[tonyedgecombe]

and made it impossible to get a high grade if no-one fromm your college got one before

Well that is unlikely. If you are going to handle it algorithmically then what else would you expect. Clearly the teachers can't be relied on because now everybody is getting an A*, the grades are effectively useless as an indicator.

I was disappointed although not surprised that the government caved on this.

[Traster]

It's not unlikely, it's practically certain. If you have hundreds of schools there absolutely will be a handful of students who do better than previous years and there will be a handful of students who do worse than ever before. Maybe it's not a big deal to hand a C to someone deserving of an E, but it's certainly a big deal that the moron at the school that gets good grades (read: private school) gets a pass, whilst the genius at the school that historically did badly (read: state school) gets screwed. Now, given that's how this system works, take a look: do you think the politicans repsonsible for this went to the state school?

[tonyedgecombe]

There are always outliers.

Interestingly the private schools seem to be to be grading their students more accurately, the problems were more common in state schools. The moron in a private school was unlikely to get their grades inflated. I'm not a fan of private schooling but in this case they appeared to be doing the right thing.

There will always be outliers, no system is perfect but what we have just done is worse in my mind.

[chippy]

Two reasons: The results indicate that the algorithm was flawed: "Ofqual figures show 39.1% of 700,000 teacher assessments were lowered by at least one grade"

Secondly, many students and teachers complained. This second reason is the thing that "the world can learn" that the article focuses on.

[tonyedgecombe]

Which can be explained by teachers assessments being too optimistic. Now we have reverted to that you can see the results, grade inflation.

Of course students complained, I would if I didn't get the grades I was hoping for. That doesn't mean the government has to cave in and pretend everybody is a winner.

[bengillies]

> Which can be explained by teachers assessments being too optimistic

This can also be explained by teachers assessments being an accurate representation of students ability, but students traditionally not faring as well in exams as their ability would suggest due to exam taking being an additional unrelated skill.

fwiw though, you only need to look at some of the outliers to see that the algorithm failed. It's all very well to say that it produced a consistent result in general, but each result specifically applies to an individual person so needs to be fair to each person as well as in general.

[bengillies]

Whatever algorithm used though the truth is that qualifications achieved this year are not directly comparable to qualifications achieved in other years due to the lack of exams.

While nobody's fault, imho we'd have been much served by admitting that they're not comparable and doing something else (e.g. add an extra qualifier to the grade or something) than by trying to make them comparable and obviously and predictably failing at it.

[pbhjpbhj]

Not really, predicted grades have exam taking ability built in. The predicted grade is the assessment of how the student will perform in the exam. Coursework that was completed was already marked and the component of that set normally.

[tonyedgecombe]

> fwiw though, you only need to look at some of the outliers to see that the algorithm failed.

I'm not arguing it's perfect, I'm just saying what we have now is worse in the aggregate. If you inflate so many grades then the grades become meaningless. You have devalued the work of the high achieving students.

[chippy]

We really need to see what teachers assessments in previous years look like. Are they consistently optimistic?

[tonyedgecombe]

You don't have to look far, now the government has caved we can see the grade inflation, particularly from state schools.

[chippy]

That is showing this years assessments, which I imagine, were done during the lockdown. I'm wondering about previous years.

[meheleventyone]

Personally I’d expect assessment of an individual to be about their performance not their schools past performance. Any system not predicated on that is doomed to fail in assessing students performance as this one obviously did.

[tonyedgecombe]

Well that's what exams are for but they went out the window as soon as the virus arrived. Whatever system the govenment put in place would be worse but it didn't need to be this bad.

[meheleventyone]

They could and probably should have done exactly what ended up happening and relying on prior data per student. Imperfect though it was at least it's about their attainment rather than an aggregate attainment.

[jonplackett]

It says this is happening in the article.