I posted this on Twitter a few minutes ago:
Today’s algorithmically created #Alevel results are the clearest message possible to today’s 18 year olds that they are just cogs in a machine.
— Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) August 13, 2020
We are all, of course, to some extent just that. I am under no illusions. But as I wait for results with my son that feel that they might be almost as random as a National Lottery draw, and have little to do with his real achievements, that is no comfort.
If there is something in life that should be liberating and not oppressing it is education. But this government - and others - have revealed that they think it all about serving the needs of the system and nothing at all about the person's own experience, effort and reward.
And that's deeply depressing.
The so-called libertarians on the right are very clearly anything but that.
This needs to be recalled, often, when we consider what world we want. It's most definitely not this soul destroying one that is intent on delivering the message of personal irrelevance to our young people.
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If I was a cynic (heaven forfend, but let’s be honest; Diogenes was wiser than Plato); I would muse whether or not the libertarian right in power may not be ensuring the State is a repellant failure at everything it attempts, so that everybody is seduced into believing in a meaningless idea of ‘freedom’ with no purchase on reality, solely in order to support a ‘free-for-all’, a ‘devil-take-the-hindmost’ world; with the sole purpose of delivering the gullible into the hands of the <0.1% billionaire oligarchs, and their political flunkies; where the public may at leisure have their data seduced into cold, greedy hands; and then are sufficiently weak, exposed and ignorant about what is happening, and vulnerable enough, for outrageous advantage to be taken of them at the convenience of their exploiters (the wonder of 'markets', eh?); to be manipulated, mislead, bullied, cheated, ripped-off, thrashed, trashed and thoroughly abused – all in the name of the tripumph of 'freedom'. It is, I understand called, 'neoliberalism', or in this country: 'Conservatism'.
Jesus Christ you dont half moan.. it’s an impossible situation. If your son wants it entirely to be in his own hands he has had loads of free tome over lockdown and the summer to revise and sit the exams!! That way there is no doubt .. or does that sound like hard work??
You entirely miss the point
Which is about typical for people writing comments of the sort you have posted here.
I suggest you go and share your intellect with the Telegraph. They’ll appreciate it
It occurred to me that we have spent our lives being made to fear the extreme Left and a maniacally mechanical society that squashes the life and hope out of people (Orwell’s ‘1984’) , only to see an extreme Right Government do it instead.
You couldn’t make it up. Yet how many people realise this?
I mean this is extreme laissez-faire – they could not be arsed about us. This must be a new low point in politics – their only way of governing now is through perpetual war between sections of society – divide and conquer.
You are right
So few people manage to interpret Orwell anywhere near his intent. I have to wonder if teachers mislead intentionally. He attacked the left because he was on the left and wanted them to do better, but even more so because the majority of the British inteligencia was overly sympathetic to Stalin at the time he was writing. He was plainly against totalitarianism of any flavor. His essay, “Notes on Nationalism” is instructive and increasingly relevant to our times. http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/nationalism.html
OK, so how would you calculate A-level grades?
Granted the algorithm might not be fair, but what do you do to stop the huge grade inflation you would get from just assuming teachers are correct? Look at Scotland, where grades have jumped 10-20% higher in a year based purely on teachers prediction. That’s not fair either.
So what do you do about it, other than sitting on the sidelines sniping.
I have answered that question, yesterday
So, just to understand you correctly, you are going with the teachers and rampant grade inflation?
Do you really believe results improved in Scotland by 10-20% in a year, one where there wasn’t a lot of teaching for much of it?
That is not remotely what I proposed yesterday
Well, what you said yesterday was that:
“Scotland has been substantially more successful in addressing the issue than England has been”
and
“The only people able to appraise the likely results of those set to take these exams in the absence of an examination were those teachers who had got to know the pupils in question”
and
“But I am saying algorithms are no substitute for professional judgement”
You added a few caveats, but very few.
So it looks like you are saying that we should simply trust the teachers, who in Scotland at least have produced massively inflated grades for their students, despite those same students missing out on a lot of teaching time.
So could you answer a simple yes/no question for me?
Do you think that grades in Scotland have been inflated, and do you think the 10-20% increase in grades is real?
I suggested a complete process
You have ignored that
And yes, I do think grades have been inflated in Scotland
But I did not propose the Scottish system
I proposed something much better, in my opinion
And in. my opinion you’re a troll
If teachers have inflated predicted grades by 10%-20% then I would suggest that there is prima facie evidence that such predictions are not a suitable starting point.
