Read on Twitter
This is the Ofqual interim report explaining what it did. https://twitter.com/bsadigitalsoc/status/1294406940743925761
I said yesterday what I thought the issues were. https://twitter.com/georgeperetzqc/status/1294220687184474112
Looking at this report, one very striking feature of it is that I can’t find any discussion of the equalities impact of allowing teacher-assessed grades (“CAGs”) through for small cohorts while severely moderating CAGs for larger cohorts.
I’m no expert on education but it falls into the category of the pretty obvious that smaller cohorts are more likely to be found in private schools than in the State/FE centre.
And since the premise of the exercise is that CAGs tend to be inflated, it follows that that aspect would, at first sight, have an adverse impact on equalities.
There is a section on equalities but (subject to the caveat that I’m not a statistician) it doesn’t seem to me to grapple with that issue.
It is also striking that CAGs are in fact ignored for larger cohorts. The grades of those cohorts are simply the (slightly adjusted) grades achieved by their predecessors in that subject and at that school/college.
Any individual’s grade is then determined simply by her ranking within the cohort: if she is the top student and the top permitted grade is a B (in simple terms, because no one at that school has done better in that subject recently) then she gets a B, even if her CAG is A*.
In other words, her CAG is irrelevant: all that matters is past grades of previous cohorts and her ranking within the current cohort. I had thought that the system was supposed to be based on (adjusted) CAGs - but these aren’t based on CAGs at all.
There may be answers to these points: but it seems to me that there are potentially some serious legal issues here.
This interesting thread pads out the detail of how CAGs (grades awarded by teachers) vanish for larger cohorts, and the peculiar consequences of the methodology that replaces them. https://twitter.com/a_weatherall/status/1294012623776817158?s=21 https://twitter.com/a_weatherall/status/1294012623776817158
See also https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1294170607643430912?s=21 https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1294170607643430912
Sunder puts the point very vividly:
“Ofqual has graded the ghosts of past students - and given their grades to 2020 students.”
“Ofqual has graded the ghosts of past students - and given their grades to 2020 students.”
