Teacher-assessed GCSE grades submitted to exam boards this year are higher, on average, than grades in 2019, research suggests.
GCSE grades submitted to FFT Education Datalab from more than 1,900 schools - more than half of all secondary schools in the country - showed that, in every subject, the average grade from teacher assessment was higher than the average grade awarded in 2019.
GCSEs:
FFT statisticians and researchers Dave Thomson and Philip Nye found that in most subjects there was a difference of between 0.3 and 0.6 grades, and that in 10 out of 24 subjects considered, the 2020 grades were half a grade higher or more.
They found that, if these teacher-assessed grades were not amended by exam boards, the share of pupils awarded a grade 4 or above would increase from 71.4 per cent to 80.8 per cent in English language, from 73.7 per cent to 79.0 per cent in English literature, and from 72.5 per cent to 77.6 per cent in maths.
And the share of results receiving a grade 4 or above across all subjects would increase from 72.8 per cent to 80.7 per cent.
In computer science, a subject that has been graded severely in the past, there was a difference of a whole grade - 5.4 for 2020, compared to an average grade of 4.5 for 2019.
The researchers acknowledge that they do not know if the data submitted to FFT is the same as that submitted to the exam boards, and also that they only compared schools that had data for 2019 and 2020 and where there was “enough data to form reliable conclusions”.
Across all subjects, the share of grade 9s would increase from 4.8 per cent of grades last year to 6.3 per cent, the research suggests.
“It seems likely that Ofqual and the exam boards will have to apply statistical moderation to the grades submitted by schools, bringing them down on average,” the blog said.
Thomson and Nye said teachers had also faced a difficult task given the recent introduction of 9-1 GCSE grading, as well as assessing pupils at a time when schooling had been disrupted.
They wrote: “It’s also much easier to distinguish between two pupils using marks from an exam. As a thought experiment, imagine two pupils thought to be on the 5/4 boundary who have produced a similar quality of work at school. It would be unfair for the teacher to give one a 5 and the other a 4 - but an exam would rule definitively on the matter, for better or worse.”
The authors also found that this year’s proposed grades would mean more variability in schools’ grades between 2019 and 2020.
They found that, out of 1,500 schools, results would increase in every subject for 69 schools from 2019 to 2020.
“Most strikingly, the number of subjects in which schools’ results would be considered to have fallen would drop greatly. Were these 2020 grades awarded this August, two-thirds of schools wouldn’t see a material decrease in their results in a single subject,” they said.
