Why the 2021 Exams Consultation is flawed

 [The red text is quoted directly from the Consultation on how GCSE, AS and A level grades should be awarded in summer 2021 produced by Ofqual.]

Here we are again.  In spring and summer 2020 we spent time preparing for and implementing the system that was created in the place of exams.  Without training or support, teachers were required to rank students in each subject.  This was difficult and time-consuming.  It only worked as well as it did because in many schools teaching wasn’t being done in the usual way and in the second half of the summer term exam leave would have been in place for Yr 11 and Yr 13 students anyway, so many teachers had gained-time they could use to develop the rank order and the CAGs.

So – to this year, and a new system to get to grips with.

Not only is the system itself going to be different.  The consultation tells us Grades would only change, in this process, as a result of human intervention.  This is code for “no algorithms will be used in the making of these exam results”.

Unfortunately, everything else is different too.  Now schools are required to have full teaching in place (having been explicitly threatened over this by the Secretary of State).  Then we are likely to have exam year groups in school for longer because instead of pupils sitting externally-marked exams in early June, teachers will mark the exams that are sat in early June and will use this, along with other evidence, to create a grade for their students.  Next, To help teachers make objective decisions we propose that exam boards should provide guidance and training.  Hold on: at a time when workload is greater than it ever has been, when there will be less gained-time in the summer term, on top of this teachers will need to undergo training to do something we have never done before.

The exam boards haven’t yet written that training (the system hasn’t yet been decided on) – for something where the deadline for teachers to submit the grades is 5 months away!  5 months: to finish the consultation, to publish the response, to create a system, to write training, to roll the training out to teachers, for teachers to deploy it with the students and to gather data and to put that together to create the final grade.  Really?

Last summer a system was put in place at short notice.  How did that one turn out?

System-wide change is hard.  It’s not easy to get it right at all, it’s hard to get it right first time and it’s even harder to get it right first time at speed.  Add to which the idea that it’s not just a new system for, say, providing vaccines, where it doesn’t particularly matter if 70-year-olds in one part of the country are inoculated a few weeks before those in a different area.  For the students’ exam results we need to ensure this is fair across every school in the country.  During a pandemic.  With teachers who have even less time than usual.

I am not objecting to making changes to assessment; if the government wants to do things differently and properly consider the implications, to have trials of alternative methods, etc, then that is fine … for exams in 2024 at the earliest.  My objection is the speed with which this will need to be done: the clock is ticking.  By the time the consultation closes there will be 4 ½ months before results need to be submitted.  My objection is to the additional pressure this will put on teachers, heads of department and senior leaders, especially head teachers.  My objection is that students will be anxious, unsure of what they need to do, upset and, ultimately, not served well by a rushed system.

What to do instead?  Don’t cancel exams.  It’s that easy. 

There are legitimate concerns about equity and access to education for every student.  In this scenario we could allow for special consideration, take note of who hasn’t had access to wifi, computers, give additional credit to those whose schools were closed earlier, who had to self-isolate, etc.  The huge resources that will be put into creating a new system for use this summer, could instead be diverted to provide support for pupils who need it.

Everything in the consultation revolves around exams being cancelled and in trying to make that work.  By ignoring whether that cancellation is the right decision we are being asked to comment on the wrong thing.

The consultation itself isn’t going to give sensible results.  How many people will answer the consultation without reading the full documentation?  Lots. 

Question: 1. To what extent do you agree or disagree that the grades awarded to students in 2021 should reflect the standard at which they are performing?

Surely no-one can disagree with this?  It’s makes sense, doesn’t it? 

If you read the consultation text you see that this is being contrasted with the system from 2020 where students were awarded the grade their teachers thought they would have got.  The question should include this information.

What does the standard at which they are performing mean?  Well, later the consultation says: Teachers should assess students on the areas of content they have covered and can demonstrate their ability, while ensuring sufficient breadth of content coverage so as not to limit progression.

It appears that they are not expecting students to cover the whole of the curriculum in a subject, but that they will be assessed on the parts they have studied.  How much is sufficient breadth of content coverage?  That doesn’t seem clear.

In the absence of exams, our view is that teachers, once provided with the necessary guidance and training, are best placed to assess the evidence of the standard at which their student is performing.

