Covid-19 disrupted school systems worldwide. Many children are still out of school. One of the issues impacted by school closures has been education assessment. How should students be assessed on their learning when school buildings are closed? Is it fair to hold tests when online learning has patchy coverage? And what happens if high stake tests can’t be held? Today I speak with Mary Richardson about how coronavirus impacted education assessment in England and how government, schools, universities, and students responded.
Mary Richardson is an Associate Professor of Education (Assessment) at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. Prior to joining academia, she was a Senior Research Officer in the department of Research and Statistics for AQA conducting national studies relating to school-based examinations, testing regimes in schools and the impact of testing on children alongside the key role in awarding national examinations.
Citation: Richardson, Mary, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 215, podcast audio, September 21, 2020. https://freshedpodcast.com/richardson/
Will Brehm 1:56
Mary Richardson, welcome to FreshEd.
Mary Richardson 1:58
Hi, thanks very much for inviting me.
Will Brehm 2:01
I wanted to start with, maybe, a very generic question for some of the listeners that are outside of the United Kingdom. Can you describe the system of A-levels and how it works inside the UK?
Mary Richardson 2:12
Okay. Put really simply, an A-level is basically an advanced level. So, that’s just the short name we use for the A-levels. And A-level qualifications have been around in England for a long time. Since the early part of the 20th century. And essentially, they were introduced, so that there was a way -once we started to create state education for children beyond the age of 16- a way to help with selection for universities. That was their very original purpose. But now what they are, is they are obviously used mainly still for selection for universities, but people sometimes might need them for job applications, or going on to other forms of study, and there’s a range of ways that you can actually use them. But the difference between A-levels and other qualifications and certifications that students do in schools in England, is that at A-level, you will only ever study, usually, three or four subjects, some students do five, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Most students do about three.
Will Brehm 3:25
And when do the A-Levels begin in a student’s career?
Mary Richardson 3:28
Okay, so again, on average, you start them when you are 16. So, in the year that you are 16, you will finish that phase of schooling, it’s called Key Stage 4 in England. You’ll finish that phase of schooling, and then you will either, by law, you have to either stay in education training or some kind of employment, and that has to have an educational element to it. But you can’t actually just leave school at 16. That’s a relatively new law. It only came in in England a few years ago. There are lots of people like me, who walked out the door at 16 many years ago, and were quite happy to go at that point.
Will Brehm 4:09
You obviously returned later on?
Mary Richardson 4:11
I did, yes. Yes. I came back to education as a very mature student. Yeah.
Will Brehm 4:17
Yes. Right. Hmm. Interesting. But now students basically stay until how many more years. Like 18? Do they have to stay in some sort of educational?
Mary Richardson 4:24
Yeah, so you have to stay on. Absolutely. You have to stay on until you’re 18 now. Which I think is quite a tough call, actually.
Will Brehm 4:32
Hmm.
Mary Richardson 4:33
And there’s quite a lot of reasons for why that might be so. So, you know, it’s an interesting time.
Will Brehm 4:39
Yeah. Okay. So, students, basically from 16 to 18 or so, some students decide to take A-levels three, four, maybe five subjects.
Mary Richardson 4:49
Mm hmm.
Will Brehm 4:50
How are these A-level examinations at the end, and the certification, how then is this used in university placement?
Mary Richardson 4:58
Okay. So, the universities are all told their results on the days that they come out. And it’s usually the second week in August it’s A-Level Results Day. And across the country, all of the results go to the universities. That usually happens the evening before so that the next day, the universities can make offers of places to students. Students generally apply to university in this country before Christmas, the preceding year. So, they have to make decisions a long time in advance as to where they would like to go and what they would like to study. And so, some of you may have heard of “predicted grades”, that’s where that comes into the mix.
Will Brehm 5:41
And so, what are predicted grades?
