Here's a write-up of the situation, shared on Facebook publicly, from a friend involved in careers at a UK Sixth Form college (where students take their A-Levels):

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I've spent the last two days dealing with very upset young people who have had their plans ripped up. Some will still be able to go to university, but not the one they planned on and have been forced into clearing, some won't be able to go at all.

So the story behind this is as follows.

Teachers at colleges and schools submitted grades to exam boards earlier in the summer based on their predictions as to how students would do in exams they would not take due to C19. The exam boards then mauled these with an algorithm.

Our current understanding is that subject cohorts of less than 10 have not had the algorithm applied and 15-20 only slightly. Most private and many small Sixth forms in schools fall in to this category, (note this is students in a subject at a provider not total numbers at that provider)

Some centre assessed grades (CAGs) will have been assigned optomistically (inflated) by teachers in an attempt to advantage them and their students but the vast majority will have been genuine assessments based on submitted work and teacher experience. They had no idea just how much adjustment would be applied, I'm sure if they had them they might not have been quite so honest!

[Edit: a colleague has pointed out that sometimes predicted grades are higher than achieved because there are unanticipated issues very close to exams such as illness, bereavement a stress which are not evident in year. This cannot be predicted by teachers and compensated for in advance, although many schools will have tried to adjust for students who experienced issues in year]

To compensate for this small amount of ingrained optimisation and unpredictability the exam boards have moderated down larger schools CAGs (but not the smaller cohorts). This includes many sixth form colleges with thousands of exam entries.

Sixth form colleges and larger sixth forms are very good at estimating grades and have been extremely thorough in their efforts to assign realistic grades. Our own teachers spent weeks compiling grades from previous work and tests to get the most accurate assessment they could. No one wanted their students to miss out, no one underestimated their CAGs.

The exam boards were not going to stand for a big increase in grades this year so they applied an aggressive algorithm to the larger subject cohorts. Our college for example has hundreds of A level maths students which makes us a target for harsh moderation despite having increadable value added and a history of very accurate (not over inflated) predictions; vast numbers of our students have seen their grades dropped by one or two grade boundaries, I have only seen one moderated up.

Many of our students have missed out on university places. Despite positive news stories about one Oxbridge University College most universities have not moderated their offers in light of this crisis and many students at private schools will have been able to swoop in on those places and adjust upwards to higher tarrif courses.

Now, whether you think this is a government fix up or not; it is not fair on poorer students at bigger schools and coincidentally some more 'privileged' students have been given another leg up.

Talk to your MP talk about it on social media and lobby to get this fixed because it's going to mess up a lot of young people's futures. These young people are now voters and I hope they will be registering their concern with their local MPs which may motivate them to put pressure on the minister and in turn the exam boards

If you think this was a fiasco then hold on tight because next weeks GCSE results will be based on less information and are likely to be even more skewed! We will hit a second crisis of students not being able to access A levels and colleges having to juggle the same situation as universities are this week. Many GCSE students will be awarded grades which either over inflate or under play their ability. Many will lose an A level place and others will end up on courses which they are 'qualified' for but are overwhelmingly too hard for them, causing distress and self esteem issues. This is on top of the emerging increase in youth mental health issues due to C19 and the lockdown.

If you feel the government's last minute addition of the 'tripple lock' and free appeals makes everything OK then I have disappointing news for you. Mock exams are internally administered in a variety of different ways. Allowing the use of mocks rather than CAGs will lead to even more disparity. September exams for students, out of education and in lock down for 6 months with no access to resources and who thought they had finished their A levels? I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about whether that will be helpful.

We in education will continue, we will pick up the pieces, we will do everything we can to make sure these young people have the best outcomes they can.

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