Once again, people across the country are anxiously awaiting results after years of effort leading up to the finals. Will their results be good enough to qualify for a favourable place in the next round? Everywhere individual performances are evaluated to decide who should be chosen. Different participants will be suited to different sides, all playing the same game, but in very different ways at different levels. Some sides are underrated, others are up and coming, some are always at the top, others live on fading glories of past exploits. And above it all sits an agency which organises and sets the rules for the competition, but seems immune from and impervious to criticism or public pressure.
Yes, students, schools and universities are waiting for GCSE and A-level results to be announced.
A-level candidates have spent years preparing to put in the best performance they can when it matters. Examination boards are referees, judging performance and applying sanctions as they see fit. For GCSE the sanctions are clear – no grade 4 or better in English and Maths, and it’s a red card for progression to the next round in school or college (unless you can improve to grade 4 or better in a resit) (or unless you can get Donald Trump to call the head of OfQual). For A-levels, universities and colleges are the teams choosing the people they want for next year. Some people would like to give a red card to anyone who has no A-levels. Ofqual are like FIFA, deciding on the rules affecting grade boundaries and whether Very Anxious Reviews (VAR) of results are eligible for appeal.
But GCSEs and A-levels are well ahead of the World Cup in terms of the integrity and credibility of the competition. To understand why, you need to understand how marking and grading works. Marking is not, of course, an exact science, but it can be monitored, moderated and checked to make it as rigorous and fair as possible – which is what happens, by and large. To convert marks to grades you look at whether a mark falls above or below a grade boundary. Grade boundaries are set by Ofqual, which aims to ensure that exams from one year to the next treat each year’s cohort of candidates fairly. This is not an easy task, and during Covid Ofqual relied on what PM Boris Johnson called (wrongly) a ‘mutant algorithm’, producing results which had to be abandoned at the last minute and replaced by centre-assessed grades. The debacle shone fresh light on a long-running problem with grades, which had already been exposed in analyses by independent consultant Dennis Sherwood. In essence, if a mark is close to a grade boundary it might be converted to either the higher or the lower grade. The explanation is set out clearly and in detail in Sherwood’s 2022 book Missing the Mark. Ofqual themselves admit that
“…more than one grade could well be a legitimate reflection of a student’s performance and they would both be a sound estimate of that student’s ability at that point in time based on the available evidence from the assessment they have undertaken.” (Ofqual, 2019).
In other words, if you were close to the borderline your B might have been an A, and both grades might have been regarded by Ofqual as equally ‘sound’. Not much consolation if you got AAB and needed AAA for your chosen university.
In a World Cup penalty shoot-out, you either score or miss. That’s what FIFA say. But Ofqual would say, if you nearly scored, or hit the bar, it might count as either a goal or a miss, depending on the referee. If that had been the World Cup system, FIFA would have had to change it – straight away. But Ofqual, who have known about this problem for more than ten years, have not tackled it. Instead they doubled down. They changed the rules on reviews and appeals, to make it more difficult, and more expensive if unsuccessful, to get A-level scripts re-marked: it was as if VAR had been switched off. They played the man and not the ball in the media, claiming that Sherwood’s analysis was ‘without merit’. And when complaints persisted, critics have sometimes been silenced. Desperation to “maintain public confidence” in the examination system has outweighed considerations of fairness to individuals within each cohort of candidates, and Dennis Sherwood’s arguments have never been contradicted; there has never been any official rebuttal, and he continues to air them where he can.
It doesn’t take a Donald Trump to jeopardise the credibility of A-level grades. They are already jeopardised by the grading system which Ofqual has established. There are many possible solutions, identified in Sherwood’s book, but none have been taken up, nor (it seems) even considered. The powers that be prefer to maintain public confidence in a flawed and unfair system, rather than change it to make it fairer. As GCSE and A-level results days approach, most people will once again believe that it is their performance that matters. But in fact one in four grades will be wrong, and “on average, about one “wrong” grade is “awarded” to every candidate in the land. With no right of appeal.” Every participant in the GCSE/A-levels penalty shoot-out will have one attempt which either counts as scoring when they missed, or counts as missing when they scored. This is not a beautiful game.
Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. X/Twitter @RobCuthbert. Bluesky @robcuthbert22.bsky.social.
I don’t remember much about my experiences at work some forty-odd years ago, but one event I recall vividly is the discussion provoked by a case study at a training event. The case was simple, just a few lines:
Sam was working late one evening, and happened to walk past Pat’s office. The door was closed, but Sam could hear Pat being very abusive to Alex. Some ten minutes later, Sam saw Alex sobbing.
