A-level

 

                                              A-level

The WSJ had an article on the British A-level exams and the impact of the Virus. This is from it.

If you want to understand how a virus exposes everything that’s wrong in modern governance writ large, this is the place to look.

The U.K. A-levels are subject-matter exams taken by university-bound students in their last year of high school, after two years of focused instruction. As with U.S. Advanced Placement courses that sometimes confer college credits, the A-levels are meant to denote a university level of academic achievement.

Except that in Britain the stakes are much higher. The A-level is the only government-approved qualification for university-bound high-school graduates, so it serves as a diploma. And since U.K. students devote only three years to their undergraduate degrees, A-levels serve as the functional equivalent to an American freshman year of college.


As a result, admission offers especially to the most selective universities are conditional on earning certain minimum grades in specified A-level subject tests. These one-off, high-pressure tests are the stuff of 18-year-olds’ nightmares.

Then the pandemic hit.

The first spread of the virus and Britain’s lockdown, imposed in late March, coincided with the normal schedule for sitting the standardized A-level tests. Absent that exam, an entire cohort of students would be left without a clear path into the university places for which they had conditionally been accepted.

Of course the education bureaucracy devised the worst possible workaround. Students would submit class work graded by their teachers and scores on mock tests they took earlier in their studies. A finely tuned computer algorithm would then “normalize” those inputs to account for possible grade inflation and spit out an exam grade for exams students hadn’t taken.

No one seems to have stopped to ask what could go wrong. The answer was a lot. Some 40% of grades on individual A-level “exams” were downgraded by the computer. Students from poorer areas and less glamorous schools were disproportionately affected. For instance, the algorithm assumed that the bigger a school’s average class size, the less accurate a teacher’s classwork grades were likely to be. This favored students at posh private schools with small classes. High-achievers were punished if they attended a school with a history of poor A-level results—the computer relied heavily on historical averages.

This has become a political disaster for Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and it should be. His lockdown policy failed to weigh the costs in lost educational opportunities against the virus’s cost on public health. Then his government picked a dumb way to try to even the scales.

The U.K. exam fiasco highlights the extent to which overreliance on technocracy has robbed governments—and societies—of resilience. Britain suffered for its long-running attempt to impose national uniformity on education at all levels. U.S. college admissions have not been marred by a similar crisis because, mirabile dictu, no one is in charge. Meaning, no one person.

American high-school students follow multiple pathways into higher education. A hodgepodge of SATs, ACTs, grade-point averages, AP exams and extracurricular activities provide the fodder for admissions officers. In normal times, Americans worry this system is too flexible, too forgiving of grade inflation or too prone to abuse.

During an unprecedented crisis, however, flexibility has been a blessing.