Exams don’t have to be ‘absent’.  No, they really don’t.  And while teachers _do_ know their pupils well and do know how well they are performing, they don’t know “the standard”, because we don’t standardise things.  Not across schools.  Not any more.

(We used to, but someone decided that national curriculum levels of attainment that were the same across the whole of England should be abolished and that it made far more sense for every school to reinvent the wheel.  Now we have a fragmentary system that means we can’t compare across schools.)

Now I will go through sections of the consultation.

2 What the grades will mean

Remember: the intention is that students will be assessed on the parts of the content they have studied.  Qualification grades indicate what a person who holds the qualification knows, understands and can do, and to what standard.  This won’t happen if each student is graded only on part of the course.

For qualification grades to be meaningful, a person who holds a qualification with a higher grade must have shown that their knowledge, understanding or skills are at a higher standard than a person who holds a qualification with a lower grade.  This won’t work if different students have been assessed in different ways.

We do not believe that teachers should be asked to decide the grade a student might have achieved had the pandemic not occurred. That would put them in an impossible position, as they would be required to imagine a situation that had not happened. It would also mean that those who use the grades would not know whether the grade indicated what a student knew, understood or could do or, rather, what they might have known, understood or could have done, had things been different.

The teachers who worked so hard in summer 2020 to create CAGs, and the students who received results in 2020 will be delighted to hear this! 

Teachers should assess students on the areas of content they have covered and can demonstrate their ability, while ensuring sufficient breadth of content coverage so as not to limit progression.

Rather than asking each school to create their own, different system for doing this, perhaps we could have a national method?  Such as an exam?

3 When teachers should assess the standard at which students are performing

Here are some of the questions in this section:

Question 2. To what extent do you agree or disagree that the alternative approach to awarding grades in summer 2021 should seek to encourage students to continue to engage with their education for the remainder of the academic year?

This assumes there should be an ‘alternative approach’.  There shouldn’t.  The consultation should be asking about whether exams can take place and how, not assuming that they can’t.

How many people are likely to say “no” to the idea that students should continue their education during this academic year?  What will you learn from the answer to this one?

Question 3. When would you prefer that teachers make their final assessment of their students’ performance?

I would prefer that teachers _didn’t_ make the final assessment.

For these reasons, we propose that teachers should make final assessments of the standard of their students’ performance during late May and early June. If the assessments were undertaken earlier, perhaps in April, then students would unnecessarily miss out on more of their education. If they were assessed later, perhaps in July, this would delay the release of results, as there would be insufficient time for teachers to assess their students and for the necessary internal and external quality assurance measures to be taken. This could in turn delay students’ progression at the start of the next academic year.

We have no way of knowing how long the quality assurance process will take, so we have to take Ofqual at their word on this.  This is therefore an unanswerable question – it is clearly daft to have them too early or too late.  Again: what will be learned from this question?

4. To what extent do you agree or disagree that teachers should be able to use evidence of the standard of a student’s performance from throughout their course?

“Should be able to use”.  But how? 

This feels like an obviously fair thing to do.  “If my student has some good evidence from earlier in the course then I should be able to use it” seems reasonable.  But how do we ensure a level playing field?  If mock exams happened in December for Yr 11 in some schools but were planned for January in others then this doesn’t give everyone the same opportunity. 

You might say that I am just answering the question here, but it’s more than that: we don’t have the detail to know how this will be done – so any answers will be meaningless.

4 How teachers should determine the grades they submit to exam boards

We propose that teachers should only take evidence-based decisions about the grade they recommend their students be issued. A breadth of evidence should inform a teacher’s assessment of their student’s deserved grade.

This is where the training for teachers comes in.  The training that will need to be devised and delivered by exam boards from scratch and done and dusted in only a few months.

If this is ever going to happen it should be brought in with a lead-in time of several years: enough time for teachers properly to understand what it looks like and what sorts of things will count.  Enough time for students to get used to working in ways that will showcase their abilities fairly.  Tacking this on in a hurry now means it will be hugely uneven. 

Who will it harm the most?  The already-disadvantaged.  If it’s the case that exams have been cancelled because disadvantaged pupils will suffer … well we need to put things in place to support them, not spend vast amounts of time and energy creating a new system that will still disadvantage them.

