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Officials knew there was a risk of “public dissatisfaction” or legal challenge over 2020 exam grade decisions from the beginning, the former head of Ofqual has said.
Roger Taylor also told The Independent there was a “growing awareness of the likelihood” that the chosen system would not work as results day approached.
After exams were cancelled due to the Covid pandemic, grades were calculated using a controversial algorithm to moderate teacher predictions of what students would achieve in exams.
Nearly 40 per cent of A-level results were downgraded last year in moderation.
Students were allowed to take teacher predictions in a U-turn after backlash and protests followed A-level results day.
Mr Taylor, who resigned from the exams regulator in December, told The Independent he believed decision-making for 2020 exam grades did not properly assess what the public would find acceptable.
“Everyone knew from the outset that there was a risk of public dissatisfaction with the process and that there was a risk of judicial review,” he said.
“The process around managing risk of judicial review is well understood and was closely managed.”
But he said a recent paper he wrote “makes the point that the process around determining what is acceptable to the public was inadequate and carried too little weight in the policy decisions”.
In the essay for the Centre for Progresive Policy think-tank, he said the fiasco was caused by “human-decision making” rather than the algorithm used.
In an event after its publication, he said a “gross miscalculation” over what was an “acceptable way to treat people” was behind last year’s fiasco over exam grades.
Mr Taylor told The Independent an ethical dimension of using algorithms which does not get enough attention is “to what extent does it feels fair to be treated in this way”, with what happened with exams a good example of this.
“Technically, it is true that there were as many people will have got a higher grade than they would have if they got if they had done an exam, as got a lower rate But that is not the experience because nobody experiences getting a higher grade than they thought they would have got,” the ex-boss of England’s exam regulator said.
“Everybody who gets a grade lower believes that they have been treated unfairly. And a lot of them – we know for a fact – will be right. And we also know for a fact that we can’t tell which ones are right and which ones are wrong.”
He added: “So everybody who thinks they’re right, there’s no way of contradicting them. They are all going to feel they have been harmed.”
Mr Taylor said this was something “we could identify and establish” from the beginning and why people were “uneasy” throughout this process in meetings.
“We all knew, as it were, that asking people to accept this was a huge thing to ask,” he told The Independent.
Mr Taylor also said it was important to note that calculated grades were not “inherently unethical” or discriminatory against one group in particular.
In a world where it was impossible to increase university places, you “were going to be forced to tell some people on limited evidence they weren’t going to get it” and that this would “be a good way to do things”, he said.
Mr Taylor told The Independent: “But what was the miscalculation was to think that people might accept that as a reasonable argument and … accept that it was a fair thing to do.”
He added: “It was absolutely possible to work out in advance that people would not tolerate this.”
In his personal reflection published earlier this month, Mr Taylor said using the algorithm to moderate grades did nothing to solve the problem of how young people can be compensated for policies taking away their ability to “produce the evidence” needed to claim their university place.
“Allowing a much larger number of students to be admitted would limit the number who were wrongly excluded. This option was, to my knowledge, never seriously considered,” Mr Taylor wrote.
Before stepping down as chair at the end of last year, Mr Taylor told the education select committee that Ofqual had warned that the regulator had warned a system of calculated grades was the “worst-case scenario”, with socially-distanced or delayed exam better options.
Tens of thousands of A-level results were initially downgraded from teacher predictions in the original grading system last year.
Even after a U-turn allowed students to take higher teacher-estimated grades instead of any lower moderated ones, some still missed out on their university places last year, telling The Independent these predictions were lower than than expected.
The Department for Education spokesperson said: “All decisions taken on assessments in 2020 were based on delivering the fairest outcome for students. At all times the department worked closely with Ofqual to find solutions that would allow young people to progress to the next stage of their education or career.”
They added: “We lifted university number caps and provided £20m to increase capacity for university places in the 2020/21 academic year to help ensure students could progress into higher education. UCAS data showed that more students were placed on to their first choice course in 2020 than in 2019.”
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