What might Sam do?
What should Sam do?
Quite a few in the group said “nothing”, on the grounds that whatever was going on was none of Sam’s business. Maybe Pat had good grounds to be angry with Alex and if the local culture was, let’s say, harsh, what’s the problem? Nor was there any evidence that Alex’s sobbing was connected with Pat – perhaps something else had happened in the intervening time.
Others thought that the least could Sam do was to ask if Alex was OK, and offer some comfort – a suggestion countered by the “it’s a tough world” brigade.
The central theme of the conversation was then all about culture. Suppose the culture was supportive and caring. Pat’s behaviour would be out of order, even if Pat was angry, and even if Alex had done something Pat had regarded as wrong.
So what might – and indeed should – Sam do?
Should Sam should confront Pat? Or inform Pat’s boss?
What if Sam is Pat’s boss? In that case then, yes, Sam should confront Pat: failure to do so would condone bad behaviour, which in this culture, would be a ‘bad thing’.
But if Sam is not Pat’s boss, things are much more tricky. If Sam is subordinate to Pat, confrontation is hardly possible. And informing Pat’s boss could be interpreted as snitching or trouble-making. Another possibility is that Sam and Pat are peers, giving Sam ‘the right’ to confront Pat – but only if peer-to-peer honesty and mutual pressure is ‘allowed’. Which it might not be, for many, even benign, cultures are in reality networks of mutual ‘non-aggression treaties’, in which ‘peers’ are monarchs in their own realms – so Sam might deliberately choose to turn a blind eye to whatever Pat might be doing, for fear of setting a precedent that would allow Pat, or indeed Ali or Chris, to poke their noses into Sam’s own domain.
And if Sam is in a different part of the organisation – or indeed from another organisation altogether – then maybe Sam’s safest action is back where we started. To do nothing. To walk on by.
Sam is a witness to Pat’s bad behaviour. Does the choice to ‘walk on by’ make Sam complicit too, albeit at arm’s length?
I’ve always thought that this case study, and its implications, are powerful – which is probably why I’ve remembered it over so long a time.
The truth about GCSE, AS and A level grades in England
I mention it here because it is relevant to the main theme of this blog – a theme that, if you read it, makes you a witness too. Not, of course, to ‘Pat’s’ bad behaviour, but to another circumstance which, in my opinion, is a great injustice doing harm to many people – an injustice that ‘Pat’ has got away with for many years now, not only because ‘Pat’s peers’ have turned a blind eye – and a deaf ear too – but also because all others who have known about it have chosen to ‘walk on by’.
The injustice of which I speak is the fact that about one GCSE, AS and A level grade in every four, as awarded in England, is wrong, and has been wrong for years. Not only that: in addition, the rules for appeals do not allow these wrong grades to be discovered and corrected. So the wrong grades last for ever, as does the damage they do.
To make that real, in August 2025, some 6.5 million grades were awarded, of which around 1.6 million were wrong, with no appeal. That’s an average of about one wrong grade ‘awarded’ to every candidate in the land.
Perhaps you already knew all that. But if you didn’t, you do now. As a consequence, like Sam in that case study, you are a witness to wrong-doing.
It’s important, of course, that you trust the evidence. The prime source is Ofqual’s November 2018 report, Marking Consistency Metrics – An update, which presents the results of an extensive research project in which very large numbers of GCSE, AS and A level scripts were in essence marked twice – once by an ‘assistant’ examiner (as happens in ‘ordinary’ marking each year), and again by a subject senior examiner, whose academic judgement is the ultimate authority, and whose mark, and hence grade, is deemed ‘definitive’, the arbiter of ‘right’.
Each script therefore had two marks and two grades, enabling those grades to be compared. If they were the same, then the ‘assistant’ examiner’s grade – the grade that is on the candidate’s certificate – corresponds to the senior examiner’s ‘definitive’ grade, and is therefore ‘right’; if the two grades are different, then the assistant examiner’s grade is necessarily ‘non-definitive’, or, in plain English, wrong.
You might have thought that the number of ‘non-definitive’/wrong grades would be small and randomly distributed across subjects. In fact, the key results are shown on page 21 of Ofqual’s report as Figure 12, reproduced here:
Figure 1: Reproduction of Ofqual’s evidence concerning the reliability of school exam grades
To interpret this chart, I refer to this extract from the report’s Executive Summary:
The probability of receiving the ‘definitive’ qualification grade varies by qualification and subject, from 0.96 (a mathematics qualification) to 0.52 (an English language and literature qualification).
