This is true to an extent, but it still doesn't take into account the amount of time they had to prepare. They showed no leadership/help towards schools and just left them to their own devices. Not A-levels, but GCSE levels, I know of some teachers who continued doing Zoom teaching throughout the remainder of the term whereas my own kids' school was so unbelievably useless it astounded me. They had 2 phonecalls to ask how they were doing from their form tutors; my year 11 son just got "that's it" and my year 9 daughter had sporadic bits of work on Show My Homework with one invite to a Zoom lesson in English right at the end of the year.snoozeofreason wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 10:28 amTo be fair, back in March, the government was facing a lot of pressure to cancel exams - from the media, schools, and the public. If they had decided to go ahead with them, they would have had to hold the line against increasing opposition for several months. It might have been technically possible, but it would have been difficult to push it through if significant numbers of people - particularly schools, pupils, and parents - had been unenthusiastic.Allo V Psycho wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 7:55 amThe Germans held exams as usualFlammableFlower wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 6:48 amindeed
I was annoyed by their rather lame and peevish comment that was reported on radio 4 PM programme last night - that other countries have used such a system and its fine. Really? Which countries exactly? I certainly haven't heard of any. And was it really so great?
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-school-le ... a-52917576
The French based the Bac on continuous assessment work, and as a result had a much higher pass rate, putting strain on University places
https://www.connexionfrance.com/French- ... inal-exams
This review is quite interesting, for the three strategies of cancel, delay, or modify exams.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/h ... t-approach
Of the three approaches mentioned, my view is that the best would have been to have held exams as usual, modifying for social distancing etc., with on line elements where feasible. Delay those elements where modification not feasible. That’s what I did, in my own particular pond.
In addition, there would have been significant unfairness, because some pupils would have been much better able to prepare during the school closures than others due to better home environment, more supportive parents and schools, etc. And the beneficiaries would likely to have been the students from more wealthy families.
Why not ask schools to audit/estimate what tech support they were likely to need? Throw laptops/tablets at them, in the bigger picture it wouldn't make that much difference. Ask schools to show what they're going to do to meet learning requirements. Push back the exam dates.
Unis, in the main, still ran exams in some form in May (we did the online release with 24-hour deadline format, allowing students to sit them in the August (re)assessment period should they feel they had insufficient time or resources or had health issues). It shouldn't have been outside the wit of the DfE to come up with something.
At the very minimum they should have realised there would be far more appeals likely and so separated the exam release date and university admissions deadline to allow for the dust to settle before uni places got finalised.
Did they really spend 4 months on an algorithm that they thought was going to work just as if it was any normal year?