guess based on priors because the pandemic prevented the exams from being written. They are going to get things wrong. If they have an appeals process for things that are completely out line (e.g. a passing student getting a failing grade), then that's the best you can hope for given the circumstances.
In the big picture, the good students are going to get good markers, average students are going to get average markets, and bad students will get bad markets. Again, it is what it is.
The problem is that the prior appears to be placed over the school, rather than the individual -- ie if your school had a low proportion of high achievers in previous years, students are finding their grades marked down, almost regardless of their performance. This results in particularly high grade disparity between independent and state schools. So it is not so much the case that good students get good marks, bad students get bad marks, but rather good schools get good marks, "bad" schools get bad marks.
Because mark inflation is a thing, and schools are different. There are schools that will give out A+ and others a B, for the same academic performance. School reputations don't change from year to year. So a school that inflates marks one year, will more than likely inflate them the next year. Are you suggesting that this should not be taken into consideration? That you should simply trust the relative weight of grade (relative to all the other schools) at face-value?
>"bad" schools get bad marks.
Why the quotes? There are schools that are at the bottom of academic rankings. That's a fact of reality.
>students are finding their grades marked down, almost regardless of their performance.
What numbers are we talking about here? No matter what algorithm or heuristic they chose, some unfairness was going to happen and my argument is that these cases are overstated. I'm sure they exist because we're talking about hundreds of thousands of students all in different circumstances. Having said that, in cases of egregious outcome, an appeals process would make sense. Also I'm sure many universities will take the pandemic into consideration and the fact that this was a best attempt at replicating standardizing test result without a test actually being taken.
Right. A levels were not written so a statistical model was created to approximate A level results based on prior performance of applicants correlated with their school and course marks. Yeah, I get all that. It changes nothing about my argument.
Small classes are excluded, so as you say, biased towards private schools. My niece was hit by this but luckily still did well enough to get a place. She was attending a large school in a deprived area. Her coursework was A*, given predicted AAA but was downgraded to ABB.
The minister of education's reason for downgrading the grades was so that pupils did not end up in jobs they were not capable of doing. Delicious irony.
> The minister of education's reason for downgrading the grades was so that pupils did not end up in jobs they were not capable of doing. Delicious irony.
Even if you weren't completely mistaken in your assumptions, shouldn't students have the right to get the exam grades they actually deserve? I was at best average in secondary school and I had to kick it up a few notch for the national exams (Portuguese A-level equivalent). Under your "meh" style, I'd have lost at least a year before I'd be able to enroll in uni, because whatever!, despite getting scores above the 95th percentile in my exams.
>shouldn't students have the right to get the exam grades they actually deserve?
Look, nothing I've seen here changes the base fact that if you were a good students getting good grades, you are going to be OK.
It also doesn't change the base fact that mark inflation exits. That some schools will grade higher than others for the same academic performance.
So no, you don't have a 'right' to a mark you haven't earned. If you had weak course marks in a school that inflates marks, you don't get to the spot of another student that worked hard during the term and was in a school that did not inflate marks.
I have yet to see a good argument that this model is bad (and it may be), or percentage of students have gotten a grade that is out of line with expectations. Also, I do support an appeals process for the cases where the algorithm just got it completely wrong.
>I was at best average in secondary school and I had to kick it up a few notch for the national exams (Portuguese A-level equivalent)
If you were a bad students, or a student on some margin, you were always going to rely on luck to get through. What if the the set of questions on the standardized test just so happen to coincide with areas you were weak in? I was in situations where I had a weak grasp on course material, but the exam just so happened to have questions in areas that I was strong in and I got a higher mark than I probably deserved. It happens. But again, things just average themselves out over time and students will end up where they 'deserve' to be.
>Under your "meh" style, I'd have lost at least a year before I'd be able to enroll in un
I'll play along. Let's say you had weak course marks and you were hoping to use the test to boost your final score to get into the school of your choice. Then covid happened and you weren't able to. Well... take that as important life lesson. Don't slack off until the end and hope that you can make up your grades with the exams.
> Let's say you had weak course marks and you were hoping to use the test to boost your final score to get into the school of your choice. Then covid happened and you weren't able to. Well... take that as important life lesson. Don't slack off until the end and hope that you can make up your grades with the exams.
I'm not sure why what you mean by "weak course marks" - something like A-Level Maths is assessed entirely in exams at the end of the two year period. There's no formal assessment prior to that.
> If you had weak course marks in a school that inflates marks, you don't get to the spot of another student that worked hard during the term and was in a school that did not inflate marks.
Alternatively, if you _did_ work hard, but it's assumed that your predicted grades have been inflated, you face getting knocked down through no fault of your own. I also query the notion that you can reliably know which schools get predicted grades wrong. Teachers, and teaching methods, change every year - the people making the predictions are not necessarily the same year to year.
>Alternatively, if you _did_ work hard, but it's assumed that your predicted grades have been inflated, you face getting knocked down through no fault of your own.
Mark inflation is a real thing by the way. You can ignore it and assume all teacher-assigned markers across the country are roughly the same, but then you will punish those pupils who come from school where the standards are higher and higher grades are harder to get. Is that fair?
>I also query the notion that you can reliably know which schools get predicted grades wrong.
That's actually not very hard to do. There was a minor controversy a few back in Canada where a number universities were found out to have correlated the marks students got in university with the marks they got from the specific high school they came from. They had that kind of historical data on every local high-school. They then normalized those marks. People got offended but without provincial standardized testing and grading, you're just going to punish schools with highest academic standards.
>Teachers, and teaching methods, change every year - the people making the predictions are not necessarily the same year to year.
I agree it changes. I disagree it changes every year, especially in aggregate. A low performing academic school this year is going to be a low performing academic school next year. Maybe in 5 years it will be different, but year over year, the changes are going to be inconsequential.
> In the big picture, the good students are going to get good markers, average students are going to get average markets, and bad students will get bad markets. Again, it is what it is.
In my year, I and one other student had to go significantly beyond the support provided to get the grades we needed. I studied one A-Level entirely outside school as they couldn't make the timetable work, and then added another to be done in a year (typically a two year course) because my school had given me bad advice about which were required. If it were this year, and my school were known for overpmarking, I'd face getting downgraded for something I had no control over. I was predicted, and needed, the top grades (AAA) in specific subjects, and even dropping to AAB would mean not getting into my university of choice. It can be a kick in the teeth for anyone who has put the extra effort in.
Essentially, students lucky enough to be in private education were more likely to see their grades go up / stay the same, compared to students receiving free education seeing grades going down.
Has been explained away as a byproduct of a sensible algorithm, but considering the government's track record and private school backgrounds (85% of the UK's Prime Ministers have been educated at Eton, arguably the country's most exclusive private school) it's hard not to be sceptical that this wasn't intentional and class-motivated.
2)
"Appears that Ofqual's algorithm caused today's A-level chaos. Ofqual chair Roger Taylor, also chairs the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation (CDEI). Cummings' fave AI consultants - Faculty, have some juicy contracts with CDEI. And Faculty's COO Richard Sargeant is on CDEI board"
(Ofqual is the department that oversees exams and responsible for this situation, they report to Gavin Williams the government's Education Secretary. Cummings is a controversial special adverse to the Prime Minister, and Faculty is a firm he used when he was leading one of the two primary pro-Brexit campaigns before the referendum. Subjective statement: Cummings is a vile, evil man.)
> it's hard not to be sceptical that this wasn't intentional and class-motivated.
It's incredibly easy "not to be sceptical".
The teacher's predicted grades are, on average, unprecedented. And represent many times greater than any previous yoy increase. This is far less true at top-performing schools where teachers are predicting far more consistent grades (by the very nature of being a top performing school).
Teachers shouldn't have been asked to predict grades. That's the heart of the problem. Not some harebrained in-public conspiracy.
This whole thing is dumb. And the media are deliberately failing to explain basic facts about the education system to provoke this kind of nonesense outrage.
I completely agree that the system put in place is poor and that it causing an accidental bias is very feasible.
But if you're going to put this system in place, with months of planning, you should make damn sure that it isn't massively favouring the children who are already advantaged in life. Which it statistically is, whether intentional or not.
