Today is A-level results day – and yet another reminder of how bizarre and backwards our education system still is in so many respects. There are many reasons why England and Wales are international outliers when it comes to education, but one of our strangest anachronisms is that we don’t follow a post-qualifications admissions system. In every other developed nation in the world, university places are awarded to students on the basis of the grades they actually achieve in their exams, rather than what their teachers predict they will achieve.
In England and Wales, however, we have ended up in a situation where record numbers of students have been accepted at their first choice of university, despite the fact that huge numbers will have missed their offers and over three-quarters of students will have been over-predicted by at least one grade. For the approximately 70,000 students (around 13-15 per cent) who do miss both of their offers and have to go into the frenzy of Clearing, they will have to make decisions that will affect the rest of their lives almost on a whim.
We cannot allow stubborn aversion to change in the education sector to halt much-needed reform
Why do we still rely on this arcane, nonsensical and unnecessarily stressful process? Why do we still ask teachers to play the part of astrologers and force students to make some of the most formative decisions of their lives on the basis of academic horoscopes? After all, predicted grades are notoriously inaccurate. Only around 13 to 16 per cent of students actually achieve them; in 2019, 84 per cent of predicted grades were wrong, with 79 per cent being overestimates.
Teachers are put in an impossible situation and are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If we err on the side of caution, then we can be accused of limiting students’ life chances (there is plenty of research to suggest that high-achieving disadvantaged students are more likely to be under-predicted than high-achieving advantaged students). Conservative predictions may also demotivate students: pupils who believe in their ability to succeed are much more likely to perform well under pressure.
Yet it is also all too easy for teachers to be over-optimistic, especially when universities are now shamelessly open about their ‘offer high but accept lower’ approach (a new financial survival strategy). Over-predictions can be well-intentioned – for example, they can sometimes reflect the best version of a learner that teachers have witnessed, not necessarily the version that will appear under timed exam conditions. However, they are sometimes not. Predicted grades can just as well be the result of parental intervention and pressure rather than student potential: it’s very hard to argue back against a parent accusing you of closing doors for their child because of their hypothetical future performance.
Predicted grades are a blend of hope and evidence: they are the culmination of teacher observations, past student performance, formative assessments, and professional judgement. Yet no matter how much qualitative or quantitative data you gather, the reality is that teachers are not fortune-tellers, and it is impossible to ever be fully objective. For example, recent research from Cambridge University suggested that there was a consistent ‘pro-girl’ gap in teacher predictions across 10 subjects; yet this does not necessarily ‘prove’ that teachers favour girls. Instead, researchers blamed the results on the ‘halo effect’, where positive impressions about female students spill over into predictions about their academic potential. In other words, because girls typically have stronger all-round academic records, teachers may pick up on characteristics like motivation, diligence and classroom engagement when forming expectations about their future performance.
Our current system of conditional offers based on predicted grades may have made sense when UCCA was first formed in the 1960s: when universities processed paper applications, admission decisions took months and institutions needed the security of an incoming cohort long before the academic year began. Sixty years on, however, the admissions landscape looks very different, and institutional change is needed.
There are a few alternatives we could consider. The first is that students apply to universities after an earlier results day, once they know their exam grades. The second is that students apply under the normal current timetable, but offers and decision-making would not take place until results day. Both would involve a much quicker turnaround in terms of marking exams, which exam boards have repeatedly pushed back against despite huge technological improvements. Surely in the age of the digital revolution there is a way to mark exam scripts in a slightly speedier timeframe than the one set out decades ago?
Yet we cannot allow stubborn aversion to change in the education sector to halt much-needed reform. There are, of course, some practical constraints, but with some imagination and flexibility there are lots of workable options which would free students from the strange lottery of predicted grades and free teachers from the perverse pressures of allocating them.
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