Ben Lowry: Allowing huge grade inflation at GCSE and A-Level will create its own injustices

The coming GCSE markings could prove just as controversial.

Already some influential people are wondering if exams are the best way to assess school pupils at any time, not just in lockdown.

Tony Gallagher, professor of education at Queen’s University Belfast, said in a tweet: “I wonder what the basis is for assuming that high-stakes examinations are a more accurate assessment measure than the professional judgement of teachers?

“And if this is a working assumption, why were teachers asked to make predictions in the first place?”

As someone who did well in some exams but flunked others, I still see no alternative to such tests.

Jeremy Clarkson, above (in the print edition, in a cited tweet), talks about getting A-Levels that ranged from grades C to U.

My own range of grades was greater: from A to U.

In my teens I was often reading things I wanted to read rather than things I was supposed to read. I resat my A-Levels and later studied for a degree with little enthusiasm.

If I was to re-do things I would learn something entirely new, such as a language. Or I might well not bother going to university at all.

I feel great sympathy for the GCSE and A-Level pupils of 2020, because I would have hated a system of teacher assessment. Some such assessments of me would have been deservedly unkind.

Jeremy Clarkson says he is building a large house with fine views. Many of us who do not ever expect to be able to do that, have even so fumbled our way into a career. In my case formal education did not have a lot to do with it.

If a school kid came to me seeking advice because they did not know what they wanted to do with their life, I would say this:

Work in your summer holidays and keep trying different roles, however basic: waiter, fruit picker, painter, etc.

You will come across something you like. Then try to develop it.

I never had a plan to be a journalist and was well into my 20s before I made moves in that direction.

My life could easily have taken an utterly different path. In the summer of 1988 aged 16 I stayed with relatives outside Boston and worked in a McDonald’s restaurant.

I learned a lot in that first job: about sales, about business, customers and dealing with complaint.

The youngest manager in the branch was 17, and they got to deal with receipts and money, the kind of stuff I wanted to do. I thought about not returning to school.

If I had stayed, my career path would have been far more business oriented than it has been.

So part of me would want to tell older school kids: if you just want to get out in the world and try different things and you don’t want to study, then don’t go to university.

Or if you want to get into a trade, forge ahead.

Before lockdown a young man who fixed my car told me he always wanted to be a mechanic, and hoped ultimately to own his own business. One day he will know as much about cars as a general surgeon does about human bodies.

But at the same time if a young person was unsure about university I would be concerned that if they ruled it out it they might later find themselves constrained by the unnecessary, at times ridiculous, requirement of a degree for some general jobs.

My point is that I am no extreme traditionalist when it comes to education. Yet I am concerned about the push to stop CCEA revising many A-Level grades downwards.

A revision of a grade from a C to a U makes little sense (U grades should be reserved for a tiny number of people like me and Clarkson who almost walked out of some exams). But hard cases make bad law.

While many of us did not know what we wanted to do when we were young, other people did know.

They worked with great focus and sacrificed vast amounts of time and pleasure to get the grades they needed to do the course they wanted at the university of their choice.

I have watched with admiration such people justifiably fill the roles in adult life that their childhood ambitions, and subsequent hard work, propelled them towards.

There is a grave risk that children like that in 2020 will find their achievements swamped by the massive grade inflation that has come from teacher assessment.

This is not the fault of anyone in particular — no-one foresaw a pandemic. But schools could have been reopened for exam year pupils after Easter, to avoid this trauma.

They would have been able to social distance if other pupils were at home.

Society did not go down that route, as some other countries did.

And I fear that allowing rampant grade inflation to go unadjusted will create its own set of injustices.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

• Ben Lowry: The centenary celebrations for Northern Ireland should be inclusive — up to a point

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