They screwed it up so spectacularly that the education secretary had to make concessions to it two days before the results, then a day after the results Ofqual made a statement about who could appeal that contradicted the education secretary, before withdrawing that statement a few hours later saying they were still deciding.
So sure it could be entirely down to incompetence not malice. But given either is possible, and this government's track record of cronyism I don't see why it's unreasonable to be sceptical.
Those children were already going to get the highest results.
There is no incompetence here. The predicted grades are a good estimate of what the results would have been.
The issue is that all teachers significantly over-predicted their students grades, but less so at high-performing schools. (Why? because the grades are more consistent at those schools, so there's less room for error).
Independant schools (private schools) received 4.7% more A/A* grades than they did in 2019. The most common type of non-private school, Secondary Comprehensive, received only 2% more A/A* grades than in 2019.
The algorithm didn't keep the gap between paid and unpaid education, it expanded it.
(Source for these numbers and more in my first comment.)
I was lucky enough to not only go to two private schools, but the second one was ranked #1 in England for exam ranks 2 of the 3 years I was there (and helped me get good grades despite being extremely unmotivated and lazy). But at least my privilege was to be given a good education that made learning / passing exams (the latter more) easy, not that the government decided my school deserved an artificial grades boost compared to state schools.
If the previous YoY was also 5%/2%, then it is just repeating the trend.
It isnt the job of statisticians to "fix" social inequality by BSing some grades. Its their job to estimate likely exam results based on previous performance.
There's absolutely no grounds on which to assume that growth in A*/A across these demographics would be the same; and of course, very many reasons to presume they'd be different.
It's only been a couple of days, we'll get more data journalists breaking it down better soon.
You know what would be really helpful? If the algorithm was released to be publicly reviewed. Oh, but the government is refusing to do that, and Ofqual made anyone consulting on this project sign a 5 year NDA or they couldn't get involved. Hmm.
Edit: and while I'm pretty sure the data will show schools weren't on track for that inflation, actually no I disagree with you that it would be fair to extrapolate previous cohort improvements to this year's anyway.
However more important than the algorithm is just the media reporting on what ofqual actually say. I've barely read any of their actual analysis in news on the issue.
Key facts: students are always ranked and graded on a curve. Student populations have a fixed number of grades awarded every year, etc.
The system is specifically designed in recognition that grades are positional goods, ie., they are valuable only to the degree that other people do not have them.
That's the view of the education system every year. And its the basic assumption of this process. They will never over-award A grades specifically because they want universities/business/etc. to index them to a percentile performance in the population.
> Key facts: students are always ranked and graded on a curve. Student populations have a fixed number of grades awarded every year, etc.
I'm pretty sure that's not correct, please find a source suggesting that. There have been major reforms (primarily the changing A Levels back from the modular version that Labour had previously introduced) and these were specifically aimed at reducing grade inflation. If there were a fixed number of grades each year there wouldn't be any inflation to counter.
Starting with the 2010 introduction of the A* grade, the proportion of grades awarded has been almost constant (25% A/A*, 25% B, 25% C).
This is in contrast to the consistent 'grade inflation' visible for the previous twenty years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation#UK_A-Level_cla...
Isn't that due to the attempted curbing of grade inflation working well? As far as I know they haven't returned to actually grading on a curve ranking like they did decades ago, in theory if next year every student somehow handed in the perfect papers they'd all get top scores.
>Student populations have a fixed number of grades awarded every year, etc.
Yes, for the national cohort. This is different, the predicted results were weighted on a per-school basis. For example, a particular child taking, say, a history exam, in a school which had previously had no pupils that achieved A* in history over the past four years had probably no chance of getting an A*, even if that was their teachers' prediction. Purely on the basis of which school they went to. A weak cohort (compared to previous years) at a good school would be upweighted.
How could +5% possibly be an actual trend?
What new magic teaching innovation have independent schools done for this year's cohort, that wasn't available in previous years or to teachers in the state sector?
You're making very strong statements over a huge assumption that you have no data to back up. This is not like previous years. The students sat no exam, they were ranked within their school, and then assigned grades based on the previous performance of their school. It is reverse affirmative action.
> The issue is that all teachers significantly
> over-predicted their students grades,
> but less so at high-performing schools.
"All teachers" is a sweeping statement.
There are teachers in comprehensive schools that are tough-markers, too. My wife, who is a teacher in a London school, was annoyed in both directions - there were teachers that she felt had given away high grades, but there was also a teacher that had given the kids in her class grades lower than she expected they'd get (as her identity is tied to being overly careful and she liked to grade kids harder in mocks, etc).
What she felt was bad was that cohorts of kids were often very different year upon year. Last year there were particularly bright kids doing Physics in her school, but this year there was only a few kids and they were much worse. But the algorithm awarded them grades above what she expected.
There were also kids that she expects would have worked hard before their exams and gotten results above what they were given. They didn't get given the chance to do this.
I meant all teachers across school types, not all teachers individually.
In both state and private schools, teachers over-predicted. But higher-performing schools have higher and more uniform results, so there's less room to actually over predict -- so there's comparatively less reduction.
That's just an in-built concequence of what it means to be a high performing school
I don't believe in the media conspiracy that the Tories created an algorithm that systematically awards higher grades to rich kids because of inherent classism or even by accident.
But I do really disagree with the insistence that all teachers in comprehensive schools were conspiring to give their kids higher grades than they deserved -- this view was frequently repeated on social media. Even if there were some that were doing this and it was apparent from the statistics, teachers are not a homogenous group and there are many teachers that take fair grading very seriously and even take enjoyment in being tough markers.
I don't know the data but my own worry is that this will have hurt the high variance or lazy kids that won't normally get high grades but would normally settle down and revise hard for such an important exam. I hope that these kids will be given the opportunity to resit the exam for free, since I doubt an algorithm could capture the variance that exists every year.
Just to be clear about what actually happened, the results were weighted on a per-school basis, based on results from the previous four years. The disparity in weighting is not solely down to effects at the top of the distribution.
The bit you haven't understood is that teacher predicted grades were reassessed by the algorithm unless the class sizes were 5 children or fewer. This meant that the predicted grades that were not adjusted by the algo were overwhelmingly at independent fee-paying schools.
Independent schools got higher grades because of a quirk in the algorithm. If there weren't enough students taking a particular course at a particular centre for the rank/previous results method to be reasonably accurate, the algorithm defaulted to partially or wholly relying on predicted grades.
Independent schools generally have fewer students and a wider range of courses and predicted grades were inflated across the board, so they ended up with better grades than larger colleges and academies.
I'm not sure how you could have avoided this bias without creating a lot of really weird outcomes.
Well, wealthy students who opt out of government secondary schools could be given lowest priority at government colleges, and if that offends someone they can expand government funded colleges so that all could attend.
>if that offends someone they can expand government funded colleges so that all could attend.
Universities in England are funded primarily by tuition fees. There are consistently more university places than applicants, but not necessarily at universities you'd want to attend.
> If anyone doubts who the winners are this year, here's a random selection of independent schools and the % of A*-A grades this year.
> 2019 figures follow in brackets.
Mayfield Girls' 66% (55%)
Sherfield School 70% (37%)
Leweston School 51% (37%)
Farlington School 62% (48%)
The Marist School 55% (52%)
Godolphin School 50% (29.2%)
St Mary's Cambridge 54% (51%)
St George's Ascot 63% (35%)
Rye St Anthony 48.1% (18.3%)
Teachers predict grades all the time. It's part of how student progress is tracked. We are constantly being told what level our kids are at and predicted level at exam time.
Part of the problem is that teachers often push the "prediction" slightly higher as a means of motivating the student. Now those predictions are being used as the real deal.
I am pretty convinced that most teachers with more than superficial experience will be able to predict grades reasonably accurately, after doing so for many tens of students 5-6 times a year .
Well as a point of fact, they didnt. Their requested, "accurate" grades represent a 20% increase in general attainment. That has never happened in the history of modern education, and occurs only when, eg., civil wars end.
As a comparative reference, we'd expect an at-most, 3% increase in IQ in the general population.
I have no problem with the idea of down-weighting the entire national cohort to correct for this. The problem is that they actually weighted the results on a per-school basis.
