"It’s all OK – students can take the exam in autumn if they want"

I have written about my concerns about the fairness of the grades students will receive this summer. But it’s all OK – Ofqual have said this: “We recognise that there will be individuals who believe that their performance in the examinations, if they had taken place, would have resulted in them achieving a higher grade than the calculated grade they will receive this summer. This underlines the importance of the autumn examination series as an opportunity for students disappointed with their results to show what they can do.”

I am not reassured by this.

The consultation that is currently running about the autumn exam series suggests GCSEs will be taken in November and A-levels in October. Having had their last face-to-face lesson on or before 20 March, after receiving their results in mid to late August, students will have perhaps 2 months (or less) to prepare to sit full A-level exams and just over 2 months to prepare for GCSEs. (Most subjects are likely to be offered, so there will need to be an exam timetable as usual, and while it may not span the usual 6 weeks, it will need to last for several weeks.)

Let’s look at the logistics.

GCSE autumn exams

In those two months of time, the students will need to prepare for the exam. They will need to do everything they would have done in the 3 months between school closure and the end of GCSE exams.

They may still have had topics still to study, taught in class by the teacher.  They would have had practice papers to do, chased up by the teacher, marked and gone over carefully. They would have had other revision sessions and they would have been able to focus more on subjects like maths after they had finished their exams in other subjects. (One thing that might make this easier is if they are sitting exams in only one or two subjects.)

For those who are currently in Yr 11, how does this happen in Sept/Oct of Year 12?  Do they have timetabled time with a teacher?  Who funds that?  If they are taking the exam for GCSE maths, do they start A-level maths anyway, and do their GCSE work alongside that?  If social distancing needs to be in place in Sept then putting additional lessons on for certain students will make a crowded school even more packed.  If schools are not fully open in Sept, then all of the arguments as to why schools couldn’t take note of work done after 20 March will still apply, and it won’t be fair for those students to prepare for the exam remotely. What happens if a student moves to a different school or college for Yr 12; does the new place provide support for the GCSE exam, or the old one? Where do the exams take place?

Why might a student decide to take the autumn exam? In most cases that will be because they are unhappy with the grade they were awarded in August.  This might be because they have fallen below a grade 4 in English or maths, or because they haven’t got the grade they need to be allowed to take an A-level.  (The hassle involved in taking an exam means, I suspect, that very few students will take these exams unless it really is important to them.)

The results of the autumn GCSEs will be published in February. Let’s imagine a scenario whereby a sixth form college requires students to get a grade 6 at GCSE to be able to access an A-level in a particular subject. If the student is expecting a grade 6 but finds they have a grade 5, what will happen?  Will they need to take the GCSE exam and start their A-levels the following year? Or to run GCSE alongside A-level, awaiting their results in Feb?

And then if they don’t get the required grade 6, what happens?  Do they get thrown off their A-level course?  Told they can only do AS-level?  Do they pick up a different subject at that point (having missed half a year of study) or do they only do 2 subjects?  Or will they then have to take a gap year before beginning Yr 12 again the following Sept?  Alternatively, if the school/college allows them to continue to study the A-level despite not getting a grade 6 in the GCSE exam, what was the point of sitting the autumn exam?

It seems as if the autumn GCSE exams will help very few students.

A-level autumn exams

For students currently in Yr 13 there are some similar issues, in that if they miss their university offer there won’t be time to take the autumn A-levels and get results before the university year begins. 

If they decide to sit the exams, there are similar issues as with GCSEs as to whether there is any teaching, revision, support, etc, who pays for this and how Yr 14 students can be accommodated in school/college.

I suspect that at many universities there won’t be a major issue if students miss their offer by up to a couple of grades, in that some students will be put off by scare stories of “lectures happening online” and will assume this means “all teaching will happen online” and will defer until the following year, and overseas students are much less likely to take up their places.  This will mean universities will be able to drop their offers a little (because they will still want to fill their places).  Some students will still miss out, though.  There will also be some who, even if they do get the university place they want, will feel hard done-by over their A-level grades and will worry there will be an enduring effect on their employability in the future.  Should they try to take the autumn exams alongside studying at university?  Where would they do the exams?

In conclusion

Whenever I have raised concerns about the fairness of the system that is being used to award grades this summer, I have been told that it’s OK because the students will be able to take exams in the autumn.  As I hope I have shown above, this will only be an option that is worth pursuing for a smallish number of students.

It will be interesting to see how many entries there are for those exams.

As in my previous post, this might well be the least-worst way of doing things. It still seems unfortunate though.