Having said that exams would be cancelled, the next part says: 4.1 The use of exam board papers

I challenge anyone to read that without smiling.  Exams have been cancelled, but instead students will sit ‘exam board papers’!

We propose that teachers should assess their students objectively. To support them we propose the exam boards could provide guidance and training, along with papers which teachers could use to assess their students. The exam boards might work jointly on the guidance and training where appropriate. The consultation seeks views on the role of these papers in informing a teacher’s assessment of a student’s grade. Provision of papers by exam boards would support consistency within and between schools and colleges.

As would exams.  As would exams.  As would actual exams!

The teacher, through the marking of the papers, could consider the evidence of the student’s work and use that to inform their assessment of the grade deserved. The exam boards could also sample teachers’ marking as part of the external quality assurance arrangements and to seek to ensure this was comparable across different types of school and college, wherever students are studying.

What?  So presumably a higher mark in the paper would suggest, I don’t know, a higher grade in the subject?  To ensure real consistency, why not get external people to mark them.  They could be trained to do this and could mark lots of papers.  We could call them “examiners” and they could be paid for doing it.  And we would have returned to the system of having actual exams.

The use of exam board papers could also help with appeals. We propose that the exam boards should use in their papers, questions that are similar in style and format to those in normal exam papers.

Read that again.  The questions will be similar in style and format to those in normal exam papers.  So they are exam papers then.

This means that the sorts of questions used will be familiar to students, who typically use past papers to help them prepare for their exams.

Like exams then.

The exam boards might use a combination of questions from past papers and new questions to develop their papers.

No no no no no.  Not past paper questions. Don’t even suggest this.  Just don’t.  All teachers are familiar with the student who gets 90% on a mock exam but subsequently gets 30% in the real thing, because they had done the past paper with a tutor, or an older sibling, or had found the answers on The Student Room, etc, before the mock.  In this scenario those students who happen to have done a particular past paper (as a mock exam or a practice paper) will be advantaged.  That’s not right.

The nature of the papers set by the exam boards will need to be appropriate for the subject. Students must be given opportunities to show what they can do. For example, a student who was working towards a high grade in GCSE mathematics must be given the opportunity to show they could perform to a standard associated with that grade. Similarly, a student who is working at a lower grade standard must have access to material which reflects that fact.

Um – exam papers generally try to do this. 

We propose that the set of papers provided by the exam boards should cover a reasonable proportion of the content and that teachers should also have some choice of the topics on which their students could answer questions. The set of papers could allow teachers the ability to choose from a set of shorter papers, based on topics, to allow teachers options to take account of content that has not been fully taught due to the disruption.

We need more information about what this means.  Will the teachers be given a list of topics that are covered in each question and told to select from those (“I’ll have a Pythagoras, a simultaneous equations and a ratio question, please”), or will they see the actual questions (“That’s a hard Pythagoras question – I think I prefer this one instead”)? 

It is important to note that the exam boards don’t know for certain how easy or hard students will find each question they set.  This is shown by the way grade boundaries are usually determined only _after_ the papers have been marked and data collated as to how each question performed.  In the maths world, a few years ago one of the exam boards tried to be helpful and gave estimated grade boundaries for a specimen paper for which they had no data.  After lots of concerned TES Forum posts from very anxious teachers they withdrew the boundaries – and haven’t issued such things since.  Given that the experts don’t find this easy to do, how can we expect teachers to sort out appropriate grade boundaries, particularly given that the data about how hard candidates find each question won’t be collected by exam boards this year?

If the topics covered by the teacher’s assessment are too narrow, students will have less opportunity to show the standard to which they can perform. They would also not have demonstrated the breadth of knowledge they hold, which risks halting their ability to progress successfully with further study. We are seeking feedback on the minimum breadth of subject content a teacher must assess a student on. This makes it appear as if the consultation is going to ask “how much” content must be assessed.  It doesn’t.  The closest to this is Q12: To what extent do you agree or disagree that teachers should be required to assess (either by use of the exam board papers or via other evidence) a certain minimum proportion of the overall subject content, for each subject?  This seems to me to be asking whether a minimum proportion should be tested, not what that minimum should be.