Even down-weighting the entire national cohort... some kids have seen grades go from C (or B/C in one case) to U! A fail grade for an exam they weren't allowed to take.
That would be an improvement if your luck of the draw was national rather than biased in favour of private schools, but it's still a pretty awful outcome.
There may not have been any solution available that would be 100% fair to both this year and other year cohorts, but at the very least they should avoid making any student feel actively screwed over.
This is desirable and it's easy to explain why. For any student there will be a range of grades they could expect to achieve. The fairest grade to assign is the best case grade in that range (not the midpoint), because there is no evidence that they would not have studied hard and achieved that grade in the exam. If every student is given their best case grade then you will indeed see an overall rise, this simply reflects a lack of knowledge of who would have studied hard and who would not have.
That's only fair in an environment where education is not a scarce good. But college education needs some way to artificially pick winners because the schools are underfunded and then economy is classist.
Nonsense. There has always been a divide in the UK between public schools that try and predict grades accurately and private schools that game the system to maximise their students' chances of acceptance.
I don't think teachers, or anyone else, can reliably predict results. I got the equivalent of an A* in most of my of my AS exams, but because I had bad GCSEs my results were ranked down for my predicted grades to AAB. Only after complaining did they change them to AAA. In the event I got two A*'s and an A - a whole grade above all of my original predictions.
The entire system is asinine because there's no reliable way of predicting future results from past performance, because of the unfair discretion it gives teachers and schools, and because it demotivates students to achieve above their prediction (because they cannot be accepted by any course above that prediction). It should have been abolished long ago.
Given the extent of some candidates differences and the impact to their life (denied entrance to offered Uni courses for that year) there’s some very serious outrage. If you were part of good class in a school with a poor record, then you’re stuffed. It’s a unprecedented situation and the only guide that you have are teacher grades.
>Given the extent of some candidates differences and the impact to their life (denied entrance to offered Uni courses for that year) there’s some very serious outrage.
It's not as bad as you might think. A large number of students are rejecting their offers with the intention of re-applying in 2021 and there has been a substantial reduction in the number of foreign students, so there are an unprecedented number of surplus places available through clearing. Even if your grades are substantially worse than you might have hoped, your chances of getting a place on a decent course are very good.
What doesn't quite make sense, is the fact that these students sat 'mock' examinations earlier in the year. Presumably, these 'mock' exams are based on an empirical standard, similar to the one used for the 'final' exam. So the first question is, why weren't these 'mock' results the main anchor for these derived results?
The problem with mock exams is that they don't follow any national rules on how they're used. Some schools do them in November, some in March. Some teachers mark them having not been trained in A Level marking. Some schools may do mocks in exact exam conditions, others might not bother with one part of the test, or have them done without supervision. Some teachers grade them accurately, some intentionally grade them harshly to motivate their students to study. Etc.
I suppose teachers never had a duty to communicate that to the students before, but that's going to be a pretty important detail in the coming weeks.
I doubt many parents would have been made aware of the precise meaning of 'mock' examinations results either.
The next question then, was whether this emergency scheme was tested against results from previous years, rather than fashioning the algorithm to match results from previous school years.
It's not obvious that predicted grades are categorically worse than the system they put in place though, is it? In some aggregate statistics we can see them perform worse but exams and grading aren't about averages at school level but individual achievement. A prediction systems that doesn't take students prior achievements into account is just obviously defective here. And that matters especially if it locks out a whole year of students from the top universities that are so life/career deciding in the UK, because getting a place at them by definition requires being an outlier.
The social and cultural factors at play are not well represented by just looking at the mean.
And finally, so what if 2020 had had outlier grade average? It's the outlier year.
> A prediction systems that doesn't take students prior achievements into account is just obviously defective here.
Doesn't it? What else would how students have been ranked in ability mean?
> And finally, so what if 2020 had had outlier grade average? It's the outlier year.
"Hey, we'll give everyone 40% better grades, because it was a tough year" won't do good. You'll get lots of people into university who will fail miserably, because the grades don't magically improve their skills. Unless, and that's a bad idea as well, you just tighten the criteria so the same number as before can go to uni. Grade inflation won't help anyone either.
We're going to have a demonstration of what happens if everyone just gets the predicted grades and 2020 becomes an outlier year, because the government did a u-turn and it happened. So far, top-tier universities don't have the space to admit everyone who meets their offer requirements, the lower-tier universities are likely to not have enough students to remain financially viable due to everyone going to the top-tier ones, it's likely that the former will be ameliorated somewhat by removing the cap on admissions but this will make the latter worse, and it's all a huge mess. Every part of this was predictable, but none of it was explained by the press - which had been pushing the idea that everyone should be able to get their predicted grades - until it actually happened, because they were more interested in blaming the Government than accurately describing the pros and cons of the different options. Now the BBC is pushing for an inquiry as their headline front-page story, as though there was some kind of secret malfeasance to be uncovered rather than a set of bad options with really obvious, unavoidable tradeoffs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53826305
> Essentially, students lucky enough to be in private education were more likely to see their grades go up / stay the same, compared to students receiving free education seeing grades going down.
Students in “private” schools get a better quality of education than those receiving “free” education. And it isn't free, we pay for it through taxation. And over here the “private” schools are called “public”. While the public schools are called comprehensive.
I'm aware of the naming (I'm English and was educated here), but writing for HN's international audience it's easier to use universally understood terms rather than ones you need to understand our system to recognise. FYI only some private schools are Public Schools (and all Public Schools are private), but the term for all private ones is actually Independent Schools.
And yes, obviously the better education leads to better grades, but that's a completely different issue.
The point in my comment that you replied to is not that independent schools got better grades than state schools this year; it's that their % improvement from previous years to this year is way higher than non-independant schools % change from previous years.
Couldn't the UK just have a regular exam, just with the social distancing measures implemented? The exams were held in many European countries with these measures and nothing bad happened and the children has received a fair examination for the University
My brother here in the Netherlands just got his average grade (of the test throughout the year that count toward the final grade) for each subject as final grade, which seems like it's fair enough.
This UK government did away with most coursework and also with sitting half of the papers in your penultimate year, half the next. Against the guidance of most universities and schools. And setting themselves up for this.
You can curve the scores on a meaningless exam and give the impression that some have learned and some have not, or I guess, you can skip the exam entirely and go to the end product.
"In Scotland the accusations of unfairness prompted a switch to using teachers' predicted grades. These predictions were collected in England too - but were discounted as being the deciding factor, because they were so generous that it would have meant a huge increase in top grades, up to 38%. There were also doubts about the consistency and fairness of predictions and whether the cautious and realistic could have lost out to the ambitiously optimistic."
As always, the question when using an algorithm or test is, 'compared to what?'
This was so foreseeable when they anounced the plans.
One possible solution could have been if they do the same statistical estimation game and then offer a choice to each student: you can take your estimated grades or go for an exam. If you take the exam you get what you het there. It might go lower or higher than the estimate. This would have incentivised that only those who are certain of themselves and their estimated grades are insuficient towards their goals will go for the tests. And since these are outliers already there will be a lot less of them than the general population, thus it is easier to organise socially distanced exams for them.
Of course nothing is easy at scale and many details need to be ironed out but thats what we keep the Miniszry of Education for.
Not possible to sit exams for everyone. A limited staged / “bubbled” approach in July/August could have worked fine. But it would require actual coordination and precision, and that’s not the sort of thing a Tory government of “big thinkers” can deliver.
I think if children took exams this year we'd find an even bigger divide between rich and poor. Private schools did vastly more teaching over lockdown than state schools [1]. It wouldn't be a good look given that the government is under a lot of pressure because private schools did better under their algorithm.
"In 2019, 21% (31,220) of accepted 18 year old applicants met or exceeded their predicted grades, a decrease of 3 percentage points. In addition, 43.2% of accepted applicants had a difference of three or more A level grades – an increase of 5 percentage points (7,190 applicants more) since 2018."
Teacher predicted grades are almost useless.
Now Scotland has caved to political pressure and wants to inflate grades
"However, these grades, taken overall, would represent a significant improvement on previous years - including a jump of 20 percentage points in the pass rate for pupils from the most deprived areas."
