It is getting close to a decade since I waited for the postie to chap the door with my envelope. Exam results day is always an anxious one but the anxiety for pupils today must have been unimaginable. That anxiety will not have been helped with the consistent lack of clarity and transparency from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) in how they would determine this years’ grades.
In May, the SQA told the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee that they would “undertake a moderation exercise nationally, using a range of data, discussion and review”. However, their methodology, published just today, shows that historical attainment data of individual schools was the basis for statistical moderation of teacher estimates.
The SQA was warned consistently throughout the process that this approach would impact upon the most disadvantaged students the most - because their schools have lower attainment rates over time. Those warnings have been shown to be justified and appear to have gone unheeded.
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The poorest pupils Higher pass rates were reduced by 15.2 per cent between teacher estimate and statistical moderation. For the richest, it was just 6.9 per cent.
This means the pupils from the poorest postcodes had their Higher downgraded from a pass to a fail at more than twice the rate of their most affluent peers. The consequence of that for those young people may be severe.
Here it is.
Poorest pupils Higher pass rate reduced by 15.2% between teacher estimate and statistical moderation.
Richest pupils rate reduced by just 6.9%. pic.twitter.com/aVHFf602Rq
- Barry Black (@BarryBlackNE) August 4, 2020
It should be noted that these results are broadly consistent with expectation. More disadvantaged young people have gained Highers this year, and that is always cause for celebration. The system has done the job of preserving the national standards of exams that understandably were scrapped this year. The problem is that if your “national standards” already produce results that are grotesquely unequal, a statistical model designed to maintain those standards will also be grotesquely unequal.
First minister Nicola Sturgeon said earlier today that if the pass rate for most disadvantaged went from 65 to 85 per cent, the results would not have been seen as credible. I think there is truth in that, but the issue stems from the design of their assessment system at the beginning of all of this. Any system would have needed elements of moderation, but the full reliance on historical attainment data has caused these issues - as they were warned from the outset.
There are also much deeper questions as to why teachers in deprived areas estimate their pupils should pass, when the SQA model says they should fail, than it simply being down to “optimistic” teachers.
The new normal looks frustratingly like the old.
Barry Black is a postgraduate education researcher at the University of Glasgow. He tweets @BarryBlackNE
*Tes Scotland will be live blogging throughout SQA results day 2020, on Tuesday 4 August. To find our coverage, go to the Scotland hub of the Tes website.