The exact approach would have to be tailored for each subject with details confirmed by the exam boards following this consultation. We propose that the exam boards should provide guidance on how teachers should take account of other evidence of the standard at which the student was working and of factors that might have affected their performance in the papers. In all cases we propose that teachers should record the evidence on which they base their decision for each student. This will be essential if students choose to appeal. It will also be needed by the exam boards for quality assurance arrangements.

_If_ other evidence is going to be used then it should be recorded.  How do we ensure this is done fairly?  How do we ensure every student has the opportunity to provide additional information?  How do we ensure this is manageable for teachers?  Teachers won’t want their students to be disadvantaged, but if a teacher currently has one exam class they will have a vastly different workload in this process from one that has several exam classes.  Those who teach in a sixth form college, for example, are likely to have around half of their students requiring grading and additional information.  And remember, this is an unfamiliar process that will require training, will require the marking of exam papers and is to be done without additional time being made available.

4.3 Other performance evidence

We propose that teachers should be able to take other evidence of a student’s performance into account when deciding on the grade to be submitted to the exam board. If teachers do not use the exam board set papers, or even where they do, they should use additional ways to assess students and to gather evidence of the standard at which their students are performing. The exam boards would provide guidance on how they could do this.   Gathering more evidence.  In what time-frame?  There won’t be time for exam boards to decide what is required/permitted, for them to prepare the training, to train teachers and then for teachers to tell students what they could do to impact this, so it can only be things that exist already, which will advantage those who already happen to have done the things that are deemed to be appropriate.

We propose that where teachers devise their own assessment materials, they should be comparable in demand to the papers provided by the exam boards.

Why would anyone do this?  Why would anyone want this to happen?  There is so much evidence to show that writing exam papers is hard.  It is reasonable for teachers to write end-of-topic tests, and to create formative tests that will show which children can answer questions on a particular topic.  But writing real, proper exam papers is hard.  It’s done by highly trained and experienced professionals.  And even they (as Twitter shows every now and then) occasionally get it wrong. 

Writing a single question without flaws is hard.  Creating an exam paper that provides a good mix of questions and difficulties is a different level.  Teachers just aren’t used to doing this.  Plus there’s the chance that pupils will get used to the style of questions their teacher poses … and will therefore answer a ‘home-made’ paper better.  Plus the teachers will know the questions that their students are going to get which doesn’t seem ideal.  Why would this be worth doing?  Only if teachers in a school were convinced it would benefit their students (perhaps, legitimately, by allowing the students to demonstrate better what they can do).  So if this is an advantage to the students, which teachers and schools will have the capacity/skills/experience to make it happen?  And who will suffer as a result?

Any assessment must allow students to demonstrate the standard at which they can perform. We propose that any teacher devised assessments used to support the final assessment should be used at the same time as the exam board papers would be taken, to avoid any students being unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged by the timing of when they are assessed.

A legitimate use of teacher-devised papers seems to me to be to allow for additional information to be gathered ahead of the exam period, to go alongside the exam papers created by the boards.  But that isn’t being permitted.

Teacher devised assessments should be supported by mark schemes, in order to support consistent marking within a school or college and any appeals. We propose that the exam boards should provide guidance for each subject on the relative use of different forms of performance evidence.  The exam boards now need to train people in how to write and use exam papers.  In ~4 months.  Good luck with that.

we propose that, in the majority of circumstances, greater weight should be given to evidence of a student’s performance that is closer to the time of the final assessment.

Does this mean that greater weight is given to topics that were studied closer to the end of Yr 11, or that greater weight is given to examining that happens closer to the end of Yr 11?  If the latter, then the easiest way to do this is to have exams.

We are also aware that it may be more difficult to draw on wider evidence for students whose education has been most disrupted and ask you bear this in mind when answering the questions here and in the equality impact assessment section.

Question 20.To what extent do you agree or disagree that a breadth of evidence should inform teachers’ judgements?

