GCSE and A-level students could query their teachers’ choice of assessment evidence to use as the basis for their final grades if they do not think it is a fair reflection of their work, exams regulator Ofqual said today.
Speaking at a meeting of the Commons Education Select Committee on grading in 2021, Simon Lebus, Ofqual’s chief regulator, said that students could raise concerns with their school before grades are submitted to boards on 18 June if they felt assessments used to grade them were not an accurate representation of “the best of their ability”.
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Asked by Tom Hunt, Conservative MP for Ipswich, whether a student who wanted to sit a non-mandatory external task - set by exam boards this year to help teachers with grading - could do so individually by choice, even if the rest of the class did not sit the assessment, Mr Lebus said: “The arrangements....provide that the school shares with students information about what evidence has been used as the basis for the grade judgement, before the recommendations are sent to the awarding body on 18 June.
GCSEs and A levels 2021: Students can challenge teachers’ evidence
“And, as a consequence, there’s an opportunity for a student to say if they think the evidence being used doesn’t accurately reflect the best of their ability, to say, ‘Actually, I don’t think that’s fair - we should have used other evidence,’ or, ‘I would have liked to have been tested.’
“And I think, given that that check exists at the end of the process, it’s clearly likely that teachers are going to think carefully about students with different needs and if there are different needs where you would require an exceptional approach. They’d probably try to make sure that that was organised for well in advance.”
In the same discussion, Mr Lebus said it would be best if all students in a class were graded on the same assessments, but that the arrangements gave teachers discretion over what assessments should be used, and from when in a student’s course.
