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Two things worth noting that the article doesn't go into... 1) "The year-on-year rise in proportion of students achieving A or A+ grades was much higher at ind

by corin_ 6y ago

Two things worth noting that the article doesn't go into... 1) "The year-on-year rise in proportion of students achieving A or A+ grades was much higher at independent schools than state comprehensives" https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/13/england-a-level-downgrades-hit-pupils-from-disadvantaged-areas-hardest https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/13/england-a-... Essentially, students lucky enough to be in private education were more likely to see their grades go up / stay the same, compared to students receiving free education seeing grades going down. Has been explained away as a byproduct of a sensible algorithm, but considering the government's track record and private school backgrounds (85% of the UK's Prime Ministers have been educated at Eton, arguably the country's most exclusive private school) it's hard not to be sceptical that this wasn't intentional and class-motivated. 2) "Appears that Ofqual's algorithm caused today's A-level chaos. Ofqual chair Roger Taylor, also chairs the Centre for Data Ethics & Innovation (CDEI). Cummings' fave AI consultants - Faculty, have some juicy contracts with CDEI. And Faculty's COO Richard Sargeant is on CDEI board" https://twitter.com/milesking10/status/1293886007771893762?s=21 https://twitter.com/milesking10/status/1293886007771893762?s... (Ofqual is the department that oversees exams and responsible for this situation, they report to Gavin Williams the government's Education Secretary. Cummings is a controversial special adverse to the Prime Minister, and Faculty is a firm he used when he was leading one of the two primary pro-Brexit campaigns before the referendum. Subjective statement: Cummings is a vile, evil man.)

mjburgess 6y ago
> it's hard not to be sceptical that this wasn't intentional and class-motivated. It's incredibly easy "not to be sceptical". The teacher's predicted grades are, on average, unprecedented. And represent many times greater than any previous yoy increase. This is far less true at top-performing schools where teachers are predicting far more consistent grades (by the very nature of being a top performing school). Teachers shouldn't have been asked to predict grades. That's the heart of the problem. Not some harebrained in-public conspiracy. This whole thing is dumb. And the media are deliberately failing to explain basic facts about the education system to provoke this kind of nonesense outrage.
- corin_ 6y ago
  I completely agree that the system put in place is poor and that it causing an accidental bias is very feasible. But if you're going to put this system in place, with months of planning, you should make damn sure that it isn't massively favouring the children who are already advantaged in life. Which it statistically is, whether intentional or not. They screwed it up so spectacularly that the education secretary had to make concessions to it two days before the results, then a day after the results Ofqual made a statement about who could appeal that contradicted the education secretary, before withdrawing that statement a few hours later saying they were still deciding. So sure it could be entirely down to incompetence not malice. But given either is possible, and this government's track record of cronyism I don't see why it's unreasonable to be sceptical.
  - mjburgess 6y ago
    It doesnt "favour" any children. Those children were already going to get the highest results. There is no incompetence here. The predicted grades are a good estimate of what the results would have been. The issue is that all teachers significantly over-predicted their students grades, but less so at high-performing schools. (Why? because the grades are more consistent at those schools, so there's less room for error).
    - corin_ 6y ago
      Independant schools (private schools) received 4.7% more A/A* grades than they did in 2019. The most common type of non-private school, Secondary Comprehensive, received only 2% more A/A* grades than in 2019. The algorithm didn't keep the gap between paid and unpaid education, it expanded it. (Source for these numbers and more in my first comment.) I was lucky enough to not only go to two private schools, but the second one was ranked #1 in England for exam ranks 2 of the 3 years I was there (and helped me get good grades despite being extremely unmotivated and lazy). But at least my privilege was to be given a good education that made learning / passing exams (the latter more) easy, not that the government decided my school deserved an artificial grades boost compared to state schools.
Stierlitz 6y ago
> Essentially, students lucky enough to be in private education were more likely to see their grades go up / stay the same, compared to students receiving free education seeing grades going down. Students in “private” schools get a better quality of education than those receiving “free” education. And it isn't free, we pay for it through taxation. And over here the “private” schools are called “public”. While the public schools are called comprehensive.
- corin_ 6y ago
  I'm aware of the naming (I'm English and was educated here), but writing for HN's international audience it's easier to use universally understood terms rather than ones you need to understand our system to recognise. FYI only some private schools are Public Schools (and all Public Schools are private), but the term for all private ones is actually Independent Schools. And yes, obviously the better education leads to better grades, but that's a completely different issue. The point in my comment that you replied to is not that independent schools got better grades than state schools this year; it's that their % improvement from previous years to this year is way higher than non-independant schools % change from previous years.

by corin_ 6y ago

mjburgess 6y ago

> it's hard not to be sceptical that this wasn't intentional and class-motivated. It's incredibly easy "not to be sceptical". The teacher's predicted grades are, on average, unprecedented. And represent many times greater than any previous yoy increase. This is far less true at top-performing schools where teachers are predicting far more consistent grades (by the very nature of being a top performing school). Teachers shouldn't have been asked to predict grades. That's the heart of the problem. Not some harebrained in-public conspiracy. This whole thing is dumb. And the media are deliberately failing to explain basic facts about the education system to provoke this kind of nonesense outrage.

corin_ 6y ago
I completely agree that the system put in place is poor and that it causing an accidental bias is very feasible. But if you're going to put this system in place, with months of planning, you should make damn sure that it isn't massively favouring the children who are already advantaged in life. Which it statistically is, whether intentional or not. They screwed it up so spectacularly that the education secretary had to make concessions to it two days before the results, then a day after the results Ofqual made a statement about who could appeal that contradicted the education secretary, before withdrawing that statement a few hours later saying they were still deciding. So sure it could be entirely down to incompetence not malice. But given either is possible, and this government's track record of cronyism I don't see why it's unreasonable to be sceptical.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  It doesnt "favour" any children. Those children were already going to get the highest results. There is no incompetence here. The predicted grades are a good estimate of what the results would have been. The issue is that all teachers significantly over-predicted their students grades, but less so at high-performing schools. (Why? because the grades are more consistent at those schools, so there's less room for error).
  - corin_ 6y ago
    Independant schools (private schools) received 4.7% more A/A* grades than they did in 2019. The most common type of non-private school, Secondary Comprehensive, received only 2% more A/A* grades than in 2019. The algorithm didn't keep the gap between paid and unpaid education, it expanded it. (Source for these numbers and more in my first comment.) I was lucky enough to not only go to two private schools, but the second one was ranked #1 in England for exam ranks 2 of the 3 years I was there (and helped me get good grades despite being extremely unmotivated and lazy). But at least my privilege was to be given a good education that made learning / passing exams (the latter more) easy, not that the government decided my school deserved an artificial grades boost compared to state schools.

Stierlitz 6y ago

> Essentially, students lucky enough to be in private education were more likely to see their grades go up / stay the same, compared to students receiving free education seeing grades going down. Students in “private” schools get a better quality of education than those receiving “free” education. And it isn't free, we pay for it through taxation. And over here the “private” schools are called “public”. While the public schools are called comprehensive.

corin_ 6y ago
I'm aware of the naming (I'm English and was educated here), but writing for HN's international audience it's easier to use universally understood terms rather than ones you need to understand our system to recognise. FYI only some private schools are Public Schools (and all Public Schools are private), but the term for all private ones is actually Independent Schools. And yes, obviously the better education leads to better grades, but that's a completely different issue. The point in my comment that you replied to is not that independent schools got better grades than state schools this year; it's that their % improvement from previous years to this year is way higher than non-independant schools % change from previous years.