"If the results had purely been based on the estimates from teachers, pass rates at grades A-C would have increased by 10.4 percentage points for National 5, by 14 percentage points for Higher and by 13.4 percentage points for Advanced Higher.
These estimated results would have led to a higher annual change than had ever been seen before in Scottish exam results if they had not been moderated by the SQA."
There's no good answer here, the unfairness is an inevitable side effect of lockdown, along with people dying due to stopped cancer treatments and a host of other issues.
Using teacher's predicted grades is stupid: teachers use predictions in whatever way they think will best motivate their students. If the student is lazy, they'll under-predict to shock them into revising more. If the student is not very confident, they'll over-predict to encourage them.
Unless the students are actually allowed to take an exam, all methods are unfair. Using mock results is at least tangentially related to the students' abilities.
You are under the mistaken assumption that somehow exams are more fair or get a better view of what students can do. It's well established that exams measure a few limited congnitive constructs and its not the smartest or most hard working students that perform best, but rather those who are prepared by teachers for those exact constructs and the precise way of answering them. A brilliant student at a public school might study hard and still not get as good results as a mediocre and lazy student at a private school which tells them and drills them on the exam topics (often having their teachers in the exam boards and anyway paying more so that those teachers that care and know how yo play the game ate likely to be recruited there).
It's absurd to think a central exam gives a more accurate picture of... What? Aptitude? Effort? ...? Than the teachers can have from working with students often for several years, seeing their work ethics, involvement in class, personal situations, etc.
In short: the system was broken and biased to begin with (at least in England, Scotland is doing much better). Now this bias and favour of 'better' schools is explicitly enforced through this weighting algorithm.
Exams, being far, far from perfect /ARE/ more fair. Why? because it is the same exam for everyone. The person marking the exam has no information about the person who wrote the paper, not their name, not what they look like, not how rich they are, not how pretty they are, not what school they attend.
Whether or not you can achieve better outcomes or get a better indication of capability with other means, that total anonymity and an absolutely common hurdle is a kind of fair that is tough to match in assessment. It shouldn't be under-vauled. We should be sure that any alternative really is better.
Let's not pretend that teachers' aren't subject to unconscious bias. I've also met a few who were just horrible human beings who had no business being in teaching.
Not what school they attend:
Except they dont mark their own schools and i think they keep the schools papers together in bundles. Plus markers have been to open days and continuous development days with the other teachers. plus they are having meetings daily to discuss how to mark classes of answers (where teaching methods used come up). i think the net of this is that they often do know what school they are marking (especially for the outliers - best and worst schools). For some subjects e.g. computer science then the pupils will answer in the langiages they were taught, so if its a python answer you know its one of the schools that teaches python)
There is kind of just a problem overall with comparing private schools to state schools. At the very least this process may have worked better if they had two data sets, one for private one for atate schools.
Beyond that though a stastical solution was never going to work, you cannot generate accurate discrete/quantized data, only representative random data.
private schools imho teach you to pass the exam, they are more cut throat about focussing on this than state schools. and the teachers seem to fight harder for their kids - the difference in personal statements from private school teachers compared to state schools on uni applications would be an interesting study.
I am not saying i have answers, just intereted in thw discussion. Overall i am always left with a few basic ideas to keep things fair (though i sometimes think some of these may be dumb and i am not suggesting do all of them):
-Zero charitable status or governemnt support for private education.
-cap the number of students a uni can take from one school (e.g. dont take the top 100 students, take the top 1 from 100 schools)
-ban people who were not state educated from governemnt positions. This is contravertial but imho you effectively live a different life when you go to privare schools (class sizes, support and oppourtunity are in comparable)
This is actually more likely the other way around. The perfections submitted, along with ranking for each class, were compiled and submitted for the purpose of awarding grades. They were always known to be a replacement for the exams.
Mocks on the other hand are graded with a view to provide the desired psychological effect (i.e. either as a boost or a kick up the rear). So mock results may well be less fair. This is coming from my partner who is a secondary school teacher.
Can someone explain to me the significance of A-level grades? If I understand Wikipedia correctly, students apply to universities using predicted grades anyways, and receive offers that are conditioned on the final grades. How about just make all offers unconditional? And if you are not going to universities, do anyone actually care about your A-level grades?
At least a couple of places, including one of Oxford Uni's colleges, have agreed to take anyone who was offered a conditional place, and there has been a hashtag trending on Twitter of #HonourTheOffer
I expect many more to follow, so it's possible that the universities will clear up an awful lot of that mess - but while some academics are saying yes great bring them all in, others are strongly against the idea of expanding to let more people in this year.
As to whether they're significant apart from for UCAS applications (university) - I'm not too sure. Personally I wouldn't care much about them on a CV of someone I was thinking of hiring in the best of years yet alone if I knew their results came from 2020.
But with unemployment rising fast, and much worse soon once government gradually removes support offered over the summer to keep people furloughed (companies paid to have their staff not working but kept officially on the payroll until they could get back to work), we've already heard stories in some places or a shop or a pub advertising a job offer and getting 1000+ applications... and in a terrible job market, school exam grades could likely be a decider for who gets called to interview for many working class jobs. (They already are even outside a terrible job market, that just amplifies it.)
edit: Oh, and while I don't know what proportion of people doing A Levels don't want to go to university (or want to go, but fail) - we're also a few days away from this same situation happening with the GCSE exams, which pretty much everyone legally has to do around age 16.
While these events are terrible, I am pleased that the decisions made by Ofqual are open to judicial review—and that the Good Law Project are considering issuing a claim to force Ofqual to fix this mess.
An obvious point not discussed is that the exams system was already biased to begin with. Previous years were already unfair as great kids at bad schools have much fewer chances than less great kids for which the parents can pay a great school. England especially is awful at achieving a fair system (that gives everyone a fair chance at good grades) because schools are so stratified - by design of funding rules, etc.
You're stating the obvious, a very well-known obvious. Perhaps you can suggest any system that is not intrinsically unfair (I'd be interested as I went both to schools in sink areas, and an expensive private school). (this was in the UK BTW)
> ...is awful at achieving a fair system [...] because schools are so stratified - by design of funding rules etc.
I'd say it was more down to the culture of parents in the poor areas mostly not giving a shit about their kid's education (and the roots of that aren't that the parents are intrinsically bad, it's a mindset of apathy inherited from their parents and the daily pressures that come with permanently worrying about money).
I'd prefer constructive comebacks from people rather than downvotes. I can't learn from downvotes.
But OMG the competence of the UK govt. It's like they literally can't do... anything without screwing it up. It is bizarre. Then they try to paper over it with words.
"I'd say it was more down to the culture of parents in the poor areas mostly not giving a shit about their kid's education"
Which sounds nasty, but rings true for a big part of England. It's also an uncomfortable truth, which basically always leads to downvotes.
Once a year (safe for this year, obviously) I'm in Blackpool at the Rebellion Punk Festival[1]. What you see in Blackpool and how people live there is very, very different from the impression you get when just visiting London.
People wouldn't believe how poor and destitute some areas in the UK are and the priority of a lot of people in such areas is not really education. Young women want as many kids as possible, since government benefits beat the shitty work prospects they have in such areas and the future for young people in general in those places are so bleak that it often leads to an understandable "why bother?" attitude.
And yes, this attitude is inherited, or actually worse. When there is a rare young person trying to be an achiever you can almost be sure he's mocked and bullied by his peers.
That is a most excellent response, and I agree with everything you say, including how and why that bit comes across nastily. Ta for that, I really must learn to be less of a tosser.
> rare young person trying to be an achiever you can almost be sure he's mocked and bullied by his peers
Yes. Someone on the web (maybe here, maybe slashdot) said that when someone tries, they're seen as trying to get above their station. Consequences follow.
I spent a couple of years on a sink estate in the UK as a kid. I know what it does to people.
I've been listening to talk radio here in the UK, and it's a constant stream of disappointed kids/teachers/parents phoning in. Some of the stories are horrendous, people expecting AAA getting CCD and similar. It seems unlikely that you'd ever have three teachers predicting you to get top marks, but you end up with that on results day.
