Exam Shambles
Image source: thesun.co.uk Since A-Level results have been published in England, there has been widespread protest and outrage about the allocation of grades to pupils on the basis of a clearly biased algorithm, favouring those from more privileged areas over students from more disadvantaged areas as it is based on schools' previous performance rather than honouring the predicted grades given by teachers. Teachers had to rank students depending on the likelihood of students achieving each grade, using evidence including mocks, unit tests, and in some cases KS2 SATS results. For example, out of the students who were predicted Grade 9s, the student with the top rank would have had the highest probability of achieving a Grade 9, whereas the student with the bottom rank might have been just as likely to achieve a Grade 8 as a Grade 9. When the government's standardisation came into effect, many students who were lower down on the ranks moved down and achieved much lower grades to m