Will 2021 exams be a fiasco too?

This summer’s cancellation of exams (GCSEs, A levels and their equivalents) and subsequent confusion over the awarding of grades was widely described as a “fiasco.” Students, whose learning had been disrupted for months because of lockdown, had a bruising experience as the grading policies changed. We know that, in aggregate, the grades eventually awarded were much higher than would be expected in normal times.

No one knows whether it will be practicable—or safe—to run a programme of national exams next summer. In these circumstances is it fair to expect students to prepare for exams which may not happen? Would any alternative to exams be fairer? Is it time to reconsider whether exams such as GCSEs are really needed at all?

The first point to make in answer to all these questions may be obvious, but is no less important for that: it depends what you mean by “fair.”

In my new book with Stuart Shaw, written pre-lockdown but relevant to the debates about this summer and next, we distinguish several senses of “fair” that are all potentially relevant to assessment. One of these is relational fairness—treating (relevantly) like cases alike. That means applying the same criteria when assessing all candidates and not treating them differently based on irrelevant considerations like their school type or their social background.

Relational fairness can be judged at different levels. An exam in which economically disadvantaged students have poorer outcomes than those of their richer contemporaries may be technically fair in many senses—for example, it may have been scrutinised to avoid bias in the test questions—but the outcomes may be unfair at a higher level, because they reflect unjust inequalities in society.

Another relevant meaning of “fair” is whether an outcome is deserved. If, for any reason, a student doesn’t get the grade that his or her work deserves, that seems unfair. This concern lies behind many of the distressing personal accounts we heard when students received their results this summer.

Something can be fair in some respects and unfair in others. Traditional exams are often thought of—perhaps uncritically—as a paradigm of fairness, but teachers know that there are some students who shine in that form of assessment and others who do not, and respond better to coursework or continuous assessment.

Further, some aspects of fairness may be judged to be more important than others. For example, it could be argued that although the maintenance of standards over time is normally an important kind of fairness, in the context of a pandemic it was not as important as attempting to give each individual student the grades they deserved. The dilemma was how to do that in the absence of exam-based evidence about each individual, while maintaining relational fairness.

The approach initially proposed this year was an attempt to use statistics to achieve relational fairness between as many candidates as possible. Statistical information has for many years been taken into account in marking exams, in order to ensure that candidates each year get the grades they would have achieved in other years, but initially statistics carried greater weight this year. No statistical model can guarantee to give each individual student the grade they deserve. The main means of remedying any individual unfairnesses was to be the appeals process. However, that proved unmanageable and unpopular and lost its credibility.

Turning to next year, how can we ensure that students have had an opportunity to learn all that is required for any exams that might go ahead? So far the plan has been to allow reductions in the mandatory content for some subjects. There has also been discussion about delaying the exams for a few weeks to allow more time for preparation. But, with students and teachers understandably seeking certainty in the context of a pandemic, what is the fair thing to do?

All countries are facing this problem, though they start from different positions. Those which, like the UK and the Republic of Ireland, place enormous weight on written exams taken at the end of a course and less on work assessed by teachers throughout, have the biggest problem if the exams cannot take place. Arguably, the Covid-19 experience may lead us to think again about our starting position with regard to that balance—just as it may lead us to be more open to greater use of technology in the exams themselves. But those are huge cultural changes and cannot be completed in a few months.

To avoid a rerun of this summer’s “fiasco,” it will be necessary to make sure that at least some work produced by each student is taken into account in the award of their grade, as well as more aggregated statistical information. Information from different schools and colleges may not be strictly comparable. But we may have to put up with that.

There is no silver bullet to guarantee fair assessment for all candidates in normal times, let alone now. But we need a balanced and informed debate about the fairest—or least unfair—approach for students next year.

 

Isabel Nisbet was the first CEO of Ofqual, the regulator of examinations and qualifications in England. She now holds a number of non-executive posts and is an Affiliated Lecturer at the School of Education, University of Cambridge. With Stuart Shaw, she is the author of "Is Assessment Fair?"