Will this year’s A-level exam grades be fair? 

It’s come round again – that anxious time when school students are told their A-level and GCSE grades. For many A-level students, the results will trigger a frenetic day of engagement with universities, using the “clearing” system. At the end of the process, most university applicants obtain a place on a course that suits them. But it’s a stressful time for them – and for their parents. For this year’s candidates, their grades come at the end of a difficult and disrupted period, with remote learning and being sent home from school to isolate with their “bubble”. And to cap it all, the exams at the end of their course have been cancelled for the second year running. Their grades will be decided by their schools and colleges, with guidance and support from the exam boards and the exam regulators. Is that fair?

Well, it depends what you mean by “fair”. In our view there are two basic ideas involved in discussions of fairness. The first is a kind of equality – that like cases are treated alike. It is fair in this sense if a student in Norwich is judged against the same standards as a student in Newcastle. The second is desert – a fair grade is one that the student deserves. This means that the student should recognise that their grade matches what they have done. With traditional exams, a fair grade would match the quality of the student’s exam script. The outcome of the exam, even if fairly marked, may or may not be thought to reflect what the student deserves for their work during the course, but traditional exams do at least provide work done by the student for the examiner to mark. 

With Covid, things have been different. After the cancellation of exams in 2020, there was a quest to find a fair way to award grades, and what happened next has come to be known as the “exams fiasco”. Elaborate statistical models were developed to be applied to information provided by schools, and these were examined to make sure that they did not disadvantage particular groups and applied the same approach to all candidates across the country. In the “equality” sense, those models were as fair as they could be. But there was a furore, because students felt that an external algorithm had been applied to them, and that their grades were being determined by factors other than the work they themselves had done. Significant numbers of students – and their teachers – felt that the grades were not what the students deserved, and hence that they were unfair. This led to a U-turn, with students receiving either the grade proposed by their school or the grade calculated using the algorithm, whichever was higher. 

Bruised by that experience, the authorities turned to planning for 2021. In England, ministers tried for as long as possible to cling on to the hope of holding normal exams, but as they pandemic persisted across the UK, they had to be cancelled. The grades being received now are determined by students’ schools and colleges, supported by a range of evidence provided by the individual student, including the outcomes of tests taken at school. Is that fairer?

In explicitly requiring schemes relating the grade to evidence provided for each pupil, the balance has been moved towards fairness-by-desert, as schools should be able to justify the grade in terms of work the student has done. But there will almost certainly be a degree of inconsistency, compared with national exams, which are tightly controlled and quality-assured. So, the student from Newcastle may not receive his or her grade against precisely the same requirements as the student from Norwich. 

Do these inconsistencies matter? They may matter a lot if the two students are competing for the same scarce university places in, say, medicine. It would also matter if minority groups of students were disadvantaged by not benefiting from the exam boards’ experience and expertise in adapting assessments to meet their needs. The regulators publish statistical analyses of exam grades and carry out research to explore the effects on particular groups of students and types of school. When we have that material for 2021 awards, we may be able to make a more informed judgement about fairness-by-equality. 

Another kind of inconsistency is “attainment gaps” – better grades for students from richer families, the children of educated parents or pupils of independent schools. There have always been such gaps, not only in educational outcomes but in health and employment. But there are rumours that the grading gaps for exams will be wider this year. If that proved to be so, there would be two possible kinds of explanation. The first would be that the process for awarding the grades was itself unfair, in relational terms, with the process offering more opportunities for some students to obtain high grades than others. The second would be that the differences in attainment reflected real differences in opportunities for students to learn during the pandemic. 

There have been media stories of “sharp-elbowed parents” pressurising teachers to award good grades, particularly in independent schools in England, though there is no hard evidence that any such pressures have been successful. One suspects that teachers in schools with sharp-elbowed parents are quite practised at dealing with them. Perhaps the second set of explanations is more credible. With students required to work at home, and some schools able to provide much more live remote support than others, it may not be surprising if their students, or students whose parents are able to help more, may do better this year. In fairness terms, it will be relationally unfair if the process for awarding grades favours one school type or socioeconomic group.  But research is suggesting that the pandemic has exacerbated many types of disadvantage in society, and gaps in exam grades may be part of a wider picture that is itself relationally unfair.   

In 2020, after the “fiasco”, the grades awarded to students – for most of them, those proposed by their school or college – were markedly more generous than those awarded by the exam boards in 2019. The jury is out on whether there will be further grade inflation this year, but there may well be. Is that fair?

In a sense, applying inflated grades to everyone is fair-by-equality for all the students in the same year. However, it is clearly unfair if two students are competing for one university place on the basis of grades they have achieved in different years and the standards applied in one year are much more generous than those applied in the other. And more generally, there are good reasons for trying to limit inflation of exam grades. A perception that high grades have become easier to obtain can affect public confidence in the whole system. It can be unfair to high-achieving students if the system lacks a way of showing how good they are. One of the uses of exam grades – to discriminate between applicants for competitive university courses – may be more difficult if more students present the same (high) grades. And it is difficult for employers to use information based on students’ grades if the meaning of those grades is constantly changing.

However, for the Covid years, we may just have to live with an element of inflation. Universities understand that students starting undergraduate courses may not have had the opportunities for learning that their predecessors had, and students who are receiving grades this week and who are offered university places can be assured that their universities will work with them to enable them to succeed in their course. 

We close with the really wicked problems, to which there are no easy answers. If there is continued grade inflation this year, what should be done about grading standards in 2022 and 2023 – should they be “pegged back”, and if so, to what level? And should we return, with a sigh of relief, to traditional exams? Is it really appropriate, in the 21st century, for the futures of young people to be determined by what they do on a single occasion, sitting at an individual desk in a hall, speaking to no-one and writing with a pen for three hours?  Or, should we allow the shock of Covid to jolt us into thinking again about the best way to assess students fairly? 

Isabel Nisbet and Stuart Shaw are co-authors of Is Assessment Fair? (SAGE Publishing)

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