This states that 96% of Maths grades (all varieties, at all levels), as awarded, are ‘definitive’/right, as are 52% of those for Combined English Language and Literature (a subject available only at A level). Accordingly, by implication, 4% of Maths grades, and 48% of English Language and Literature grades, are ‘non-definitive’/wrong. Maths grades, as awarded, can therefore be regarded as 96% reliable; English Language and Literature grades as 52% reliable.
Scrutiny of the chart will show that the heavy black line in the upper blue box for Maths maps onto about 0.96 on the horizontal axis; the equivalent line for English Language and Literature maps onto 0.56. The measures of the reliability of the grades for each of the other subjects are designated similarly. Ofqual’s report does not give any further numbers, but Table 1 shows my estimates from Ofqual’s Figure 12:
Probability of
‘Definitive’ grade
‘Non-definitive’ grade
Maths (all varieties)
96%
4%
Chemistry
92%
8%
Physics
88%
12%
Biology
85%
15%
Psychology
78%
22%
Economics
74%
26%
Religious Studies
66%
34%
Business Studies
66%
34%
Geography
65%
35%
Sociology
63%
37%
English Language
61%
39%
English Literature
58%
42%
History
56%
44%
Combined English Language and Literature (A level only)
52%
48%
Table 1: My estimates of the reliability of school exam grades, as inferred from measurements of Ofqual’s Figure 12.
Ofqual’s report does not present any corresponding information for each of GCSE, AS or A level separately, nor any analysis by exam board. Also absent is a measure of the all-subject overall average. Given, however, the maximum value of 96%, and the minimum of 52%, the average is likely to be somewhere in the middle, say, in the seventies; in fact, if each subject is weighted by its cohort, the resulting average over the 14 subjects shown is about 74%. Furthermore, if other subjects – such as French, Spanish, Computing, Art… – are taken into consideration, the overall average is most unlikely to be greater than 82% or less than 66%, suggesting that an overall average reliability of 75% for all subjects is a reasonable estimate.
That’s the evidence that, across all subjects and levels, about 75% of grades, as awarded, are ‘definitive’/right and 25% – one in four – are ‘non-definitive’/wrong – evidence that has been in the public domain since 2018. But evidence that has been much disputed by those with vested interests.
Ofqual’s results are readily explained. We all know that different examiners can, legitimately, give the same answer (slightly) different marks. As a result, the script’s total mark might lie on different sides of a grade boundary, depending on who did the marking. Only one grade, however, is ‘definitive’.
Importantly, there are no errors in the marking studied by Ofqual – in fact, Ofqual’s report mentions ‘marking error’ just once, and then in a rather different context. All the grading discrepancies measured in Ofqual’s research are therefore attributable solely to legitimate differences in academic opinion. And since the range of legitimate marks is far narrower in subjects such as Maths and Physics, as compared to English Literature and History, then the probability that an ‘assistant’ examiner’s legitimate mark might result in a ‘non-definitive’ grade will be much higher for, say, History as compared to Physics. Hence the sequence of subjects in Ofqual’s Figure 12.
As regards appeals, in 2016, Ofqual – in full knowledge of the results of this research (see paragraph 28 of this Ofqual Board Paper, dated 18 November 2015) – changed the rules, requiring that a grade can be changed only if a ‘review of marking’ discovers a ‘marking error’. To quote an Ofqual ‘news item’ of 26 May 2016:
Exam boards must tell examiners who review results that they should not change marks unless there is a clear marking error.…It is not fair to allow some students to have a second bite of the cherry by giving them a higher mark on review, when the first mark was perfectly appropriate. This undermines the hard work and professionalism of markers, most of whom are teachers themselves. These changes will mean a level-playing field for all students and help to improve public confidence in the marking system.
This assumes that the legitimate marks given by different examiners are all equally “appropriate”, and identical in every way.
This assumption. however, is false: if one of those marks corresponds to the ‘definitive’ grade, and another to a ‘non-definitive’ grade, they are not identical at all. Furthermore, as already mentioned, there is hardly any mention of marking errors in Ofqual’s November 2018 report. All the grade discrepancies they identified can therefore only be attributable to legitimate differences in academic opinion, and so cannot be discovered and corrected by the rules that have been in place since 2016.