But about the algorithm, it seems to be an impossible task. You cannot satisfy the requirement of the gross statistics being roughly the same, ie little grade inflation on average, while also identifying talented individuals.
The outline of the algorithm seems to be that you basically take the gross stats for earlier years from a school, and then you take the teacher's guesses about who will do well, and make up a distribution of grades around that. This is probably what most people would do if forced into such an exercise. And you can add wrinkles to it like a bit of grade inflation, adjustment for overconfident predictions, and so on.
But you can't get that piece of information that you really need, which is a mix of signal and noise about the true distribution of the kid's abilities. If you have a talented year in a low performing school, you'll never know. And vice versa.
The year before I finished the IB, two kids got the top 45/45. That's normally achieved by something like 1/400 kids worldwide, and it was a class of maybe 30 kids. That would never have been awarded without examinations.
In addition the other presumed goal, of having the grades as close to the predictions as possible, give the algo designer an incentive well known from machine learning: guess safely. Squish the distribution on the edges, that way you're not off much. This is bad for people who shoud be getting As, because many will get Bs. And it's good on the other end, though I don't know where the lump ends (C or D?).
“There have been two key pieces of information used to produce estimated grades: how students have been ranked in ability and how well their school or college has performed in exams in recent years.”
“there was no direct connection between an individual's prior achievement and their predicted grade.”
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadFairness is a complicated thing. A lot of it is based on feeling and relative status, rather than some objective measure of well-being. One person might find it deeply unfair that another person has a lot of money, relatively speaking. But take that money away and redistribute it equally between the two and now the latter person may find the situation unfair.
It is claimed that in any class where the chance of someone failing is judged to be > 0%, even if it is a tiny fraction of a percentage point, then the algorithm requires that someone in the class MUST be given a failing grade, even if it the weakest student in a very high performing class.
So is it? The guy is mining theoretical examples, but I wonder if in practice anyone has been hurt by this. And if they have (let's say a non-failing student was given a failing grade), why not handle those cases within a manual appeals process? After all, the exams weren't written, so no matter what mechanism you choose their will be students that get higher markers than they otherwise would have received and lower marker than they otherwise deserved - but I suspect, even in those cases, the marks will be in the same ballpark.
Oxford have decided to ignore results and honor previously given offers because the process is so untrustworthy.
Yes. I understand there will be cases like this, but what numbers are we talking about?
And you were never going to prevent circumstances like those.
>we're talking straight A students getting demotd to Ds across the board because their school has a history of bad results, which are irrelevant to any given student right now.
That's not irrelevant. Schools don't flip their standards from year or another. A bad school this year, will be a bad school next year. And many students are hurt by mark inflation. It isn't fair that one school will give out B, while another A+ for the same academic performance - and that certainly happens. There was a case in Canada some time ago where it came out that Universities were scoring high-schools based on performance of their alumni and normalizing the marks of new applicants based on those metrics. It was a small controversy, but what else are they going to do? The alternative is to assume that 'A' from one school is the same as 'A' from another - which is grossly unfair.
>Oxford have decided to ignore results and honor previously given offers because the process is so untrustworthy.
Good. Everyone understands that this is a weird time and everyone is trying their best. This is why this does not worry me one bit. I fully expect all schools that rely on these marks to be a little bit more understanding.
The Scottish government SQA has already backed down on its "adjustment" and agreed to use estimated marks from teachers and mock exams.
And you think that's more fair? Because to me that is a way worse method of ranking. Mark inflation exists and vary by school. That's a fact. Schools will low academic performance are more guilty of this because all schools and teachers will inevitably grade on a scale relative to other students in that school.
Listen, you can do whatever you want. The reality is that there are more applicants than there are seats at the universities. You can give everyone an 'A' and it won't change the fact that the same amount of students are going to get those spots. The method adopted by the Scottish government punishes students for going to schools and having teachers that don't inflate their marks.
(Oxford, along with Cambridge but unlike many universities, has the results of interviews and, for many subjects, admissions tests to assess to whom to offer a place. They make offers expecting that the vast majority of them will be met, rather than over-offering and expecting A-level results to prune the numbers significantly. In previous incarnations of the admissions system, candidates who passed the entrance exam and interview routinely got an offer of two Es, i.e. a formality. So, providing places to all offer-holders would not seem an unreasonable course of action in the circumstances.)
Notable exception to this would be Cambridge maths, who over-offer significantly for Mathematics (last year: 541 offers, 253 acceptances). Quite a lot of people miss their STEP offer so colleges can choose on results day who to take based on STEP, UMS, interview, etc. Though STEP unlike A-Levels was sat this year, so they're still able to do that selection.
As always, students who are unhappy with their results have the option of (re)-sitting their exams and re-applying for university; given the substantial uncertainty over whether universities will be able to offer anything like a normal level of teaching in the next academic year, deferring might be a sensible option regardless of results.
No students performance should be a sum based on how previous students have done at their school. That's literally reinforcing the postcode divide in education quality that were supposed to turn a blind eye to.
My home town school has historically refused to even put children in for exams if they didn't get at least a C grade in their mocks because they valued league table position so highly (helps with investment and alumni donations etc). That cynical and should-be-illegal approach clearly benefits their students in this situation more than schools in the area that do right by their children.
And more than any of that, this is the real world effects of the bullshit algorithm peddlers have been pushing for the last few years. Algorithms can solve any real world problem given the data. Well they can't. They can give the proposition of an answer to the problem, but at costs to some that are too high to bear.
Low-performing students at private schools are having their estimated Cs and Ds bumped up to As. Stellar students at schools in poor areas who got As in their mock exams and have teacher-predicted As are being awarded Ds instead.
Do you have an example of this happening? It seems basically impossible from my understanding of the process.
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Edit: I think I understand how it can happen. A school with a cohort that is small, but large enough to get the algorithm, and a previously exemplary results, has an unusually bad pupil. I can see this happening in a subject like Further Maths where only good students take it
The scheme is flawed, as it clearly penalises some students, and benefits others. And many are rightfully outraged by that.
So yes. 'Controversial', I think.
1. Teachers submit both an estimated grade and a relative rank ordering for each student
2. Ofqual calculate a distribution based on the predicted grades
3. They compare it to grade distributions at that school from previous years
4. If need be, they shift the distribution up or down to be roughly in line with that school's prior results
5. They then use the rank ordering to assign students grades from that distribution (e.g. in a class with 20 students, each student is worth 5% of the distribution - so if it predicted 10% A* (highest grade), 15% A, etc., the top 2 students would get an A*, the next 3 an A and so on)
Here is the 319 page document published on results day. This is the totality of the current description of the 'algorithm'. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
There's some kind of predictive linear model (page 40) which is based on a student's prior attainment (i.e. GCSE and SATs 'data'), but then modelled at the level of the exam centre (i.e. school). These models are separately fitted for different bins (I think ten are shown at one point) of achievement.
The whole document is pretty incoherent. I suspect the 'algorithm' is a set of excel spreadsheets.
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I've spent the last two days dealing with very upset young people who have had their plans ripped up. Some will still be able to go to university, but not the one they planned on and have been forced into clearing, some won't be able to go at all.
So the story behind this is as follows.
Teachers at colleges and schools submitted grades to exam boards earlier in the summer based on their predictions as to how students would do in exams they would not take due to C19. The exam boards then mauled these with an algorithm.
Our current understanding is that subject cohorts of less than 10 have not had the algorithm applied and 15-20 only slightly. Most private and many small Sixth forms in schools fall in to this category, (note this is students in a subject at a provider not total numbers at that provider)
Some centre assessed grades (CAGs) will have been assigned optomistically (inflated) by teachers in an attempt to advantage them and their students but the vast majority will have been genuine assessments based on submitted work and teacher experience. They had no idea just how much adjustment would be applied, I'm sure if they had them they might not have been quite so honest!
[Edit: a colleague has pointed out that sometimes predicted grades are higher than achieved because there are unanticipated issues very close to exams such as illness, bereavement a stress which are not evident in year. This cannot be predicted by teachers and compensated for in advance, although many schools will have tried to adjust for students who experienced issues in year]
To compensate for this small amount of ingrained optimisation and unpredictability the exam boards have moderated down larger schools CAGs (but not the smaller cohorts). This includes many sixth form colleges with thousands of exam entries.
