A teacher at a Northern Ireland school offers his reflections on this year’s A Level results, placing them in the broader context of the modern exam system.

It’s been hard to escape headlines across all news outlets decrying the disaster of this year’s A level results. Across Northern Ireland, teachers and students have been disappointed to see grades downgraded from those their teacher assigned them back in May.

In response to widespread concerns that many children have not received a grade that reflects their ability, the examining body CCEA has doubled down and explained that grades have been adjusted to be in line with typical performance – and there are more higher grades offered this year than in previous years.

As a teacher I sympathise with colleagues and students who have not got fair reward for their work. But I also reflect that what has happened this year is actually the same as every year, and is a reflection of how our grading system works.

A level and GCSE grades are not reflections of what a student knows or can do. They represent the mark they achieved in exams and coursework compared to the marks of all the other students in the cohort. Their cohort also is compared with historical cohorts, and the overall numbers of grades given at each level reflects how that cohort has performed overall compared to other years.

So students’ grades have always, to an extent, been the function of how others have performed. They have never been solely an indication of that student’s ability in the subject.

What is different this year is we have also asked teachers to submit their own grades. Teacher grades have been based on assessing their students’ work. Every A level and GCSE course has a list of assessment criteria that describe what a student needs to do to reflect their skill and understanding. These criteria have thresholds of increasing complexity to distinguish levels of ability. These are called ‘bands’ to distinguish them from grades, which are based on comparisons with others. 

In May, teachers by and large assigned students the grade they felt reflected the quality of work done during the course, to reflect how well students understood or displayed the knowledge and understanding they had learned. They assigned grades based on the criteria, and not referenced to the performance of others.

What we all missed was the final exam. In an exam, students earn marks towards their final total. As we all know, marks can reflect student ability in a subject, but can also be lost for minor errors – forgetting a key piece of vocabulary, misreading a question, managing time poorly, and so on. None of these things reflect ability in a given subject but can cost marks, and therefore affect a final grade. For higher mark questions students are also expected to use a typical framework for answering the question that some do not master. When assigning grades, teachers could not predict the extent of these errors, but instead they relied on the actual performance of students that they had observed.

So, of course, when an exam score is not taken into account, you would expect grades to be higher. And, of course, this is also not a fair reflection of ability in the subject – rather it is the ability to know how to gain marks in an exam.

As a teacher I believe norm-referenced assessment is long past its use. The diversity of opportunities available to young people means their rank in our society is less important than their knowledge and skills. If everyone gets an A, then we should celebrate that – not turn the lower As into Fs. We should have a system that has built into it the opportunity for all to excel – and not to continually reproduce the hierarchy that narrows and limits our society.