Re Sonia Sodha’s article (The fake meritocracy of A-level grades is rotten anyway – universities don’t need them, 18 August), I write as a Cambridge graduate, a former examiner of English A-level for two boards, and a former tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association, the Oxford University department for continuing education and the Open University.
The people I met and taught during my years in adult education often put me to shame. I found among my students (many of them three times my then age) industry, commitment, wisdom and maturity of thought, and I heard many accounts of missed educational opportunity through class, race, gender and poverty. But by far the most common reason I heard for failure during school years was being “slow”.
Slow most emphatically does not equal unintelligent; indeed we should welcome those who think things through and take time to evolve arguments and reach conclusions. The problem with exams is that they encourage and favour speed, which is often facile. This is why coursework must be reintroduced and included in any fair marking system.
Salley Vickers
Wilcot, Wiltshire
• Melissa Benn argues cogently that we need to learn lessons from this year’s exams fiasco (Let’s use this exams debacle to transform England’s schools, 20 August), but let us not forget that the government’s U-turn continues to advantage private-school pupils over their state-school counterparts.
The decision to award the higher of either centre-assessed grades or algorithm-determined grades will disproportionally favour those pupils in small examination-groups, more likely to be found in private than in state schools. Proportionally more privately educated pupils will benefit, and that advantage will carry forward when future decisions are made about their educational destinations.
Prof Colin Richards
Spark Bridge, Cumbria
• Are the centre assessment grades submitted to exam boards really the grades that teachers gave their students? Are they the grades teachers thought their students deserved?
According to the Ofqual guidance for summer 2020 grades, teachers were supposed to take account of “previous results in your centre in this subject – these will vary according to a number of factors, including prior attainment of the students, but our data shows that for most centres any year-on-year variation in results for a given subject is normally quite small” and “the performance of this year’s students compared to those in previous years”.
Therefore, if a school followed this guidance, the grades submitted to exam boards were not just based on students’ work and their mock results but also on the school A-level and GCSE results from previous years.
Unfortunately, the general public has been led to believe that the centre assessment grades were just based on teachers’ predictions when, in some cases, they were actually modified several times in order to follow statistics criteria based on the school’s past performance. As a result, some students got a lower grade than the one their teachers gave them.
I teach in a secondary school in outer London, and 30% of my initial grades were downgraded in order to fit previous school performance. We should stop calling these grades “teacher assessments” and use the term “centre assessment grades”.
Name and address supplied
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