Exam Results 2024 – ‘Reliable To One Grade Either Way’

Dear Secretary of State for Education,

I fully appreciate that your in-tray is overflowing with problems. All complex. All taking a long time to resolve. All costing a lot of money.

So here’s some good news. Good news about an action you can take to deliver a huge benefit to millions of young people. An action that is simple, could happen right now, and – even better – costs absolutely nothing.

The action is this: to tell the exam regulator, Ofqual, to instruct the exam boards to print, IN BIG LETTERS, on every GCSE, AS and A level certificate to be awarded on 15 and 22 August, these words:

OFQUAL WARNING: THE GRADES ON THIS CERTIFICATE ARE RELIABLE ONLY TO ONE GRADE EITHER WAY

For these words are true. And they’re important.

They mean that a grade as shown on a certificate is intrinsically unreliable and that any decision based on that grade is – as the lawyers might say – ‘unsafe’.

Take, for example, a certificate showing “GCSE English, Grade 3”.

We all know the implications: the student loses a year of development. Is forced to re-sit. Is condemned to the ‘forgotten third‘. Is branded a ‘failure’.

The truth, though, is that the grade the student truly merits might be any of grades 3, 2, or 4 – pass. And no, this ambiguity cannot be untangled by an appeal, for it happens even if there are no ‘marking errors’. Accordingly, under the rules Ofqual introduced for appeals in 2016, a ‘review of marking’ leaves this unreliability unresolved.

This is an unreliability that can blight lives. A problem that must be fixed.

The fundamental fix is to change the way in which assessments are shown on certificates, but the best way of doing that might take a while to determine and agree. In the meantime, there is a low-cost and speedily implemented solution. To ensure that all users of grades – students, parents, teachers, employers, admissions officers, etc. – are made aware that grades are ‘wobbly’, and to alert them not to take a grade as printed on a certificate as ‘the truth’.

You might be wondering: ‘Where does this claim come from?’

The answer is from an unimpeachable source: no less an authority than the then Chief Regulator of Ofqual, Dame Glenys Stacey. In giving her evidence before a hearing of the Commons Education Select Committee held on 2 September 2020: you can hear the words ‘reliable to one grade either way’ shortly after 12:19:47 on this parliamentlive.tv recording.

Dame Glenys is not alone. A similar, but perhaps rather more oblique, statement – ‘More than one grade could well be a legitimate reflection of a student’s performance‘ – can be seen in this Ofqual ‘news story’ dated 11 August 2019 and also heard in an interview posted to YouTube on 8 August 2022, in which the noted educational journalist Laura McInerney is talking to Ofqual’s then-Chief Regulator, Dr Jo Saxton (about 9:18 here).

‘More than one grade…‘

But only one grade appears on a student’s certificate. If there are other ‘legitimate grades‘, what are they? Are any higher than the single grade shown? If so, why are these other ‘legitimate grades‘ not declared?

Should you wish to check the research on which these statements are based, I refer you to Ofqual’s November 2018 report Marking Consistency Metrics – An update. In particular, see Figure 12 on page 21, as well as these words on page 4: ‘The probability of receiving the definitive grade or adjacent grade is above 0.95 for all qualifications, with many at or very close to 1.0 (ie suggesting that 100% of candidates receive the definitive or adjacent grade in these qualifications).’

That last part, ‘100% of candidates receive the definitive or adjacent grade‘, means exactly the same as Dame Glenys’s statement that a grade as shown on a certificate is reliable only to one grade either way.

That’s important. It’s the truth. A truth that everyone should know.

A truth that should appear on every certificate.

So may I implore you to pick up the phone to Ofqual? It will take only a few minutes. And if that phone call takes place soon, then this year’s certificates will, for the first time, tell the truth.

Yours sincerely,

Dennis Sherwood