Mary Richardson 5:43
Okay, glad you asked! Teachers have to decide what grade they think, all things being equal, that people will get in each of the subjects. So, they give those predicted grades to the universities and the student writes an application and they have to write a statement as well for university. And all of that goes in and then generally what happens is universities say, okay, your teacher has predicted that you’re going to get an A and two B’s. So long as you get an A and two B’s, you can have your place to read history or maths or whatever it might be.
Will Brehm 6:18
And then so the students basically have to, once they have those predicted grades, then it’s sort of their responsibility to live up to those predicted grades in the actual A-levels, like the examination?
Mary Richardson 6:29
That’s exactly it! They have to work towards them. And they have to make sure that they get those. So, there are occasions where it depends on the student, it depends how they did in their exams at 16 as well, the GCSEs. Some offers may be different to what we might expect from universities, but generally, most students then are working in that next six months, they know they’ve got to make the grade. Otherwise, they’re going to have to go for a second or third choice. And the way that the competition is set up for universities in this country, you might put a second or third choice, but it could be when it comes to results day that there aren’t any places left. And then you go into a system we have called “clearing”. So, it’s a free for all then.
Will Brehm 7:14
I mean, it’s a free for all, but it’s also highly structured. I mean, it’s a really quite an interesting system. And so how many choices do students have when selecting which university they want to apply to in December, or whenever it is?
Mary Richardson 7:30
They have quite a lot now. You know what, I can’t remember what the exact number is this year but generally -I helped someone quite well known to me to do their application last year, and she chose six in all- but you have to put them in rank order. And that’s quite difficult then because also there may be some universities that look and go well, if you didn’t put us first we’re not going to consider you.
Will Brehm 7:54
Oh, right! So, they can not select people based on how they were ranked.
Mary Richardson 7:59
Yeah. Sometimes that can happen. Yeah, it has been known.
Will Brehm 8:03
Wow. Wow. Okay. So, it’s not simply meritocratic in a way. Some universities might feel slighted by being positioned at number three rather than number one.
Mary Richardson 8:13
Absolutely. Yeah. Particularly if it’s a very competitive university, they might just go well, okay, you didn’t put us first. Plenty of other people have done so unless you turn in the most outstanding grades, then we won’t necessarily make you an offer.
Will Brehm 8:29
Right. Okay. Very interesting. So, I would imagine there’s a lot of game theory that students are playing when they’re sort of working through how they rank universities on their applications. But what about the assessed grades? I mean, are they often correct? Like, are they accurate in the end?
Mary Richardson 8:46
Okay, so there’s two things here. So, the predictions that teachers make, we do know from the research that we’ve done, and I used to work for one of the big exam boards in England doing research into the statistics of awarding at A-levels and GCSEs, which are the exams they take at 16. So, that was my job to help with that process each year. What we do know is that teachers aren’t great at predicting grades accurately for examinations. They tend to over predict. Now, there’s a quite simple reason we think for that, in that generally, what the teachers want to do is to obviously encourage the students. They want them to work hard, to aim high and do that. But also, there is, and the government perhaps wouldn’t agree with me on this one. But there is evidence to say that teachers over predict because it’s in their interest as a professional. They need to show that their cohort of students look good and look like they’re going to achieve well, because achievement is everything in schools in England. We place a huge amount of emphasis on examination results every year and that impacts the overall public view of the quality of a school.
Will Brehm 10:02
But it would be the perception of doing well, because it’s these predictions. They’re over predicting, right?
Mary Richardson 10:08
Yeah, it just adds to that kind of fever around the perception of “is this school good enough”? “Is this school doing well enough”? So, that’s what those are. What happened this year is slightly different because the other terminology that your listeners might have come across are what are called “center-assessed grades” in England.
Will Brehm 10:30
Yes. And so, what are those?
Mary Richardson 10:32
That’s slightly different, because that’s a combination of data, which might include teacher predictions, but will also include things such as coursework outcomes, the grades that students may have got in a mock examination, etc. So, it was a kind of bundle of evidence that was presented.
