A breakdown of the UK’s A-level disaster

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

2020 has been a messy year for Brits. The UK’s dodgy handling of exam season may have been its messiest mistake yet.

***

At 6am on Thursday 13th August, over 250,000 eighteen year-olds across the UK received the defining letters of their school careers: their A-level results. 

However, this year, things were a bit different.

Backtrack a few months to the 18th of March, the day Boris Johnson, the UK’s Prime Minister, announced that schools would shut from the 20th of March ‘until further notice’ in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

That was over five months ago and, as it transpired, the majority of students never went back to school – year 13s will never go back to school. 

As the UK sunk deeper and deeper into the quicksand that is the notoriously infectious coronavirus, reaching a peak of 866 daily deaths on April 10th,[1] it became clear that not only would schools be unable to reopen until the start of the new school year in September (at the earliest), but also that any hope of current GCSE and A-level students being able to sit their exams was fruitless. 

Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson confirmed that the UK would “not go ahead with assessments or exams,” leaving hundreds of thousands of helpless students to speculate about how they would be graded.

Now, the A-level results are in…*

***

On results day, A-level students in England were awarded their first set of grades. These were calculated by a government algorithm which mediated pre-submitted Centre Assessment Grades (CAGs). 

CAGs: these are the grades that schools and colleges submitted for students. Teachers were asked to provide the grade they thought each student would have achieved, and a rank order for each subject.  

Government algorithm: this worked as a standardisation module. As the CAGs were heavily optimistic (for example, the CAGs at grade A or above were 12.5% higher than outcomes in 2019), the algorithm sought to make results more realistic. 

Despite the standardisation module, the resulting grades were the best England had seen in a while:

  • The proportion of A* and A grades rose by 2.4% to 27.6% on 2019 
  • The proportion of A* grades also rose from 7.7% last year to 8.9%
  • 98.2% of grades were an E or above, up from 97.5% in 2019
  • The proportion of B grades was also higher, whilst the proportion of grades at a C and below dropped.

Nevertheless, these results sparked outrage amongst many students and schools across the country. The government algorithm proved controversial and, to an extent, rightly so.

The algorithm lowered almost 2 in 5 of the CAGs: 

  • 35.6% of grades were lowered by one grade 
  • 3.3% were lowered by two grades
  • 0.2% were lowered three grades.[2]

Although the UK government claimed their algorithm “avoided any systematic advantage or disadvantage to particular student[s] on the basis of particular protected characteristics or socio-economic status,”[3] there resulted widespread claims that grades were adjusted based on the past performance of schools. It became clear that this was the case when testimonies and studies revealed that a higher percentage of grades were lowered in deprived areas than in more affluent areas.[4]

“I am not my postcode,” became the slogan displayed by students protesting their unfair grades.

In response to the outrage, the government did the unthinkable.

On Monday 17th August, four days after the original A-level grades were released, the Education Secretary for England announced that the CAG grades would be reinstated where they were higher than the grades adjusted by the government algorithm. This followed the example set by Scotland as was mirrored by Northern Ireland and Wales. The decision came as such a shock in England as Mr Williamson had vowed only days before that there would be “no U-turn, no change” to grades.

Students now have a second set of grades, many of which are higher than the original, already abnormally high grades:

  • The pass rate has risen to nearly 100% on 97.5% in 2019
  • The proportion of A and A* grades has risen from 25.2% last year, to 38.1%
  • 14.3% of students received A* grades compared to 7.7% last year

In the wake of this unpredictably shambolic government U-turn, leavers are experiencing a number of problems:

Scenario 1: I missed out on an A* in my first set of grades, so couldn’t go to my first choice university. I accepted my offer from my second choice. I was awarded an A* in my second set of grades so can theoretically go to my first choice, but have already declined it.

Scenario 2: In my first set of results, I didn’t get what I needed for either my first or second choice university, so I declined them both. Through clearing, I was able to get accepted into a lower calibre university. With my second set of grades I can get into either my first or second choice – but it’s too late for that now.

Students do, however, have the option to re-apply to their first or second choice universities if they now have the necessary grades in hand. Although many applicates have another chance and universities have a wider pool of eligible candidates, the majority of the consequences are negative for both students and institutions.

Many universities are now oversubscribed, but are having to honour offers. To tackle this, most are offering incentives in the hope of persuading offer-holders to defer a year to start in 2021. 

Durham University, for example, is offering bursaries and guaranteed accommodation to offer-holders who defer, after finding themselves juggling 15,000 oversubscribed applicants.

Though, a challenging year is ahead for applicants who do decide to defer; limited employment prospects combined with no gap-year travel will make for a difficult 12 months. Those who choose not to defer face accepting a place at an institution that was not their first, or even second, choice. 

I am currently a year 12 student going into my final year of school and am worried about my prospects for university entry in 2021. 

Having decided not to take a gap year, I and my fellow university-bound classmates will face fully or over-subscribed universities as a result of the fiasco A-level students have experienced this year.

I wonder, with the majority of this years’ 18 year-olds copping high grades, bursaries and guaranteed accommodation on top of receiving the handy ‘you don’t have to sit exams’ memo, if it’s my year that’s really in the shit. 

*Please note that these statistics refer to England only 

[1] London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s estimations

[2] Schools Week, James Carr and Freddie Whittaker using data published by Ofqual

[3] Ofqual’s Guide to AS and A-level results for England, 2020, through GOV.UK

[4] Examples and more specific information