Over to you…
So, back to that case study.
Having read this far, like Sam, you have knowledge of wrong-doing – not Pat tearing a strip off Alex, but Ofqual awarding some 1.5 million wrong grades every year. All with no right of appeal.
What are you going to do?
You’re probably thinking something like, “Nothing”, “It’s not my job”, “It’s not my problem”, “I’m in no position to do anything, even if I wanted to”.
All of which I understand. No, it’s certainly not your job. And it’s not your problem directly, in that it’s not you being awarded the wrong grade. But it might be your problem indirectly – if you are involved with admissions, and if grades play a material role, you may be accepting a student who is not fully qualified (in that the grade on the certificate might be too high), or – perhaps worse – rejecting a student who is (in that the grade on the certificate is too low). Just to make that last point real, about one candidate in every six with a certificate showing AAA for A level Physics, Chemistry and Biology in fact truly merited at least one B. If such a candidate took a place at Med School, for example, not only is that candidate under-qualified, but a place has also been denied to a candidate with a certificate showing AAB but who merited AAA.
And although you, as an individual, are indeed not is a position to do anything about it, you, collectively, surely are.
HE is, by far, the largest and most important user of A levels. And relying on a ‘product’ that is only about 75% reliable. HE, collectively, could put significant pressure on Ofqual to fix this, if only by printing “OFQUAL WARNING: THE GRADES ON THIS CERTIFICATE ARE ONLY RELIABLE, AT BEST, TO ONE GRADE EITHER WAY” on every certificate – not my statement, but one made by Ofqual’s then Chief Regulator, Dame Glenys Stacey, in evidence to the 2 September 2020 hearing of the Education Select Committee, and in essence equivalent to the fact that about one grade in four is wrong. That would ensure that everyone is aware of the fact that any decision, based on a grade as shown on a certificate, is intrinsically unsafe.
But this – or some other solution – can happen only if your institution, along with others, were to act accordingly. And that can happen only if you, and your colleagues, band together to influence your department, your faculty, your institution.
Yes, that is a bother. Yes, you do have other urgent things to do.
If you do nothing, nothing will happen.
But if you take action, you can make a difference.
Don’t just walk on by.
Dennis Sherwood is a management consultant with a particular interest in organisational cultures, creativity and systems thinking. Over the last several years, Dennis has also been an active campaigner for the delivery of reliable GCSE, AS and A level grades.If you enjoyed this, you might also like https://srheblog.com/tag/sherwood/.
[1] The ITV programme ‘Mr Bates v The Post Office’ was shown on British TV during the first week of January 2024 and has generated in the UK a media firestorm and a swift government response. Those, probably mostly outside the UK, who are unfamiliar with the story might like to read this explainer from Private Eyebefore reading this editorial. Or just Google it.
by Rob Cuthbert
Mr Sherwood, you’re the only one who’s been reporting these problems …
We have complete confidence that our system is robust.
This is a story of injustice on a massive scale, over a long period. The story of someone affronted by the unfairness who refused to give up, even though the authorities lined up to oppose him and try to make him go away. A story which has not yet attracted the attention it seems to deserve, given the way it affects the lives of tens of thousands of people who put their faith in a flawed system.
Every year a new group of tens of thousands of people are subject to the same repeated injustice. Most of them have no idea that they might have been unfairly treated. If they try to use official procedures for complaint and recompense most of them will fail. The authorities’ repeated mantra is that the system is ‘the best and fairest way’.
It could be, but it isn’t. And one person’s attempts to make things better have been met with denial, opposition, obfuscation, and the use of official processes to discourage media attention, by a public agency which is “independent of government”.
The reports showed varying reliability in the grades awarded by examiners, compared with the ‘true’ or ‘definitive’ grade awarded by a senior examiner. Dennis Sherwood, an independent analyst and consultant, interpreted Ofqual’s measurements of grade reliability as a consequence of what he termed ‘fuzziness’. Fuzziness is the range around a senior examiner’s ‘definitive’ mark that contains the ‘legitimate’ marks given by an ordinary examiner. The 2018 report found that grades for, say, English and History are much less reliable than those for Maths and Physics. In Sherwood’s terms, the ‘fuzziness’ of the marks associated with English and History is greater than for Maths and Physics.