Sixth form colleges and larger sixth forms are very good at estimating grades and have been extremely thorough in their efforts to assign realistic grades. Our own teachers spent weeks compiling grades from previous work and tests to get the most accurate assessment they could. No one wanted their students to miss out, no one underestimated their CAGs.
The exam boards were not going to stand for a big increase in grades this year so they applied an aggressive algorithm to the larger subject cohorts. Our college for example has hundreds of A level maths students which makes us a target for harsh moderation despite having increadable value added and a history of very accurate (not over inflated) predictions; vast numbers of our students have seen their grades dropped by one or two grade boundaries, I have only seen one moderated up.
Many of our students have missed out on university places. Despite positive news stories about one Oxbridge University College most universities have not moderated their offers in light of this crisis and many students at private schools will have been able to swoop in on those places and adjust upwards to higher tarrif courses.
Now, whether you think this is a government fix up or not; it is not fair on poorer students at bigger schools and coincidentally some more 'privileged' students have been given another leg up.
Talk to your MP talk about it on social media and lobby to get this fixed because it's going to mess up a lot of young people's futures. These young people are now voters and I hope they will be registering their concern with their local MPs which may motivate them to put pressure on the minister and in turn the exam boards
If you think this was a fiasco then hold on tight because next weeks GCSE results will be based on less information and are likely to be even more skewed! We will hit a second crisis of students not being able to access A levels and colleges having to juggle the same situation as universities are this week. Many GCSE students wi...
But yeah, why would you bother learning when you can just make the same mistake?
I wonder if the effects are visible when comparing allocation of spots vs past years. Or is that what they are optimizing for? To achieve the same allocation across feeder schools as the year before?
You're right, and that's what is happening this year. Straight A students that had solid offers from major universities have found themselves with Bs, and seen those places vanish in the mist.
Stupidly, if they just accepted this year as a weird year where everyone did a better than normal, it would be less negatively impactful than what they've opted for.
Even worse, this was literally what Scotland just went through a few weeks ago. There's just no excuse for it.
(Modular and coursework based A levels were popular under labour but reverted by the Tories)
What a horrible situation where a whole year group are reliant on their teachers’ opinion of them and the success of other kids at the same school the previous year. Neither of which these children have any direct control over.
In the big picture, the good students are going to get good markers, average students are going to get average markets, and bad students will get bad markets. Again, it is what it is.
>"bad" schools get bad marks.
Why the quotes? There are schools that are at the bottom of academic rankings. That's a fact of reality.
>students are finding their grades marked down, almost regardless of their performance.
What numbers are we talking about here? No matter what algorithm or heuristic they chose, some unfairness was going to happen and my argument is that these cases are overstated. I'm sure they exist because we're talking about hundreds of thousands of students all in different circumstances. Having said that, in cases of egregious outcome, an appeals process would make sense. Also I'm sure many universities will take the pandemic into consideration and the fact that this was a best attempt at replicating standardizing test result without a test actually being taken.
The minister of education's reason for downgrading the grades was so that pupils did not end up in jobs they were not capable of doing. Delicious irony.
Fake news, sorry. https://fullfact.org/education/gavin-williamson-fake-quote/
Solidarity clearly means nothing here.
Look, nothing I've seen here changes the base fact that if you were a good students getting good grades, you are going to be OK.
It also doesn't change the base fact that mark inflation exits. That some schools will grade higher than others for the same academic performance.
So no, you don't have a 'right' to a mark you haven't earned. If you had weak course marks in a school that inflates marks, you don't get to the spot of another student that worked hard during the term and was in a school that did not inflate marks.
I have yet to see a good argument that this model is bad (and it may be), or percentage of students have gotten a grade that is out of line with expectations. Also, I do support an appeals process for the cases where the algorithm just got it completely wrong.
>I was at best average in secondary school and I had to kick it up a few notch for the national exams (Portuguese A-level equivalent)
If you were a bad students, or a student on some margin, you were always going to rely on luck to get through. What if the the set of questions on the standardized test just so happen to coincide with areas you were weak in? I was in situations where I had a weak grasp on course material, but the exam just so happened to have questions in areas that I was strong in and I got a higher mark than I probably deserved. It happens. But again, things just average themselves out over time and students will end up where they 'deserve' to be.
>Under your "meh" style, I'd have lost at least a year before I'd be able to enroll in un
I'll play along. Let's say you had weak course marks and you were hoping to use the test to boost your final score to get into the school of your choice. Then covid happened and you weren't able to. Well... take that as important life lesson. Don't slack off until the end and hope that you can make up your grades with the exams.
I'm not sure why what you mean by "weak course marks" - something like A-Level Maths is assessed entirely in exams at the end of the two year period. There's no formal assessment prior to that.
> If you had weak course marks in a school that inflates marks, you don't get to the spot of another student that worked hard during the term and was in a school that did not inflate marks.
Alternatively, if you _did_ work hard, but it's assumed that your predicted grades have been inflated, you face getting knocked down through no fault of your own. I also query the notion that you can reliably know which schools get predicted grades wrong. Teachers, and teaching methods, change every year - the people making the predictions are not necessarily the same year to year.
Mark inflation is a real thing by the way. You can ignore it and assume all teacher-assigned markers across the country are roughly the same, but then you will punish those pupils who come from school where the standards are higher and higher grades are harder to get. Is that fair?
>I also query the notion that you can reliably know which schools get predicted grades wrong.
That's actually not very hard to do. There was a minor controversy a few back in Canada where a number universities were found out to have correlated the marks students got in university with the marks they got from the specific high school they came from. They had that kind of historical data on every local high-school. They then normalized those marks. People got offended but without provincial standardized testing and grading, you're just going to punish schools with highest academic standards.
>Teachers, and teaching methods, change every year - the people making the predictions are not necessarily the same year to year.
I agree it changes. I disagree it changes every year, especially in aggregate. A low performing academic school this year is going to be a low performing academic school next year. Maybe in 5 years it will be different, but year over year, the changes are going to be inconsequential.
In my year, I and one other student had to go significantly beyond the support provided to get the grades we needed. I studied one A-Level entirely outside school as they couldn't make the timetable work, and then added another to be done in a year (typically a two year course) because my school had given me bad advice about which were required. If it were this year, and my school were known for overpmarking, I'd face getting downgraded for something I had no control over. I was predicted, and needed, the top grades (AAA) in specific subjects, and even dropping to AAB would mean not getting into my university of choice. It can be a kick in the teeth for anyone who has put the extra effort in.
1) "The year-on-year rise in proportion of students achieving A or A+ grades was much higher at independent schools than state comprehensives"
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/13/england-a-...
Essentially, students lucky enough to be in private education were more likely to see their grades go up / stay the same, compared to students receiving free education seeing grades going down.
Has been explained away as a byproduct of a sensible algorithm, but considering the government's track record and private school backgrounds (85% of the UK's Prime Ministers have been educated at Eton, arguably the country's most exclusive private school) it's hard not to be sceptical that this wasn't intentional and class-motivated.
2) "Appears that Ofqual's algorithm caused today's A-level chaos. Ofqual chair Roger Taylor, also chairs the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation (CDEI). Cummings' fave AI consultants - Faculty, have some juicy contracts with CDEI. And Faculty's COO Richard Sargeant is on CDEI board"
https://twitter.com/milesking10/status/1293886007771893762?s...
(Ofqual is the department that oversees exams and responsible for this situation, they report to Gavin Williams the government's Education Secretary. Cummings is a controversial special adverse to the Prime Minister, and Faculty is a firm he used when he was leading one of the two primary pro-Brexit campaigns before the referendum. Subjective statement: Cummings is a vile, evil man.)
It's incredibly easy "not to be sceptical".
The teacher's predicted grades are, on average, unprecedented. And represent many times greater than any previous yoy increase. This is far less true at top-performing schools where teachers are predicting far more consistent grades (by the very nature of being a top performing school).
Teachers shouldn't have been asked to predict grades. That's the heart of the problem. Not some harebrained in-public conspiracy.
This whole thing is dumb. And the media are deliberately failing to explain basic facts about the education system to provoke this kind of nonesense outrage.
