Ofqual’s chief regulator has said she would welcome a National Reference Test being carried out in subjects beyond English and maths but does not think the government would fund this.
Dr Jo Saxton was responding to questions in a House of Lords inquiry about how exam grades are set.
She told peers it was wrong to suggest that GCSEs or A levels had a quota of how many grades would be awarded.
Dr Saxton said it was important that students’ underlying performance matched their grades, and that the National Reference Test (NRT) - sat by a representative sample of students - was a “fantastic tool” that helped Ofqual to determine whether standards in English and maths were changing.
Lord Knight, a former schools minister, asked how the NRT could be used to help Ofqual regulate what grades should be in other subjects, given that the NRT only tests students in English and maths.
Dr Saxton said: “Between English and maths that obviously gives us a really good kind of bellwether about the national performance. My colleagues at Ofqual observe all of the exam board awarding processes so they can see it first hand.”
She added: “To regulate, we use data in the fullest sense and we require significant training and quality assurance on the part of the exam boards to make sure that expertise, to make sure that human judgement is coming into play and that data points are an important check and balance.”
Lord Knight added: “Would it be helpful for you to have National Reference Tests in other subjects?”
Dr Saxton replied: “It would be absolutely wonderful but I don’t think the Department for Education and the Treasury would want to fund it for every subject.”
Questions over GCSE exam grades
The House of Lords committee questioned Dr Saxton and Ofqual chair Sir Ian Bauckham following earlier evidence in which peers were told that the current GCSE grading system “required” a third of students to fall short of achieving a grade 4 in English and maths.
Alistair McConville, the co-founder of Rethinking Assessment also told the committee that GCSEs do not have criterion reference marking in place to establish what grades pupils should achieve.
When asked about this, Dr Saxton said there is not a set quota of exam grades each year.
She said: “The bell curve of grades, because it looks similar in successive years, people assume is a quota and [that] it’s been kind of retrofitted on to results, but grades are a direct consequence of the marks that students achieve.”
When pushed on this by committee chair Lord Johnson, a former universities minister, she added: “There is no quota and there is no requirement that a certain proportion of students must fail.”
The committee also asked Dr Saxton about the likelihood of moving to online exams.
She told peers that Ofqual and the DfE was doing “a feasibility study about what it would take for high-stakes exams to go fully digital”.
Dr Saxton said this study was considering what national infrastructure would be needed and what “guardrails” needed to be in place.
The Ofqual chief regulator said that technology could be used to produce adaptive interactive questions, which could mean students did not have to sit tiered exams. She warned that this would be resource-intensive and said it would need a large number of questions for them not to be predictable.
She added: “I think we are some years away from being able to achieve that.”
But Sir Ian told peers that artificial intelligence could have the potential to address the problem of “resource intensity that has hitherto been the problem of creating fully adaptive testing”.
