In education, nothing quite compares to results day.

Despite the fact that we all say, and to some extent know, that education is so much more than merely the award of a number or a letter determined by someone who doesn’t really know a child, the honest truth is that exam results are a key part of what keeps us focused and driven towards always raising standards.

They are both the carrot and the stick of learning.

As such, results day itself is always a strange mix of excitement, validation, fear, achievement and sometimes, unfortunately, disappointment.

It is a day where you have to balance the many rewarding success stories against the failures and panic when a student misses their university offer. 

IB results day 2020: ‘A strange experience’

And this year, results day is even stranger still: the International Baccalaureate examination results will be awarded without anyone sitting an actual exam. The very essence of what the grades are supposed to represent has been removed.

Although, as I look through the results of the Aiglon students, they are largely about right.

The IB has used the internal assessments (IAs) and teacher predictions alongside historical data to award a grade that holds the same weight as a “real” result.

As always, there are individual frustrations and the odd outlier.

These feel even more pronounced and unfair when they are based upon even less than usual, but most of our students have got what they should, and most probably would, have received. 

Ranking results

Upon reflection, I would hope the IB might consider that a ranking system, as employed by the A-level and IGCSE boards, would have been beneficial.

This is because we have some situations where our top students seem to have been bumped off due to some arbitrary distribution curve, whereas weaker students have maintained predictions alongside them, and it is hard to know how they reached that conclusion based on so little evidence. 

The saddest part of this is that the students may never feel that these are their genuine, earned results. Equally, you get no room for the truly amazing stories.

Every year there is a student who surprises you, who puts in that last bit of effort and reaches their full potential at the absolutely perfect moment.

For example, last year we had a student who beat her predictions in the IB by eight points. Our predictions are, as a centre, 65 per cent accurate, so this said more about the student’s latent potential than any mistakes in judgement.

Credit where it’s due

This year the results are exactly what was expected.

This is credit to the IB. Some of our top-end students seemed to be held back a little - we had three who we thought, with a good wind behind them, would get full marks and 45 - but, perhaps cursed by the inherent nature of teachers to never give full marks, they all fell just short. 

Equally, we all know students who thrive in the exams and, for this cohort, they will never have the chance to see if their last push would have been rewarded. 

How the students and history will process this set of results will remain to be seen.

Time to reflect

Will they forever have an asterisk next to them, or will they come to be accepted as a fair solution for a challenging time?

Here at Aiglon, the 2020 cohort was our largest ever one to take the IB and, as an international boarding school that prides itself on the high levels of support and small class sizes, we had our concerns.

In the end, they received a respectable average of 36.7 and, incredibly, over a quarter of all our students got over 40 points.

However, the thing that made us proudest was that 97 per cent of all our students got over 30, which was last year’s world average and, whatever these results come to represent, a number speaks volumes for the love and support that defines this community. 

Tomas Duckling is director of learning at Aiglon College, Switzerland 

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Tes spoke with Paul Teulon, the Head of Global Recognition at the International Baccalaureate, about how the organisation worked to provide students with grades despite no formal exams taking place this year and what this could mean for the future of IB assessments.