I know that this will be tempting for lots of people.  There are those who believe other evidence ought to be part of assessing final grades, alongside exams.  While I think it is reasonable to hold this position, I worry that some will see that supporting this question will help to usher that in.  At the risk of repetition: there isn’t time to put this in place properly this year, it will be applied unevenly, and the pupils who will be disadvantaged by this will be students who already face disadvantage.  Please don’t support this question just because you are ideologically in favour of it: the practicalities mean it will be a nightmare this year.

5 The assessment period

If schools and colleges use exam-board-provided papers or create their own, we propose they should be used by teachers within a set period of time. If students who are completing the papers do so at different times there is a risk that students taking the papers later in the window might be at an advantage, particularly if the content of the papers is leaked.

I love the optimistic use of “if” here.  I would replace it with “when the content of the papers is leaked”.  In a normal year, the day after a maths paper is sat there are videos showing worked answers on YouTube and threads about it on The Student Room.  This means schools can’t use those papers as mock exams the following year and is a source of frustration for many.  Of course the same thing will happen here.

This risk could be reduced by: (a) the exam boards creating a menu of papers from which teachers would choose. The papers could be deliberately published shortly before the assessment window opened, although students would not know which one(s) they would be required to complete

By “published” does it mean that they would be made openly available to everyone, including students?  Those with access to additional teaching, private tutoring, etc, will be able to go through these.  And they will appear as worked answers on social media.  Or does it mean that schools will only be able to see the papers (which will still be kept away from students) a short while before choosing the questions they want their students to answer?  That will lead to a mad scramble just before the exams.  What if the teachers decide the questions aren’t appropriate for their students at that late date?  Do they then begin to write their own paper?

(b) all students completing the papers for a particular subject within a certain time frame—and we are seeking views on how long that should be It is important to consider what would happen if the course of the pandemic is such that papers cannot safely be sat within a school or college (see the next section). Following this consultation, the exam boards will seek views from schools and colleges on the dates between which the papers for each subject can be used by teachers. We propose that, in the interests of fairness and consistency, students assessed with and without the use of the exam board papers should be assessed as late as possible in the academic year.

If there is an assessment window, what is the benefit to schools of having their students do the exam early in that window?  Some will want to defer them as late as possible to allow for more lessons to take place.  And it will be extremely difficult to police leaks of papers and who might have seen them. 

We shouldn’t forget that students will be taking their usual subjects.  For Yr 11 that might be 9 or 10 subjects.  If there is only one exam in each subject these still needs to be spread out and still requires an exam timetable to be created (add that to the list of things for every school to do separately: create an exam timetable) except instead of having the usual 6-week-long exam-board produced timetable, it all needs to happen in a shorter timeframe.  More exams in each subject would make this more challenging to do, fewer would make the results less reliable.

7 Supporting teachers

Question: 31.To what extent do you agree or disagree that the exam boards should provide support and information to schools and colleges to help them meet the assessment requirements?

Will anyone disagree with this?

9 External quality assurance

We propose that the exam boards should quality assure the approach taken by each school and college and that the exam boards should work together, where appropriate, to make sure their approaches are both consistent and do not impose unnecessary burden on schools and colleges.

_All_ of this is an unnecessary burden on schools and colleges that is being caused by the decision to cancel exams.

We propose that the exam boards should engage with every school or college to consider the approach it is taking.  Will this be on a subject basis or a centre basis?  If the former, will exam boards have enough capacity to do this?  If the latter, does that mean the exact same approach will have to be taken across every subject?

All schools and colleges, regardless of cohort size, geography, demographic or centre type could be subject to further checks. We would also expect the exam boards to target some of their quality assurance activities. They might, for example, spend more time with a new school or college verifying that compliant processes are in place,

This process is a brand new one.  No-one has done it before.  _All_ schools and colleges will be ‘new’ to doing this. 

10 How students could appeal their grade

We propose that the appeal should be considered by a competent person appointed by the school or college, who had not been involved with the original assessment – this could be another teacher in the school or college or a teacher from another school or college.

This is a very odd way of doing things.  The person considering an appeal will be chosen by the school, and could even be a colleague of the teacher who made the original judgement. 

an appeal to the exam board would be on the grounds that the school or college had not acted in line with the exam board’s procedural requirements, either when assessing the standard at which the student was performing or when considering the student’s appeal. A student could not appeal to the exam board on the basis that either the teacher assessment or the appeal decision was not a reasonable exercise of academic judgment where the correct procedure had been followed.

