CAGs? Exams? Can’t we just do both in Summer 2021?

NOTE: Thanks to Ben Newmark, Jonathan Mountstevens and Matthew Benyohai for asking a few questions that helped me develop some of the ideas here — in some cases not that far yet but they were useful!

So this post is going to try and flesh out a few ideas I put together on twitter earlier about possible solutions to the looming exams crisis this summer.

So far we’ve seen lots of polarisation on this issue — either we should scrap the exams and go full on with some form of internal, teacher-based assessment, or we should proceed like normal and run exams in the summer. The government made noises a while ago about some kind of formal ‘mock’ exam which seemed to just sound like doing regular exams but earlier in the year.

I guess my point is that people have been very clear on the problem, but reasonable solutions have not been as forthcoming. My intention is to try and put some ideas together to try and address that.

My starting point is this:

1. Exams are intrinsically fairer than teacher assessments. That doesn’t mean they are fair (they don’t entirely iron out other inequalities in education) but they are the least worst solution (teacher assessment or coursework based systems likely to lead to wider inequalities than exams). So ideally, some form of exam-based assessment should be retained.

2. However, clearly this year the inequalities around exams are far greater. Some students will be in school all the time this year, while others may have attendance somewhere around 50% through no fault of their own. A small number may be laid low with COVID, others won’t be. Some students have worked well remotely, while others don’t have the facilities to even make a start. I think the inequalities this year around exams are more unacceptable than they are in other years (although I’m perfectly happy to engage with arguments that they are unacceptable in other years as well, but this isn’t the time).

3. The most crucial thing to get right on behalf of the students is ensuring that they have a fair shot at reaching their desired next destination, whether that be university, college, Sixth Form, apprenticeship or whatever. Particularly in light of all the issues young people have faced in this pandemic, getting that right on their behalf seems to me absolutely fair and a key priority. Some of the other goals of the public exam system, such as measuring the quality of education provided by a school, are secondary.

4. However I am sensitive to the problem of ‘grade inflation’. It doesn’t do anyone any good to lie to children about where they are at because it’ll make them feel better. Football clubs don’t offer contracts to teenagers out of the kindness of their hearts. They are highly selective and they have to cause disappointment to huge numbers of children and young people every year. So having some sense of ‘standards’ being maintained is important to retain a degree of credibility in the system.

5. I want to make sure the most disadvantaged students are protected, which are those whose schooling has been disproportionately affected by COVID, as well as those who may suffer unfavourably via pure internally assessment due to various implicit biases that teachers tend to unknowingly hold. Basically, can you come up with a system that doesn’t shaft the kids that usually get shafted in situations like this. Do no harm surely has to be the first rule.

Given those things, my main idea is as follows:

Students should have the chance to sit their exams in full, as they would normally, and be awarded grades in the usual way. However, they should also be awarded some form of teacher assessment of their capability and performance in the subjects they have studied. That could, for example, take the form of teachers placing students into one of the following categories:

GCSE

· Student has shown Grade 7 capability.

· Student has shown Grade 4 capability.

· Student has shown Grade 1 capability.

· Student would not meet the requirements to pass this subject (ie, a U).

A-level

· Student has shown A grade capability.

· Student has shown C grade capability.

· Student has shown E grade capability.

· Student would not meet the requirements to pass this subject.

You could even take the ‘grades’ out and have more descriptive statements if you wanted to delineate the two systems (CAG vs exam) more clearly (e.g. Strong Pass, Standard Pass, Low Pass, Unclassified which are terrible labels but you get the idea).

I haven’t included BTECs and their equivalents here for the simplicity’s sake and due to the fact that this lies outside of my domain of expertise (such as it is).

Students would be awarded BOTH the exam grade and whatever you want to call the CAG-equivalent described above, and both would be formally certified and required to be submitted, for example, on a UCAS form.

What are the advantages of doing this?

· It gives students a fallback option if they miss their exams due to the need to quarantine for COVID (I’m guessing vaccines won’t fix that problem in the summer).

