How will the GCSEs/A-Levels be graded during Coronavirus?

As we reported in our first article regarding test cancelations, the UK GCSE and A-level exams scheduled to start this month have been cancelled due to the public health crisis of COVID-19.

For students in the UK or those globally hoping to sit the exams, this might seem disappointing, given the amount of study you have already done and the concern that your results were key to your university admissions. It is also problematic for the universities themselves. For many of the most competitive; such as Oxford or Cambridge, it will be challenging to discern a student’s academic standing without standardised test results.

So what is the proposed solution?

The UK authorities have recently outlined their method of calculating GCSE and A-level grades for students without holding the actual exams, and it hands the task of grading students to teachers.

Teachers and departments have been instructed to grade based on objective and fair assessments of performance. This may include taking into account grades achieved in assignments, prior tests, homework, and other tasks. What is made clear is that teachers are not to rank students based on subjective criteria, such as whether or not they like particular students.

Teachers and departments will then be made to rank students based on these predicted grades, and submit them. The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) will take in these ranks and standardise them across the board. The scaling will incorporate things such as a school’s past results and the cohort’s past results in other standardised tests. Additionally, if the average grade for a particular subject across the board seems too high or low compared to previous years, some scaling will be done to account for that.

After all of this adjustment, the grades will go back to the student, and will serve as their GCSEs or A-levels that they can then use for university admission. Results for the GCSEs will be available from the 20th of August, and for the A-levels it will be 7 days earlier on the 13th of August.

If students are unhappy with their scores, there is the ability to appeal to their school, who can then appeal to the exam board on their behalf. However UK students will not be able to force their teachers to disclose how they were internally graded and ranked, given that this may put pressure on the teachers to submit conflated and unrepresentative grades.

Additionally, all of these procedures do come with the guarantee that pupils will be given the opportunity to retake the exams later in the year. Thus GCSE students still at school are likely able to attain a grade before the 2021 university admission application deadlines.

The equation is more difficult for A-level students, who are to graduate school very soon and may already have conditional offers to study at university. We will keep an eye on how universities deal with these students, and whether they will force them to retake the exams if their predicted scores are not up to par.

On the prospect of future sittings of the exams, there is already some talk whether the content examinable in 2021’s GCSEs and A-levels should be narrowed, to account for the lost learning caused by coronavirus. While at the moment this amount is still low, it is still uncertain when normal teaching will resume. It will be important to keep track of any updates given throughout the year.

What will it mean for university admissions?

There is no doubt that COVID-19 or Coronavirus has had a detrimental effect on student wellbeing. School students learning from home have reported a sense of isolation and anxiety. The disruption caused by coronavirus has also had a negative effect on student life and activities, which for many students provides immense enjoyment and solace from studying. There is also some evidence that learning from home has impacted student’s motivation to perform academically.

But all of these effects aside, the true question on everybody’s lips is whether or not students would achieve higher or lower grades than they otherwise would under this system. People familiar with the UK admissions system would know that for the A-levels, students already get predicted grades from their teachers before the final exams.

However studies by Cambridge Assessment show that while about 43% of these grades are optimistically high, as opposed to being accurate or lower than they should be. Therefore it has been suggested that it could give many UK students a better chance of attaining a great grade and getting into a top university. By extension, it may mean that there is greater demand and competition for admission at top UK universities for both domestic and international students.

However, one must keep in mind the scaling and standardising procedures that will be applied under the new regime described above. Additionally it is important to keep in mind the general trend for students to reconsider their university options in light of coronavirus, in particular the trend for international students to study closer to home at this time. As such, any increased demand or competition due to higher test scores may be completely canceled out.

At the end of the day all of the speculation above is rather distracting, as the effects of coronavirus on the UK admissions system is beyond any student’s control. What is in the student’s control is achieving fantastic grades at school in the next few months, which undoubtedly will maximize your chance of attaining admission to a top university in the future.