Problems arise when a marking range straddles a grade boundary. For example, if a script is legitimately marked in a range from 38-42, but a grade boundary is set at 40, then more than one grade could result from that one script, depending on who marks it and how. Ofqual have admitted that this is the case:
“…more than one grade could well be a legitimate reflection of a student’s performance and they would both be a sound estimate of that student’s ability at that point in time based on the available evidence from the assessment they have undertaken.” (Ofqual, 2019).
The 2016 report says: “… the wider the grade boundary locations, the greater the probability of candidates receiving the definitive grade.” GCSEs have nine grades plus unclassified, and A-levels have six plus unclassified, meaning grade widths are inevitably narrower than, for example, university degree classifications with just four plus fail. With comparatively narrow grade widths more candidates will be close to a boundary. In other words, and however good the marking is, grading for many candidates will not always give a ’true’ or ‘definitive’ grade.
“It’s really important that people don’t put too much weight on any individual grade. … I know, unfortunately, that a lot of weight is placed on particular GCSEs for progression, maths and English being the obvious ones. In maths that is less problematic because the assessment in maths is generally highly reliable. In English that is problematic. This is not a failure of our GCSE system. This is the reality of assessment. It is the same around the world. There is no easy fix, I am afraid. It is how we use the grades that needs to change rather than creating a system of lengthy assessments.” (emphasis added).
Dame Glenys Stacey, Ofqual’s Chief Regulator until 2016, was reappointed as Acting Chief Regulator after the departure of Sally Collier in the aftermath of the 2020 results, and she said in 2020 (House of Commons Education Committee, 2020a: Q1059):
“It is interesting how much faith we put in examination and the grade that comes out of that. We know from research, as I think Michelle mentioned, that we have faith in them, but they are reliable to one grade either way.” (emphasis added)
According to Ofqual’s own research, we have a national system of grading that is only 95% reliable – and then only if you accept that grades are reliable within plus or minus a grade. The problem is that most people use grades more precisely than that. If you don’t get a grade 4 or above in GCSE English or Mathematics, you may be allowed to progress to educational routes post-16, but you must take a resit alongside your next phase of study, and will not be allowed to continue if your resit grade is still 3 or below. If you miss out by just one grade at A-level, your chosen university may reject you. Although marking meets the best international standards, grading still contains much individual unfairness. That means many students may miss out on their preferred university, be forced to wait a year to try again, or decide not to enter higher education at all.
We know this mainly because of the efforts of Dennis Sherwood, who started writing about problems with grading five years ago. Sherwood’s analyses attracted media attention but often his findings were rejected by Ofqual, for example in Camilla Turner’s Daily Telegraph report of 25 August 2018, when an Ofqual spokesman was quoted as saying: ‘Mr Sherwood’s research is “entirely without merit” and has drawn “incorrect conclusions”’ (Turner, 2018).
Ofqual tried to shut down Sherwood’s commentaries, and complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) about a Sunday Times article headlined ‘Revealed – A-level results are 48% wrong’ published on 11 August 2019. IPSO’s finding upheld the complaint, but only on the narrow grounds that the newspaper had not made it sufficiently clear that the use of the word ‘wrong’ was the newspaper’s, and not Ofqual’s, characterisation of the research. However the IPSO ruling said:
“It was not significantly misleading to report that 48% of grades could be “wrong”, in circumstances where the research indicated that, in 48% of cases, a senior examiner could have awarded a different grade to that awarded by the examiner who had marked the paper. The complainant had accepted that different grades could be awarded as a result of inconsistencies in marking, but disagreed with the characterisation of the research which had been adopted by the publication.”
Sherwood’s argument has never been refuted. Ofqual, with its statutory responsibility to maintain public confidence in qualifications, was trying to ignore or attack stories that ‘one grade in four is wrong’. That tactic might have succeeded, were it not for Covid. The story of the infamous examinations algorithm, ultimately abandoned, need not be repeated here. However it showed, first, that few parents and indeed teachers understood how the grading system worked. Secondly, Ofqual’s defence of the flawed 2020 algorithm was so focused on the collective unfairness of grade inflation between one year and the next that they failed to recognise that their ‘solution’ moved grading from a national competition to an intensely local one. That made individual unfairnesses very visible, there was a public outcry and the algorithm was abandoned. Individual unfairness in grading persists – but has reverted to its former obscurity.
Dennis Sherwood accordingly wrote a book, Missing the Mark,which I reviewed for HEPI, setting out his arguments in detail. It seemed to be persuading more in the educational media to give his arguments the space they deserved. He was no longer entirely alone, with a small group (including me) finding his arguments convincing. Support from various media, notably the HEPI blog, gave him space to make his argument. However, as in the case of Mr Bates and the Post Office, there were still just a few individuals ranged against the forces of Ofqual and (some of) the educational establishment.