How will students know that the procedural requirements haven’t been followed?  Presumably this will require every school to publish detail of what they have done and what evidence they have used?  Is that a sensible use of time?

To relieve pressure on the appeals process, we are seeking views on whether results day(s) in 2021 should be brought forward as this could be of benefit to students, schools and colleges and further and higher education providers. Students should only be issued with their result once external quality assurance by the exam boards has been completed. If there is an appetite for results to be brought forward we will consider the interaction between the timing of students receiving their results and the results becoming formal for the purpose of university admissions, working with the further and higher education sector to ensure no delay to existing admissions timelines. We propose that the exam boards should publish information for use by schools and colleges on how to deal with appeals.

Does this mean appeals would happen during the summer holiday?  Would teachers need to be on-hand to respond during that time?

11 Private candidates

We want to build into the approach opportunities for private candidates (for example students studying independently, and home educated students) to be awarded grades in summer 2021.

The proposals give four suggestions, of which the third is:

(c) for the exam boards to run normal exams for private candidates to take in the summer of 2021 – appropriate venues would need to be provided.

This suggests that exams haven’t been “cancelled” then.  The only thing that would be different here from having _all_ students sitting exams is the number of students who are involved.  If it’s deemed fair for us to consider in this consultation that private candidates might sit exams, surely it’s fair for us to be asked whether _everyone_ should be allowed to sit exams?  Question 58 says:

58.If the preferred option for private candidates is an exam series, should any other students be permitted to enter to also sit an exam?

Yes!  All of them!

Impact on schools and colleges

We expect there would be one-off, direct costs and administrative burdens to schools and colleges associated with the following activities: • familiarisation with information and guidance from exam boards on teacher assessment and submitted grades • communication and training from senior leaders to teaching staff on teacher assessment and submitted grades • marking and quality assurance of teacher assessments and submitted grades • amendments to centre systems to enable the required information to be gathered and submitted to exam boards in a format specified by them • managing high volumes of enquiries from candidates and parents • managing potentially high volumes of appeals

Of these, which will fall on teaching staff and senior leaders in school?  Most of them.  And even if exams officers make amendments to centre systems and are the first contact for enquiries from candidates and parents, teaching staff will need to learn how to use the centre system, will need to enter data they didn’t used to have to input (because exams were marked externally) and will need to respond to at least some of the queries.

But it’s OK, because there are things schools won’t need to do that will balance this out:

Schools and colleges will be delivering the alternative arrangements in place of, and not in addition to, the usual range of activity required to deliver summer exams in their centre including, for example, secure handling of exam papers and scripts, invigilation of exams and dealing with any cases of possible malpractice and maladministration arising in usual exam delivery.

Let’s look at these in turn:

secure handling of exam papers and scripts

This will still need to happen to maintain integrity.  This is a task that wasn’t carried out by senior leaders and teachers but by exams officers.

invigilation of exams

Teachers aren’t allowed to invigilate exams; external people are paid to do this in a normal year.  In fact, who will be doing that this year, when the exam papers are sat in school?  There will _have_ to be invigilation happening in any case.

dealing with any cases of possible malpractice and maladministration arising in usual exam delivery

This will also still need to be done (and would have been carried out by the exams officers and not by teachers in any case).

So this section lays out the vast extra work that teachers and senior leaders will have, countered by things that are either a mirage, or which would have been done by non-teaching members of staff anyway.

We acknowledge that the burden of delivering the revised arrangements could be greater and more challenging for both exam boards and centres where staff availability is affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) and centres are closed for normal teaching.

This one hadn’t occurred to me.  If there is a short timescale for exam board papers to opened and for decisions to be made as to which parts to use, if teachers are unwell then that will mess things up.  Normal exams could be invigilated as usual, with perhaps the need to recruit more invigilators if there is illness within the group, because no specialist subject knowledge or knowledge of the students is required to carry out the invigilation process.

We also acknowledge the exceptional impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on the workload of teachers and their colleagues.

I am pleased to see this written down, but these proposals suggest it has then been entirely ignored.  Teachers and senior leaders are being asked to do an intolerably large number of additional duties.

