Covid caused, and is still causing, many problems for the education sector, but the absolute carnage it unleashed upon our assessment system has been one of the most unfortunate.
The government made a complete hash of dealing with the impact of lockdowns on exams - first through the poor implementation of an algorithm designed to replicate results, and then by giving up on consistency altogether and asking schools to set results without external moderation or much in the way of guidance.
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This put schools and colleges in an invidious position - the more rigorous they were, the more they harmed the life chances of their pupils, given that other centres would be more generous. It was a real-life prisoner’s dilemma at scale.
Unsurprisingly we saw dramatic grade inflation, particularly for A levels, and particularly at the top end, where not meeting predicted grades can have such a profound impact on a student’s life.
This didn’t require outright cheating, or even doing anything consciously misleading - it just meant making the generous call on every marginal decision.
Returning to ‘normal’
When proper exams returned this year, the government and Ofqual were left with a tricky choice about grading. Should they “rebase” the currency to the new inflated level, or go back to the 2019 profile, which would see a huge fall in grades?
They chose to do the latter but over two years. So we knew long before today what this year’s grade profile would look like. And indeed grades are roughly halfway between 2019 and 2021.
The 2022 grades are slightly above the exact midpoint because, for popular subjects, they have chosen to round up where it fell between two marks.
So far, schools seem to have accepted this process.
Grades this year are still higher than they were in 2019, and almost no one wanted to keep the time-consuming and wildly inconsistent teacher-assessed grades of the last two years. We will see over the course of the next few days how it affects students, many more of whom will miss out on selective university courses than in the previous two years.
They certainly have the right to feel hard done by given their grades will, on average, be worse than cohorts from last year through no fault of their own. In many ways, they have taken a bigger hit from Covid than anyone else as they missed getting proper GCSE results and suffered through both lockdowns and more disruption this year.
Why exams are our best option
It would be easy to look at the mess of the last few years, where no year’s results are comparable with any other, as an argument against an overly rigid assessment system.
Surely a more flexible approach with properly moderated teacher assessment would be less vulnerable? But if anything it’s shown the opposite - the critical importance of fair, standardised, externally assessed exams.
We can debate if these all need to be at the end of the course, or whether they could be more varied in content, but the last few years have made it clearer than ever that asking schools to set results themselves benefits pupils from wealthier families.
Look for instance at private schools, where results were inflated even more than elsewhere. This year, their proportion of A* and A grades have dropped 12 percentage points from 70 per cent to 58 per cent, whereas the most comparable state institutions - grammar schools - have fallen back just 6 points from 56.5 per cent to 50.4 per cent.
Professor Lindsey Macmillan’s analysis of the 2020 results shows that, even adjusting for demographics and prior attainment, pupils with graduate parents were given higher grades by schools than those without.
Creating a level playing field
This is an iron rule of any public service - the more room you give for ambiguity, the more it will be exploited by those with money and knowledge of the system. Avoiding this is, after all, the reason exams were invented in the first place.
In the meantime, we can only congratulate students on their achievements, commiserate with those who’ve been caught up in a series of messes that were no fault of their own, and thank teachers for steering through all the troubles of the past few years.
We have one more year where results won’t be comparable, and another cohort who will have the right to feel unfairly treated.
But then, hopefully, we can return to normality and start thinking about sensible approaches to improving the assessment system that increase, rather than harm, fairness.
Sam Freedman is a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education and a senior fellow at the Institute of Government.