OK, in that case why has the algorithm used them?
And what else would you use?
Gender?
Ethnicity?
Parental income?
Day of the week born on?
Random grade allocation?
Please explain
Because your comment makes no sense
I really don’t see grade inflation as a problem for a year in which education was interrupted by a global pandemic. It’s only one year and one that no-one is likely to forget. Is one year of higher grades more important than this years school leavers sense of personal achievement based on their teacher’s judgement? Why is fixing grades so they are not inflated in this, the most abnormal of years, so important?
Richard
Surely this should have been a simple auditing question. The default should be to accept the teacher’s assessment, but to warn that outlandish results would be audited. I guess that as an auditor, you would have checked a small number of assessments at random, and then concentrated on those which were furthest out of line in either direction. If everything seemed in order, fine. If there appeared to be a problem, you would investigate further.
Instead, the main predictors of downgrading are an honest teacher, and too many less able pupils in earlier years. Neither being a good predictor of an individual student’s future performance.
Incidentally, our son is head of science at a Scottish school. They took great care to produce credible assessments. For almost every subject, their assessments were accepted, but for one subject they were marked way down, well below previous years, for no obvious reason.
Much as I suggested yesterday https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2020/08/12/algorithms-are-no-substitute-for-professional-judgement-no-10-needs-to-take-note/
It is apparent that the experience of your son is commonplace where schools really tried
My son got all teacher forecast grades (which I think were fair)
But that was not true in all subjects – and from a college of 1,000 students they were able to check standards in advance
Fo0rm other schools I hear of blanket downgrades e.g. of 1 grade
Assessment of a student’s ability in a subject will always have some degree of personal examiner subjectivity whether its continuous assessment or one-off exam assessment.
We can see this very clearly in the topic of MMT the usual subject of this blog. Most politicians and voters in the UK don’t understand and therefore believe the country operates a Double Currency in which government and bank money is created from thin air. Amazingly these politicians and voters never stop to think they can’t provide any evidence this is not so.
So what to conclude other than assessment of knowledge is never entirely objective. It would seem rational to me that continuous assessment by a pupil’s teacher should be given at least equal weighting with a one-off exam in the subject. Even more weighting could be given to continuous assessment if a second teacher was involved but then Libertarian biased governments aren’t prepared to fund this.
The government approach is fine for achieving a good approximation of the population distribution of grades that would have resulted had the exams been sat – but they forgot that the impact that matters is on the individual student and their specific grades. For that reason I agree with you that there needed to be mechanisms for validation and moderation that involve scrutiny at the individual student level.
Possibly schools could have been told from the beginning that their grades would be adjusted in line with the school’s previous record – so that any internal moderation had something to work with – but with the opportunity to make a case for a higher average. That would have been relatively easy for A level where there are GCSE results for the same cohort (though this poor lot were also the guinea pigs for the new-look GCSEs). It would be more difficult with GCSE grading due next week, though obviously trends over preceding years could be used.
I liked this, sent by my son’s sixth form college this morning:
“The government approach is fine for achieving a good approximation of the population distribution of grades” – well only if you feel that ensuring the kids of rich parents get inflated grades and anyone living in a poor area will get downgraded.
My niece (who has a 1st class honours from Kent Uni) was doing an online biology A level. All course work was A grade, but her postcode is from a less affluent /achieving area and has been downgraded from the teachers assessment of an A to a B. Fortunately it will suffice for the course she wants to do but it bears no relation to her actual achievement.
And that is so common
For those interested in this field, Catyh O’Neill’s book, Weapons of Maths Destruction on the subject of AI and alorithms is excellent. This is not the first time that questionable, opaque algorithms working on incomplete and dubious historic data sets have led to inequitable decisions in the field of education.
Cummins obsession with the use or rather abuse of AI and data is one of his most dangerous traits
It was obvious from the start of this process that we were headed for disaster.
Some schools have been incredibly careful with their predictions, whilst others will have been less so. The guidance made it pretty obvious that ultimately the grades were going to be based on the history of the school rather than the predictions of the teachers, but which school would want to be ultra-conservative if it later turned out that the exam boards granted exactly what was requested, and Scotland is a perfect example of that happening!
