Lots of people are probably wondering why UK governments were/are reluctant simply to use teachers' predicted grades for #Alevelresults.

My @Cieothinks report on UK universities with @thephilippics, published this week, provides clues.

https://www.cieo.org.uk/research/saving-universities/

Thread

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As our report shows, marketisation of universities means they now compete with each other for student fees. In this cut-throat environment, many universities struggle to recruit enough students to stay afloat, while others expand unsustainably at their expense.

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So, when A level results come out, many universities downgrade their requirements to get more fee income. Say a student got an offer of ABB, but they get BBB. At all but the most selective universities, they will be let in anyway.

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Schools know this. A teacher thinks Student X will really get BBB, but if they say this, the uni ostensibly demanding ABB will reject their application. So many prepare 2 sets of predicted grades: 1 for internal consumption; 1 inflated "UCAS predicted" for universities.

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Accordingly, teachers' *official* predictions are artificially inflated to compensate for universities' actual recruitment behaviour in a marketed HE system. This exemplifies the corrupting effects of marketisation and how it spreads through the education system.

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This gap btwn real/official predictions can be seen in the Scottish Higher results. When Holyrood embraced the latter, after student backlash, the pass rate rose from 74.8% to 78.9% and Advanced Higher increased from 79.4% to 84.9%, compared to 2019.

https://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/94724.html 

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Ofqual (and its Scottish equivalent) know this full well (though can't admit it, given their own role in degrading education). So they felt a need to "compensate" for teacher grade inflation using algorithms.

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A typical technocratic solution, this produced fair-ish outcomes at a population level (modest but uneven increases in attainment at all types of institutions) but grossly unfair results for individuals as their characteristics were overriden by cohort-level assumptions.

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There is no quick fix. We ought to be able to trust professionals like teachers. We must understand the mechanisms that drive them to be dishonest. These originate in league tables, marketisation, and competition in a field (education) where they ought not to exist.

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