But if you're going to put this system in place, with months of planning, you should make damn sure that it isn't massively favouring the children who are already advantaged in life. Which it statistically is, whether intentional or not.
They screwed it up so spectacularly that the education secretary had to make concessions to it two days before the results, then a day after the results Ofqual made a statement about who could appeal that contradicted the education secretary, before withdrawing that statement a few hours later saying they were still deciding.
So sure it could be entirely down to incompetence not malice. But given either is possible, and this government's track record of cronyism I don't see why it's unreasonable to be sceptical.
Those children were already going to get the highest results.
There is no incompetence here. The predicted grades are a good estimate of what the results would have been.
The issue is that all teachers significantly over-predicted their students grades, but less so at high-performing schools. (Why? because the grades are more consistent at those schools, so there's less room for error).
The algorithm didn't keep the gap between paid and unpaid education, it expanded it.
(Source for these numbers and more in my first comment.)
I was lucky enough to not only go to two private schools, but the second one was ranked #1 in England for exam ranks 2 of the 3 years I was there (and helped me get good grades despite being extremely unmotivated and lazy). But at least my privilege was to be given a good education that made learning / passing exams (the latter more) easy, not that the government decided my school deserved an artificial grades boost compared to state schools.
If the previous YoY was also 5%/2%, then it is just repeating the trend.
It isnt the job of statisticians to "fix" social inequality by BSing some grades. Its their job to estimate likely exam results based on previous performance.
There's absolutely no grounds on which to assume that growth in A*/A across these demographics would be the same; and of course, very many reasons to presume they'd be different.
It's only been a couple of days, we'll get more data journalists breaking it down better soon.
You know what would be really helpful? If the algorithm was released to be publicly reviewed. Oh, but the government is refusing to do that, and Ofqual made anyone consulting on this project sign a 5 year NDA or they couldn't get involved. Hmm.
Edit: and while I'm pretty sure the data will show schools weren't on track for that inflation, actually no I disagree with you that it would be fair to extrapolate previous cohort improvements to this year's anyway.
However more important than the algorithm is just the media reporting on what ofqual actually say. I've barely read any of their actual analysis in news on the issue.
Key facts: students are always ranked and graded on a curve. Student populations have a fixed number of grades awarded every year, etc.
The system is specifically designed in recognition that grades are positional goods, ie., they are valuable only to the degree that other people do not have them.
That's the view of the education system every year. And its the basic assumption of this process. They will never over-award A grades specifically because they want universities/business/etc. to index them to a percentile performance in the population.
I'm pretty sure that's not correct, please find a source suggesting that. There have been major reforms (primarily the changing A Levels back from the modular version that Labour had previously introduced) and these were specifically aimed at reducing grade inflation. If there were a fixed number of grades each year there wouldn't be any inflation to counter.
Yes, for the national cohort. This is different, the predicted results were weighted on a per-school basis. For example, a particular child taking, say, a history exam, in a school which had previously had no pupils that achieved A* in history over the past four years had probably no chance of getting an A*, even if that was their teachers' prediction. Purely on the basis of which school they went to. A weak cohort (compared to previous years) at a good school would be upweighted.
How could +5% possibly be an actual trend? What new magic teaching innovation have independent schools done for this year's cohort, that wasn't available in previous years or to teachers in the state sector?
Table 9-10: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
There are teachers in comprehensive schools that are tough-markers, too. My wife, who is a teacher in a London school, was annoyed in both directions - there were teachers that she felt had given away high grades, but there was also a teacher that had given the kids in her class grades lower than she expected they'd get (as her identity is tied to being overly careful and she liked to grade kids harder in mocks, etc).
What she felt was bad was that cohorts of kids were often very different year upon year. Last year there were particularly bright kids doing Physics in her school, but this year there was only a few kids and they were much worse. But the algorithm awarded them grades above what she expected.
There were also kids that she expects would have worked hard before their exams and gotten results above what they were given. They didn't get given the chance to do this.
In both state and private schools, teachers over-predicted. But higher-performing schools have higher and more uniform results, so there's less room to actually over predict -- so there's comparatively less reduction.
That's just an in-built concequence of what it means to be a high performing school
I don't believe in the media conspiracy that the Tories created an algorithm that systematically awards higher grades to rich kids because of inherent classism or even by accident.
But I do really disagree with the insistence that all teachers in comprehensive schools were conspiring to give their kids higher grades than they deserved -- this view was frequently repeated on social media. Even if there were some that were doing this and it was apparent from the statistics, teachers are not a homogenous group and there are many teachers that take fair grading very seriously and even take enjoyment in being tough markers.
I don't know the data but my own worry is that this will have hurt the high variance or lazy kids that won't normally get high grades but would normally settle down and revise hard for such an important exam. I hope that these kids will be given the opportunity to resit the exam for free, since I doubt an algorithm could capture the variance that exists every year.
I just read this article, and it was interesting.
The bit you haven't understood is that teacher predicted grades were reassessed by the algorithm unless the class sizes were 5 children or fewer. This meant that the predicted grades that were not adjusted by the algo were overwhelmingly at independent fee-paying schools.
Independent schools generally have fewer students and a wider range of courses and predicted grades were inflated across the board, so they ended up with better grades than larger colleges and academies.
I'm not sure how you could have avoided this bias without creating a lot of really weird outcomes.
Universities in England are funded primarily by tuition fees. There are consistently more university places than applicants, but not necessarily at universities you'd want to attend.
[1] to understand this locution it may help to understand that there is also a breakaway technical college somewhere off in the fens...
https://twitter.com/queenofswords6/status/129447148835198566...
> A levels...short thread
> If anyone doubts who the winners are this year, here's a random selection of independent schools and the % of A*-A grades this year.
> 2019 figures follow in brackets.
Part of the problem is that teachers often push the "prediction" slightly higher as a means of motivating the student. Now those predictions are being used as the real deal.
I am pretty convinced that most teachers with more than superficial experience will be able to predict grades reasonably accurately, after doing so for many tens of students 5-6 times a year .
As a comparative reference, we'd expect an at-most, 3% increase in IQ in the general population.
That would be an improvement if your luck of the draw was national rather than biased in favour of private schools, but it's still a pretty awful outcome.
There may not have been any solution available that would be 100% fair to both this year and other year cohorts, but at the very least they should avoid making any student feel actively screwed over.
I don't think teachers, or anyone else, can reliably predict results. I got the equivalent of an A* in most of my of my AS exams, but because I had bad GCSEs my results were ranked down for my predicted grades to AAB. Only after complaining did they change them to AAA. In the event I got two A*'s and an A - a whole grade above all of my original predictions.
The entire system is asinine because there's no reliable way of predicting future results from past performance, because of the unfair discretion it gives teachers and schools, and because it demotivates students to achieve above their prediction (because they cannot be accepted by any course above that prediction). It should have been abolished long ago.
I'm glad you got the grades you wanted eventually, but the finger needs to be pointed in the correct direction.
It's not as bad as you might think. A large number of students are rejecting their offers with the intention of re-applying in 2021 and there has been a substantial reduction in the number of foreign students, so there are an unprecedented number of surplus places available through clearing. Even if your grades are substantially worse than you might have hoped, your chances of getting a place on a decent course are very good.
I doubt many parents would have been made aware of the precise meaning of 'mock' examinations results either.
The next question then, was whether this emergency scheme was tested against results from previous years, rather than fashioning the algorithm to match results from previous school years.
The social and cultural factors at play are not well represented by just looking at the mean.
And finally, so what if 2020 had had outlier grade average? It's the outlier year.
Doesn't it? What else would how students have been ranked in ability mean?
> And finally, so what if 2020 had had outlier grade average? It's the outlier year.
"Hey, we'll give everyone 40% better grades, because it was a tough year" won't do good. You'll get lots of people into university who will fail miserably, because the grades don't magically improve their skills. Unless, and that's a bad idea as well, you just tighten the criteria so the same number as before can go to uni. Grade inflation won't help anyone either.
What you realize is that the school's primary deliverable is acceptance into a university program.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if the private schools were actively lobbying to deliver the best result to their customers.
