Exam appeals made free amid fears GCSE results will be bigger disaster than A-levels
All exam appeals will be free this year, the Education Secretary announced last night in an attempt to see off rising anger ahead of GCSE results day.
Gavin Williamson said that his department would cover the costs so that schools were not left out of pocket, as he announced that he would set up a Government task force to oversee the appeals process.
His intervention came as statisticians predicted that GCSE results day on Thursday would be an even bigger disaster for students than A-levels were. The exams regulator’s own analysis of its algorithm being used to calculate most results this summer found that it was able to predict GCSE grades less accurately than it could predict A-level grades.
Prof Guy Nason, chair in statistics at Imperial College London, told The Telegraph that he was struck by Ofqual’s admission on this. “I am extremely worried about next week,” he said. “If people think A-level results were bad, what is going to happen then?”
Ofqual should have been more open about its model so that a “mature discussion” could have taken place earlier at an earlier stage, he added.
Other statisticians pointed out that the more grades there were, the less accurate any estimate would be since it increased the likelihood of falling on the wrong side of a boundary. Since there are more grades in GCSEs than at A-level, this will inevitably lead to the algorithm being less accurate, they said.
A technical report published by Ofqual said that while the model accurately predicted 93 per cent of A-levels that were at most one grade out, it only predicted 55 per cent of GCSEs with the same precision.
“Based on the testing of the approaches applied this summer using results data from 2019, 51 of the 55 A-levels tested had accurate predictions for more than 90 per cent of students within plus or minus one grade,” the report said. This figure was lower for GCSE (12 out of 22 subjects) which was likely due to a combination of the grade scaling being longer for GCSE compared to A-level and some limitations of the testing.
“We extensively tested possible variations of the model to ensure we selected the one which gives students the most accurate results possible,” an Ofqual spokesman said.
On Friday night, it emerged that Nick Gibb, the schools minister, was ordered to set up a task force to monitor the appeals process, meeting daily with Ofqual and exam boards.
Read more: How can I appeal my grades?
