Another summer of exam chaos has revealed anew how English education somehow manages to combine narrowness, neurosis, inequality and a lack of rigour. Proper assessment is important, but as things stand, pupils are suffering pointless pain

ELIANE GLASER ILLUSTRATION BY PRIYA MISTRY

Imagine that you are education secretary Gavin Williamson. It is 13th August 2020, and the algorithm employed by Ofqual to “moderate” the teacherassessed A-level grades, which followed the pandemic cancellation of exams, has come under intense fire. The results are out, and teachers in England have had almost 40 per cent of the grades they awarded marked down.

Q1. Do you:

A. Scrap the algorithm, bowing to the concerns of prominent figures such as Jon Coles, a former Department for Education director general, who warned you in early July that it was flawed;

B. Stick with the algorithm, citing the instruction you issued to Ofqual in March to ensure that the distribution of grades “follows a similar profile to that in previous years”;

Or C. Dither for five days, defending the system as “robust,” before finally performing a U-turn, claiming you have only just discovered the algorithm is unfair, and following the decision already taken in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to simply go with the teachers’ grades.

No marks for choosing the correct answer, but the trickier follow-up question is whether last summer’s saga merely reflects Williamson’s own (undoubted) shortcomings, or is instead a reflection of the confused way in which all politicians—and perhaps many of us voters too—approach examinations. Have we got any coherent idea of what we want them to do?

Labour leader Keir Starmer hailed Williamson’s capitulation as “a victory for the thousands of young people who have powerfully made their voices heard.” It’s true that the algorithm did threaten to prevent high-achievers at schools in poorer areas from transcending their circumstances. But last year’s abortive marking-down of disadvantaged kids was really just an automated version of what happens every year with little public outcry. And getting rid of it promptly created other problems, as grades went up across the board.

Oversubscribed universities asked applicants to defer full courses or choose an alternative subject. This year, with minimal moderation, the marks have risen higher. Students with places at the most coveted medical schools have been offered £10,000 to switch institution, despite the government funding extra places. With more youngsters holding passports to the elite Russell Group universities, other institutions are suffering a ruinous drop in recruitment.

Williamson now strikes a genial note, brushing aside complaints about grade inflation by saying students “deserve to be rewarded” after the pandemic disruption. But if the guiding principle of assessment is being nice, then the system— surely—is sunk.

Q2. Take three identically able students. Olivia gets AAB in 2020, when more than 38 per cent of results in England are A or A*, compared to 25 per cent in 2019. Karim gets AAA in 2021, when almost 45 per cent are A or A*. What should Jack get in 2022, when exams are almost back to normal?

This year, unlike 2020, schools have been able to choose between a wide variety of assessment methods, raising questions about comparability. This apparent freedom has spawned vast compensatory rituals of probity, with students (ironically) sitting multiple tests, and teachers filling out endless forms for exam boards. We end up in the worst of all worlds: ballooning bureaucracy and the erosion of standards.