The Ofqual chair resigning would only serve to protect the Minister in question and ultimately the Prime Minister. I don't score internet points. As far as the experts go, some appeared before the Education select committee a few months ago and raised concerns about the moderation process, to which Ofqual and the Government didn't respond to. A parent worked out how disastrous the algorithm was going to be and attempted to make Ofqual aware of it. Again ignored. The Government had plenty of chances to avoid this own goal.
Absolutely agree the algorithm was flawed. However, problem was that they were trying to come up with something to fix a very clear problem.
Teacher estimates were submitted three months ago and it was immediately clear that overall there was a massive grade inflation.
For example an increase in A/A* grades by 40% - anyone really believes that is correct is barking. The fact that teachers significantly over-graded is undeniable. This is why the BTecs have been delayed, because they haven’t been over-graded and they realise that if they don’t retrospectively over-grade their students will at a disadvantage compared with A Level students.
The problem was that this inflation wasn’t created by a general, across the board tendency for teachers and schools to be generous. Most schools predicted accurately the ones that over-estimated were in the minority.
So you couldn’t have a simple algorithm that simply shifted the complete distribution to the left you had to look at each subject within each exam centre (school or college) to try and determine whether the estimates were accurate or over-egged. The exam boards simply didn’t have time to do this properly, which would have looked at each student individually, so appear to have simply judged whether a course at an exam centre had been over-marked and if so marked everyone down.
Let’s say an exam centre gives all 60 students an A where in previous years the average would have been a C. The exam board could clearly see that was over-graded and should have tried to work out who should have really got an A and who should have got a D but they just didn’t have time to do that, probably didn’t even have the data to do it any way. So they just downgraded the whole course at that exam centre. This meant that some students fell victim of the down-grade.
So by the time you get to the moderation algorithm the data is so flawed that nothing was ever going to work. The data was already broken in two ways, over-grading by some exam centres and clumsy rectification by the exam boards. I imagine the algorithm was quite simple, quite naive, assuming that everyone had done their jobs more or less correctly and it was just going to smooth out the bumps. But there is no algorithm in the world that will deal with fundamentally broken data.
Scotland went though the same, even Sturgeon originally came out and said there was massive grade inflation (14.4% for Highers) which needed to be addressed but then had to U-Turn when they realised that their algorithm couldn't resolve the mess that had been created by the schools, colleges and exam boards.
In the time available, reverting to teacher grades was the only fair approach possible. It at least means that those that should have got A grades did get A grades. But it also means that a load of students that should have got B, C and D grades also got A grades.
Cheers,
Nigel