Exams should never have been cancelled in the first place. If social distancing was going to be an issue they could have used the whole school to take them. Pupils may have missed out on teaching at the end of their courses, but that would have been obvious and grade boundaries could have moved.
The results may be broadly accurate at the macro level, but they can be hugely problematic at the micro level because statistics always have those sorts of issues. The son of a friend of mine received A*BBB despite the school saying he should have got an A*AAA. For two of those B grades he was ranked top of the school suggesting that school was allowed nothing more than a B no matter how good the pupil is this year. These results lay bare how flawed this kind system can be.
Indeed…
The only response that will satisfy me (and I suggest any of you – including ‘Morris’) is if the algorithm is made available and deconstructed along with the names of the people who created it – those who created the specification and those who wrote it.
So come on on then – lets see it and ‘them’ eh? Let’s have it our here in the open.
Fat chance I bet.
There was no reason why the exams could not have been held. Exams could easily have complied with social distancing. That they weren’t held is a disgrace and shows how young people’s priorities have been neglected in every consideration of Covid.
Very politely you show yourself to be a complete idiot
Curriculum teaching was not complete
No one knew who had done what
No support for revision was available
Strict distancing was in force
Grades would have been wholly unpredictable
There would have been undoubted significant underachievement that could not have been systematically corrected for
But you think the only issue was whether physical attendance could take place or not
I find such crassness deeply annoying and offensive to those who you seek to malign
Upon further reflection, this seems like another over centralised response as was the case with the disastrous response to Covid itself and the none use of local clinics and surgeries to offer testing – simply because their has been no enablement of local knowledge in the schools of their kids’ abilities from the previous mock exams which would have been fairer. Instead we have what seems to be an arbitrary contrived and applied algorithm from the centre. It’s bollocks.
The Government has failed to utilise its assets in education and the NHS because it does not trust them – because it also knows that it has been undermining them. Instead, Boris chooses to trust his mates instead like Dido Harding who did not know how to protect her customer’s data in one of her last jobs and has been working in the NHS I think since 2017!!!
There is only one answer after seeing a section of the population so badly treated and that is to give them the vote.
It’s worse than that Richard. If your livelihood depends upon the machine functioning correctly you make damn well sure that it is serviced regularly and the cogs and machine as a whole are looked after. This current administration care neither for the cogs OR the machine. They are like the owner of a car with lots of money who never has it serviced, who never performs any preventive maintenance and then when it falls apart simply buys another.
They care neither for us or the economy, simply for themselves.
The underlying problem is a lack of honesty by examiners Ofqual and Minister. They needed to say upfront that they couldn’t produce the exam result with the accuracy we would want.
But there are so many flaws in the system that need addressing.
– Teachers can’t be trusted to predict grades with any accuracy, but they can be trusted to place students in grade order. One assumes that because if they didn’t their system simply wouldn’t work. When you start from that premis, you’ve already lost the support of the profession.
-The computer model, may at a national aggregate level work, but at the level of the individual school there is simply too much variance to pretend the accuracy they claim is correct.
-They’ve broken the link between students actual performance and grade and they can’t pretend otherwise.
-Senior people involved have not done their job and spoke with honesty to power.
My solution is to be honest. And start from the position that it is impossible to provide an accurate spot grade for everyone. And universities employers etc will just have to live with that and make it work.
For those who prediction and computer generated grade are the same, we have no problem.
For those where the difference is one grade then the certificate should say the student is performing in the grade range A-A* etc and it is impossible to be more accurate. For this year, universities will simple have to muddle through.
Where there is a difference of 3 grades or more, then we simply have to check. Either the teachers were dishonest/incompetent or the computer model isn’t as good as they are pretending. So a simple moderating system where a teacher from an unrelated school talks to the student and class teacher and examines a sample of the work/mocks etc and reports back for moderating purposes.
That leaves us with the 2 grade differences where I think we need to know the scale 1st and then the solution is probably a combination of the depending on the needs of the pupil.
Prattling about grade inflation is simply to miss the point, these are unusual and challenging times and creative solutions are called for. The sort of rigid deference to the system is part of the problem and can never provide a solution.
Thanks
And some good ideas and insights
Did ofqual create their own algorithm? Seriously ? How much experience have they ? Or was it farmed out and if so how much did it cost and who created it ?
Good questions