Impact on students

Students taking the relevant qualifications are directly affected by the proposed arrangements. We are focused on making sure they are not disadvantaged and that disruption to their planned progression is minimised.

It is right that students should not be disadvantaged and should not be disrupted.  Unfortunately these proposals don’t achieve this goal as well as exams would.  We should be asked for our thoughts on ordinary exams as well.

Summary:

What has been suggested here is vastly less good than having exams and tweaking how those are organised and managed. 

Here are the downsides of these proposals:

·         Huge extra workload for teachers and senior leaders with the need to:

o   Write/choose exam questions

o   Justify the choices

o   Be trained in how to assess students by non-exam means

o   Set and mark the exam questions

o   Decide on the grade for each student

·         Teachers will need to do all of this with a period of about 4 months, while teaching full-time and remotely, in a pandemic.

·         Anxiety amongst students who have been preparing for one system and who will now have to change to something new, something that neither they nor their teachers have experience of.

·         The fact that exam boards and teachers will have to do all of this at speed.

·         Disadvantaged pupils are likely to be more disadvantaged.

·         Despite best efforts, it won’t be moderated in a fair way across schools; there will be huge differences in the questions that are used, in the way additional evidence is taken into account.  It won’t be fair and it won’t be seen to be fair.

·         Exam questions will be leaked, they will make it into the public domain, and this will give some students an unfair advantage.

·         There is chance in play here: if students happened to do a mock exam in December then that might be usable, but cancelled January mocks are not.

How can we deal with these problems?

This answer to this is boring and predictable: having exams as usual will deal with every single issue listed above.

Here are the downsides of having exams as usual?

1.       In different schools the teaching provision during lockdown has been different and not all of the syllabus can be covered in full.

2.       Disadvantaged students are likely to have suffered disproportionately (perhaps because of a lack of access to wifi, IT equipment, a place to work, equipment for art, etc).

3.       Schools might not be able to be open on a particular date in June for students to come in to sit their exams, or certain students might be having to self-isolate at the time of an exam.

How can we deal with these problems?

It is reasonable to say that if I am disagreeing with one set of proposals I should come up with an alternative, so here are some comments on those problems caused by having exams as usual:

1&2) Additional resource needs to be put in place in schools that have been more disadvantaged by lockdowns and for students who have been more affected.  If Yr 11 and Yr 13 have been affected in some schools more than others, then so will Yr 10, and Yr 7, and Yr 5, etc.  Changing the entire exam system for this one year won’t help those other year groups and doesn’t deal with the underlying issue.  Special consideration could be applied by exam boards, with schools asked to say which students are likely to have been disadvantaged, either because of access to equipment or by additional periods of self-isolation.

3) This might be the case for the new system that is proposed, and the solution for that can be used for ordinary exams.

It seems far more sensible to tweak the usual exams rather than throwing them out (and replacing them with different exams).  These tweaks could be different in each subject.  For example, in GCSE maths there are currently 3 exam papers, all of which examine the majority of the curriculum. Removing one paper would not be a major issue and would save on exam-time (although it wouldn’t sort out lack of coverage of the curriculum).  If there are distinct topic areas within exams (this might be more likely at A-level) then it could be feasible for students to choose say 2 out of the 3 topics to answer questions on.  Alternatively, in all examined subjects the topic for each question could be made explicit and schools could declare in advance which topics have been covered in their school, with those that aren’t being ignored for those students (with a minimum requirement in place).  I think my preferred suggestion would be for exam papers to be set as usual and for the lowest-performing 20% of questions to be ignored for each student, so it won’t matter that they have only covered 80% of the content of the exam. 

Is this perfect?  No.  Is it better than the proposed system?  Yes!  And will take vastly less time, energy and resource to put in place: time, energy and resource that could be diverted to the students who need it most.

A plea

I have strong views on this.  If you do too, then please take part in the consultation (whether you agree with me or not!).  I will be using the ‘any other comments’ questions to say how much I disagree with the approach being taken.

Please read the full consultation document first and then reply to the consultation.  The link for both of these is here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/consultation-on-how-gcse-as-and-a-level-grades-should-be-awarded-in-summer-2021

The deadline is Friday 29 January 2021 .