This post was originally published on my academic blog, http://msci-going-on-phd.blogspot.com/.
Today, six years on from the day I received my A-level results, another cohort was just awarded their grades. Unlike those of us who came before, this year's crop weren't able to sit exams to earn the results, but have to settle for widely-criticised moderated grades, which were lower than teachers' estimates in almost 40% of cases. I can't help wondering what might've happened to myself and other high achievers at my school had the distribution of our grades depended on the school's past performance and largely ignored our own individual trajectories to GCSE and AS.
I also wonder whether the bitter disappointment felt by so many this year would have been lessened if AS exams still counted towards the final A-level grade, because that would've allowed other forms of mitigation, such as students not dropping more than one or two grades below their AS result. I appreciate that there was not time to administer a replacement formal measure of progress over the 18 months of A-level education completed before schools closed, and not everybody would have achieved as highly as predicted, but surely there could have been a mechanism to submit work that the centre-assessed grades were based on for moderation instead?
Shifting the entire group based on performance of previous cohorts does not seem fair, particularly when many university places won't be held in time for appeals based on meaningful individual factors, such as mock grades. These results influence the course of lives, so it is unfathomable to me that pupils were marked down simply because a lower proportion of previous years' students achieved high grades.