Students in “private” schools get a better quality of education than those receiving “free” education. And it isn't free, we pay for it through taxation. And over here the “private” schools are called “public”. While the public schools are called comprehensive.
And yes, obviously the better education leads to better grades, but that's a completely different issue.
The point in my comment that you replied to is not that independent schools got better grades than state schools this year; it's that their % improvement from previous years to this year is way higher than non-independant schools % change from previous years.
Pirsig would have something to say here.
As always, the question when using an algorithm or test is, 'compared to what?'
One possible solution could have been if they do the same statistical estimation game and then offer a choice to each student: you can take your estimated grades or go for an exam. If you take the exam you get what you het there. It might go lower or higher than the estimate. This would have incentivised that only those who are certain of themselves and their estimated grades are insuficient towards their goals will go for the tests. And since these are outliers already there will be a lot less of them than the general population, thus it is easier to organise socially distanced exams for them.
Of course nothing is easy at scale and many details need to be ironed out but thats what we keep the Miniszry of Education for.
My point is that there are solutions other than “everyone sit exams as usual” and “everyone gets an estimated grade”.
[1]: https://outline.com/qnWxj4
"In 2019, 21% (31,220) of accepted 18 year old applicants met or exceeded their predicted grades, a decrease of 3 percentage points. In addition, 43.2% of accepted applicants had a difference of three or more A level grades – an increase of 5 percentage points (7,190 applicants more) since 2018."
Teacher predicted grades are almost useless.
Now Scotland has caved to political pressure and wants to inflate grades
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-537...
"However, these grades, taken overall, would represent a significant improvement on previous years - including a jump of 20 percentage points in the pass rate for pupils from the most deprived areas."
"If the results had purely been based on the estimates from teachers, pass rates at grades A-C would have increased by 10.4 percentage points for National 5, by 14 percentage points for Higher and by 13.4 percentage points for Advanced Higher.
These estimated results would have led to a higher annual change than had ever been seen before in Scottish exam results if they had not been moderated by the SQA."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53636296
A really difficult situation when what you have to work from is already inaccurate.
(https://www.bbc.com/news/education-53776938)
Using teacher's predicted grades is stupid: teachers use predictions in whatever way they think will best motivate their students. If the student is lazy, they'll under-predict to shock them into revising more. If the student is not very confident, they'll over-predict to encourage them.
Unless the students are actually allowed to take an exam, all methods are unfair. Using mock results is at least tangentially related to the students' abilities.
It's absurd to think a central exam gives a more accurate picture of... What? Aptitude? Effort? ...? Than the teachers can have from working with students often for several years, seeing their work ethics, involvement in class, personal situations, etc.
In short: the system was broken and biased to begin with (at least in England, Scotland is doing much better). Now this bias and favour of 'better' schools is explicitly enforced through this weighting algorithm.
Whether or not you can achieve better outcomes or get a better indication of capability with other means, that total anonymity and an absolutely common hurdle is a kind of fair that is tough to match in assessment. It shouldn't be under-vauled. We should be sure that any alternative really is better.
Let's not pretend that teachers' aren't subject to unconscious bias. I've also met a few who were just horrible human beings who had no business being in teaching.
There is kind of just a problem overall with comparing private schools to state schools. At the very least this process may have worked better if they had two data sets, one for private one for atate schools.
Beyond that though a stastical solution was never going to work, you cannot generate accurate discrete/quantized data, only representative random data.
private schools imho teach you to pass the exam, they are more cut throat about focussing on this than state schools. and the teachers seem to fight harder for their kids - the difference in personal statements from private school teachers compared to state schools on uni applications would be an interesting study.
I am not saying i have answers, just intereted in thw discussion. Overall i am always left with a few basic ideas to keep things fair (though i sometimes think some of these may be dumb and i am not suggesting do all of them):
-Zero charitable status or governemnt support for private education.
-cap the number of students a uni can take from one school (e.g. dont take the top 100 students, take the top 1 from 100 schools)
-ban people who were not state educated from governemnt positions. This is contravertial but imho you effectively live a different life when you go to privare schools (class sizes, support and oppourtunity are in comparable)
Mocks on the other hand are graded with a view to provide the desired psychological effect (i.e. either as a boost or a kick up the rear). So mock results may well be less fair. This is coming from my partner who is a secondary school teacher.
I expect many more to follow, so it's possible that the universities will clear up an awful lot of that mess - but while some academics are saying yes great bring them all in, others are strongly against the idea of expanding to let more people in this year.
As to whether they're significant apart from for UCAS applications (university) - I'm not too sure. Personally I wouldn't care much about them on a CV of someone I was thinking of hiring in the best of years yet alone if I knew their results came from 2020.
But with unemployment rising fast, and much worse soon once government gradually removes support offered over the summer to keep people furloughed (companies paid to have their staff not working but kept officially on the payroll until they could get back to work), we've already heard stories in some places or a shop or a pub advertising a job offer and getting 1000+ applications... and in a terrible job market, school exam grades could likely be a decider for who gets called to interview for many working class jobs. (They already are even outside a terrible job market, that just amplifies it.)
edit: Oh, and while I don't know what proportion of people doing A Levels don't want to go to university (or want to go, but fail) - we're also a few days away from this same situation happening with the GCSE exams, which pretty much everyone legally has to do around age 16.
> ...is awful at achieving a fair system [...] because schools are so stratified - by design of funding rules etc.
I'd say it was more down to the culture of parents in the poor areas mostly not giving a shit about their kid's education (and the roots of that aren't that the parents are intrinsically bad, it's a mindset of apathy inherited from their parents and the daily pressures that come with permanently worrying about money).
That said I also believe that the current UK government is far beyond any benefit of a doubt in terms of competence and maliciousnes.
But OMG the competence of the UK govt. It's like they literally can't do... anything without screwing it up. It is bizarre. Then they try to paper over it with words.
"I'd say it was more down to the culture of parents in the poor areas mostly not giving a shit about their kid's education"
Which sounds nasty, but rings true for a big part of England. It's also an uncomfortable truth, which basically always leads to downvotes.
Once a year (safe for this year, obviously) I'm in Blackpool at the Rebellion Punk Festival[1]. What you see in Blackpool and how people live there is very, very different from the impression you get when just visiting London.
People wouldn't believe how poor and destitute some areas in the UK are and the priority of a lot of people in such areas is not really education. Young women want as many kids as possible, since government benefits beat the shitty work prospects they have in such areas and the future for young people in general in those places are so bleak that it often leads to an understandable "why bother?" attitude.
And yes, this attitude is inherited, or actually worse. When there is a rare young person trying to be an achiever you can almost be sure he's mocked and bullied by his peers.
[1] http://www.rebellionfestivals.com/
> rare young person trying to be an achiever you can almost be sure he's mocked and bullied by his peers
Yes. Someone on the web (maybe here, maybe slashdot) said that when someone tries, they're seen as trying to get above their station. Consequences follow.
I spent a couple of years on a sink estate in the UK as a kid. I know what it does to people.
But about the algorithm, it seems to be an impossible task. You cannot satisfy the requirement of the gross statistics being roughly the same, ie little grade inflation on average, while also identifying talented individuals.
The outline of the algorithm seems to be that you basically take the gross stats for earlier years from a school, and then you take the teacher's guesses about who will do well, and make up a distribution of grades around that. This is probably what most people would do if forced into such an exercise. And you can add wrinkles to it like a bit of grade inflation, adjustment for overconfident predictions, and so on.
But you can't get that piece of information that you really need, which is a mix of signal and noise about the true distribution of the kid's abilities. If you have a talented year in a low performing school, you'll never know. And vice versa.
The year before I finished the IB, two kids got the top 45/45. That's normally achieved by something like 1/400 kids worldwide, and it was a class of maybe 30 kids. That would never have been awarded without examinations.
In addition the other presumed goal, of having the grades as close to the predictions as possible, give the algo designer an incentive well known from machine learning: guess safely. Squish the distribution on the edges, that way you're not off much. This is bad for people who shoud be getting As, because many will get Bs. And it's good on the other end, though I don't know where the lump ends (C or D?).
“there was no direct connection between an individual's prior achievement and their predicted grade.”
Who wrote this algorithm and can we see it?