On 8 June 2023 I wrote ‘If A-level grades are unreliable, what should admission officers do? for HEPI, arguing that universities should recognise the limited reliability of A-level grades by giving candidates the benefit of the doubt, uplifting all achieved results by one grade. That blog was perhaps provocative but it did at least recognise the problem and suggest a short-term fix. My 2020 explanation about the algorithm had become the most-read HEPI blog ever, and I was invited, as I had been every year since 2020, to contribute a further blog to HEPI, to be published near to A-level results day. My follow-up to the June blog advised students and parents how to respond if they had fallen short of an offer they had accepted. I submitted it to HEPI but it was not accepted. HEPI did however publish a blog by one of its trustees, Mary Curnock Cook, on 14 August, the Monday before results day on Thursday.
Curnock Cook is the widely-respected former head of UCAS. She began:
“In this blog, I want to provide some context and challenge to two erroneous statements that are made about exam grades:
That ‘one in four exam grades is wrong’
That grades are only reliable to ‘within one grade either way’”
She asserted that the statement ‘one in four exam grades is wrong’ was a ‘gross misunderstanding’, but then said:
“In many subjects there will be several marks either side of the definitive mark that are equally legitimate. They reflect the reality that even the most expert and experienced examiners in a subject will not always agree on the precise number of marks that an essay or longer answer is worth. But those different marks are not ‘wrong’.”
In other words, as admitted by Ofqual, more than one grade could be a ‘legitimate’ assessment of the outcome for an individual. Huy Duong, another critic of the 2020 algorithm, had been widely quoted in the media in 2020 after he predicted the exact outcomes of the algorithm a week before the publication of results. He commented on Curnock Cook’s blog:
”… a lot of this is simply playing with words … whichever definitions of ‘wrong’ and ‘rights’ the establishment chooses to use, it is irrefutable that students are subjected to a grade lottery … If, as the author and the establishment contend, for a given script, both “Pass” and “Fail” are equally legitimate, then for the student’s certificate to state only either “Pass” or “Fail”, that certificate is stating a half truth.”
Curnock Cook then addressed the supposedly ‘erroneous’ statement that “grades are only reliable to ‘within one grade either way” – the statement made by Glenys Stacey as Chief Regulator – saying:
“Some commentators have chosen to weaponise this statement in a way that shows poor understanding of the concepts underpinning reliable and valid assessment and risks doing immense damage to students and to public confidence in our exam system.”
How it is that Sherwood’s analysis shows ‘poor understanding’ is not explained. On the contrary, he seems to have a clear understanding of what Ofqual themselves have admitted. Curnock Cook said the claim about reliability had been taken out of context, but the context is not international tests of collective grading reliability, but the way universities and individual students actually use the grades.
Curnock Cook’s blog was welcomed by influential commentators like Jonathan Simons of Public First, a government favourite for research and PR, and some educationists such as Geoff Barton of the Association of School and College Leaders. She said that talking about unreliable grades “risks doing immense damage to students and to public confidence in our exam system”. Indeed it does, but the risk lies not in pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. The real risk is in not changing the system which remains unfair to so many individuals. The emperor still has no clothes, and it is time to redress things.
Most people who suffer injustice in grading do not even know it has happened. For individuals who do know, most will find that using official procedures to complain or appeal is expensive, and unlikely to change the outcome. In his campaign to illuminate the problem Mr Sherwood, like Mr Bates, met denial, opposition and the use of official processes to discourage the media from continuing to cover the story. People in the organisations concerned know how the system actually works, but they don’t want it to be widely known, for the sake of public confidence in the system. Groupthink puts collective inter-cohort ‘fairness’ ahead of fairness to every individual in every cohort. There was even, in 2020, blind faith in a computer system which was later proved to be faulty.
Public confidence in the qualifications and examinations system is of course absolutely vital. But the need for public confidence does not mean that individual unfairness on a large scale should be tolerated and ignored. There are several possible solutions to the problems of grading unreliability, and many would have little direct cost. HE institutions would have to take even greater care in using grades, as part of their wider assessment of the potential and abilities of candidates for their courses. That is a small price to pay for maintaining public confidence in a national system which everyone could be proud of for its fairness as well as its international standing.
Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com. Twitter @RobCuthbert
