GCSEs should be awarded to pupils from this
year’s cohort based on predicted grades following the
government’s ‘extraordinary’ step of cancelling exams, say
academics from the UCL Institute of
Education.
The researchers from the UCL Centre for
Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO) say that
this is a better solution than rescheduling exams for later in
the year, which could negatively impact children, particularly
those from lower socio-economic
backgrounds.
“Yesterday, the Department for Education took
the extraordinary step of cancelling GCSE exams and some children
will suffer the consequences of this throughout their lifetime.
It is obviously a very tricky situation, and any solution the
government comes up with will be less than perfect,” says
Professor John Jerrim (UCL Institute of
Education/CEPEO).
“Our collective opinion is that children in the
2019/20 cohort should be award GCSEs based upon their predicted
grades. This has the obvious advantage of being relatively cheap
and easy to do. Weighing up the different options this seems to
be as fair as the alternatives.”
The academics say that the government is likely
to be concerned with awarding predicted grades because they might
not be able to regulate grade inflation. Some students’ grades
could be more inflated than others, which could negatively impact
those from less advantaged backgrounds.
Previous research, for example, has provided
evidence to show that equally able children from poor backgrounds
will be predicted lower grades than their peers from richer
backgrounds.*
However, to avoid this issue, education experts
say there are statistical ways of identifying schools with
suspiciously high or low grades by looking at how pupils have
performed in GCSEs in previous year.
“By making clear that there will be such checks
on schools, it will greatly reduce any temptation to game the
system,” explains Professor Jerrim.
“One of the benefits of England having a very
data driven system is that almost all Year 11 students will have
taken either mock exams or standardised tests, and schools could
be asked to justify the predicted grades that they assign kids
based upon such information, and even try to do some moderation
where necessary.”
The researchers say that alternatives such as
taking exams in September are not as credible as we do not know
what the situation will be. Children may have been out of school
for six months and those from lower socio-economic families are
less likely to benefit from private tutoring. They also say
online exams or subject assessment by coursework would not be
viable options due to problems of monitoring, data security and
comparability.
“Added to this, many young people will also
have progressed on to A-Levels or into jobs and may not be able
to return to school and who will be available to do the marking
of all these tests, in the middle of a busy academic year?” adds
Professor Jerrim.
Notes to
editors
*http://conference.iza.org/conference_files/behavioral_2019/farfan_g28000.pdf
