Thought experiment: there is to be a general election. Election is cancelled because of pandemic. But Electoral Comm says fear not, we have an algorithm. It takes into account the result of the last three general elections, opinion polling, population change. Here is the result.

Politicians would complain. They would do so because the key objective of the election to reward on the basis of desert, decided by who wins the most votes, after a campaign of effort- would have been eliminated. The result was out of their control. It would be seen as unjust.

Those are essentially the same underlying philosophical problems we’re dealing with in the exams problem. The answers were never going to be easy (and it’s not exactly the same) but it’s important to recognise why so many people feel aggrieved.

It cuts at the heart of what exams (or an election) are for. Rewarding merit on performance. The reason so many feel powerless is that the performance element has been removed and the system doesn’t have robust enough safeguards to compensate.