Students’ performance in exams continues to be negatively affected by the pandemic - but there are “signs of recovery”, according to the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) director of policy, analysis and standards.

Interruptions to learning since 2020 are continuing to have an impact on “foundational knowledge, skills and understanding”, says Martyn Ware, who has worked at the SQA for over 20 years.

Speaking exclusively to Tes Scotland ahead of today’s publication of this year’s SQA exam results, Mr Ware said that modern languages were among the subjects where “learners being out of school for an extended period” was having the biggest impact. He also said that in the sciences learners continued to struggle this year “to engage with questions around practical experiments... and around data arising from experiments” because public health guidance during the pandemic had led to less of these experiences in school.

However, Mr Ware also said there were “signs of recovery” in the exam papers sat by students this spring.

He said: “It’s a mixed picture and as with the impact of the pandemic itself - that wasn’t even across the country, across schools, across learners - and neither is the recovery, therefore. It’s an ongoing process, but it’s not an even process.”

Still, Mr Ware said the feedback from principal assessors - those who oversee marking for the SQA, who are often practising teachers and lecturers - was that students were “not where we would have expected them to be”.

The upshot was that the SQA took a “sensitive” approach to grading this year - something of a halfway position between the “generous” approach taken last year and a return to normal standards.

Mr Ware said: “In setting and maintaining a national standard, the challenge we have is trying to make sure that we take sufficient account of that recovery, while still maintaining a standard in our qualifications so that those qualifications continue to have credibility and to command the confidence of learners and anybody else who needs to know about those qualifications - employers, colleges, universities.”

In practice, what this “sensitive” approach meant, said Mr Ware, was that at the 140 meetings that took place in the wake of the exams, where the mark needed to achieve different grades was determined, the impact of Covid-19 was part of the discussion.

In order to attain a C grade, the general expectation is that a candidate should achieve 50 per cent of the marks. However, that cut-off point is not set in stone and can be adjusted if, for example, an exam is deemed to be too easy or too hard.

This year there was another element to those discussions.

“You would have the conversation about, ‘Are there other continuing legacy impacts from the pandemic here that we should make adjustments for?’” said Mr Ware, who, along with other senior SQA staff, chairs grade boundary meetings.

SQA grade boundaries this year

Mr Ware said that any adjustments to SQA grade boundaries this year to take into account ongoing Covid impact had not been “large adjustments on the whole”. Whether they had an impact on individual learners, he said, would depend on how close a student was to a grade boundary.

“If they were close to the grade boundary in the marks they achieved, then it may make a difference to the grade - as it would in any year where we make an adjustment to a grade boundary. If we adjust by a mark or two, that takes a number of candidates into a grade or out of a grade, and again that’s part of the usual process,” he added.

“Ultimately, the objective of this process was to ensure fairness to learners, recognising that while, thankfully, the worst excesses of the pandemic are past us, there is a continuing impact on learners and on the education system more generally.”

That continuing Covid impact varied depending on the course, said Mr Ware.

“Languages is one area where, probably because of learners being out of school for an extended period, they have had less exposure to the listening and talking elements of the language - to have the opportunity to speak it themselves and hear other people speak it,” he added.

“And also the fact of the foundational knowledge - on the whole, vocabulary was less well developed in modern foreign languages than we would have expected had the pandemic not happened. Intuitively, I suppose that’s not a surprise but that’s the evidence we saw.”

In 2022, in order to attain a C grade in Higher French, students needed to attain at least 40 per cent of the marks; in 2019 that figure was 52 per cent. For Spanish and German the pass mark also dropped to 40 per cent at Higher last year.

This year the grade boundary to attain a C grade for Higher French was set at 42 per cent. For German it was 47 per cent and for Spanish it was 43 per cent.

Scotland’s chief examiner and SQA chief executive Fiona Robertson said in her report on the 2023 exam results that overall “median [grade boundary] adjustment is usually around zero” but this year “the median adjustment was -0.8 percentage points at grade A and -2.4 percentage points at grade C”, to take account of the “impact of disruption on this year’s learners, specifically how this has impacted acquisition of skills and knowledge”.

She said this was smaller than the adjustments made last year, “reflecting the continuing recovery in skills, knowledge and understanding on the part of learners, and a sensitive approach to grading”.

Covid mitigations

According to Mr Ware, although the SQA Covid mitigations that reduced the assessment burden on teachers and students were introduced for good reason, it is the subjects where modifications to coursework and exams were most modest where students are now performing best.

He said: “In places where we have been able to modify assessment less, the impact on learners has been less. The course arrangements and the course assessment were designed to perform in a particular way. So almost like a house, if a house is built in a particular way, if you take one bit of the house out it might fall down.

“The modifications to assessment were put in for good reason: they allowed learners to access courses in the deepest, darkest days of the pandemic when they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. But they have meant that courses aren’t being assessed in the way they were designed to be assessed.”

The SQA has already stated its intention that, for most qualifications, Covid modifications will cease next year.

The Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association reacted angrily to this announcement, saying that students were not ready.

However, this year, Scottish students who sat qualifications in the spring have continued to be given at least some leeway.

The test of whether that approach has been successful will be if learners and teachers feel the results are fair, said Mr Ware. That is something that will become increasingly apparent over the coming days.