· It means students still have the opportunity and incentive to keep working towards exams, as the maximum a student can get via teacher assessment is a Grade 7 (or A at A-level). For those students at the top end, that is potentially a tougher deal. My argument here is that, and this might seem brutal, but those kids will be fine in the long run. If your main worry is getting an A or an A*, or a 7 or an 8, that’s not to me as big a worry in this list of things I need to worry about as those lower down the attainment scale.

· It hopefully reduces some of the cliff edge problem of the very high stakes grades (such as getting 4 in GCSE English and Maths) that I think worries many about doing pure exams. It gives those kids two different cracks at getting that 4, and if they aren’t a 4 on an exam OR teacher assessment, then that is to me, fair enough. But given that teacher assessment likely to be more generous at that end (as seen by the grade inflation of the summer), hopefully the number of students negatively affected there is lower, which I think on balance is desirable. With English and Maths, for most kids the need is ‘to get a 4’ and if you’re wanting to specialise in those areas (especially Maths) you need much higher than that so aren’t in this particular conversation.

· It gives students those exams to work for, and the sense of achievement in completing them that was, I think, an overlooked negative of last year, and hopefully knowing they have some fallback grades might lead to greater motivation to go out and outperform expectations. I appreciate that’s a double-edged sword and you might get the ‘unconditional grades’ problem we’ve seen with UCAS offers in recent years in some cases. That’s a rub I’d be willing to tolerate.

· You give more information to prospective destination providers. In a world where exams are providing potentially very imperfect information, I think providers need to have as much information as we can give them. A Sixth Form college can see, with their prospective A-level historian from the local 11–16 school, that their teacher thought they were a Grade 7, but in the exam they only got a 5. That should open up a line of enquiry about the reason for the difference (where there may be legitimate COVID-related reasons, or there may not be) that should enable an informed decision to be made about whether to offer a place. With universities, you probably need to move towards post-qualification admission for this to work (a long overdue change anyway). Giving students more opportunities to provide information about their abilities to desired destinations is surely a good thing, especially at this current time? Obviously it needs to be somewhat reliable information and therein perhaps lies the rub. But exams + CAG I think is better than just one of those two.

I’m not under any illusions that this is perfect, and I’m aware of some flaws and unanswered questions, such as:

· Do you tell students their CAG in advance of the exams, or just reveal it at the end? I think, as my aim here is, in part, to try and reduce anxiety for students, I’m inclined to tell them in advance.

· On what basis do teachers determine the 7/4/1s? Like last year (what they would have achieved had the sat the exam) or on the basis of the work they’ve done so far? Both answers have pros and cons. I think in reality the grades last year were based on a combination of the two things so that’s probably where it would end up. But I don’t have a very good answer there.

· You need to suspend school accountability again for this to work, because you want the teacher judgements to be as honest as possible. Again, it’s the problem I described during lockdown of being the driving test instructor who then conducts the exam for their own student. Not ideal. A lot of work would need to be done with teachers to ensure they understood ‘the rules of the game’ here I think.

· You need some sort of moderation process to ensure fair judgements, although tricky to resolve in practice how this would work. Ultimately the exam provides some of that as it’s a bit awkward if the differences between CAG and exam are massive, but it’s certainly an imperfection.

You could have a system whereby teachers provided references for students post-exams, if you wanted to do an alternative to CAGs. That might be quite time-consuming and workload intensive at a bad time of year for that (in the summer), although clearly I’m sure we’d do it no problem if it was beneficial to our students. I’m not sure how much more useful that would be for the destination provider than some form of CAG system as I’ve described.

You could also argue that universities, in particular, could do more to determine the suitability of their prospective students given the problems in the school exam regime during COVID. I think that aspect of this has been overlooked with the responsibility placed entirely on schools a little unjustifiably in my view.

So, to sum up, this isn’t easy. I’m sure I’ve got loads wrong here and I’m just a fairly ordinary head of department with no particular expertise in assessment and standardisation and so on at a national level. But I do think it is up to the school system to generate some ideas otherwise we’ll undoubtedly have those ideas done to us, and we probably won’t like them.