Will Brehm 10:51
And so, are center-assessed grades something common? Did they happen before this year?
Mary Richardson 10:58
No. This is purely because of COVID that this evidence had to be created in this way this year.
Will Brehm 11:05
Okay, so this is an excellent segue to begin to unpack what exactly happened this year. So, you know, when Coronavirus happened, and the UK went into lockdown the schools were closed on March 20, if I’m not mistaken.
Mary Richardson 11:21
That’s right.
Will Brehm 11:21
So, how were students impacted in regard to A-levels when this happened?
Mary Richardson 11:27
Okay, so straight away, there was a huge amount of concern, because, of course, students usually would be, at that point, in the lead in time to actually taking the examinations. And all the examinations happen generally, in -some start at the end of April, most are in May and June, and then the scripts go off for marking and then the data goes into the awarding bodies who put all the awards together. So, of course, what happened this year was, initially there were all sorts of discussions about, we might be able to set up online versions of the exams, and then they quickly realized that wouldn’t be possible. The next suggestion was, all the exam boards could reset all the examinations for later in the summer. And then we realized quite quickly, yeah, that’s not going to happen because we can’t get people into testing centers. We can’t set up testing centers that are appropriate for people. And then of course, one of the things that everyone kept forgetting, a lot of people said to me, but why can’t they just, kids could go into schools at different times, we could do this, we could make this work. And I said, yeah, but you’re forgetting what happens afterwards. Then everything has to be marked, then it has to be standardized, then it has to be awarded. And I said by the time you’ve done all that, that takes such a long time that just getting all that data together appropriately is really problematic in this situation.
Will Brehm 12:55
Right? So, one of the issues here is that because in a sense, it’s so centralized, at the national level. These are national level examinations and so all the students in A-levels across England and also the United Kingdom, is that right?
Mary Richardson 13:09
Yeah.
Will Brehm 13:09
They’re all sort of at the same time. And they all get processed by -who actually processes them?
Mary Richardson 13:16
Okay. So, just to be clear, that Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have their own ways of dealing with their assessments. So, they have their own governance for education. So, what we’re dealing with here is just what happened in England. Although if you look in the newspapers, you’ll find it didn’t go that well in Scotland, either. And they do their exams slightly ahead of us, so we could have learned from that horror that unfolded but we didn’t.
Will Brehm 13:46
So, the thread of this question was about who actually is compiling all this data, who’s involved in that across England?
Mary Richardson 13:56
Okay, so to make this even more complicated, in many countries, you have one examination board, you might have a national examination board. In England, we have lots of examination boards. There are literally hundreds of them that deal with all sorts of assessment. But there are three main ones that deal with A-levels and GCSEs. And it is a competition. Schools look at what the different offerings are in terms of the curriculum and the syllabus from each of those awarding bodies as they’re called, or examples. And then they choose them. And so, they may actually offer a whole -you don’t have to stay with one exam board every year. And you certainly don’t have to offer all your subjects from one example. So, schools are generally dealing with three examination boards across all their subjects. So, you might use board one to do all your history and IT, and then you might use board two to do maths and English and board three to do something else. So, you have to deal with all those different syllabi and the examinations, then what you do when your students have completed everything is everything is sent securely back to the individual examination boards. So, then in terms of like the journey of an exam, that script then comes back, it’s checked, it goes out to an examiner to be marked, and then the marks are input, and the data relating to those marks then comes back to the central system, whoever it is in those examination boards who start to process that data.
Will Brehm 15:33
Oh, wow. I mean, quite an elaborate process. I mean, I like that idea of the life of an exam and following it around and seeing who touches it and where. So, obviously, they ended up deciding not to sit the A-levels. Is that what ended up happening?
Mary Richardson 15:48
Yeah, absolutely. So, no student sat an exam this year in England.
Will Brehm 15:53
So, they basically said there’s too many things to sort out, we don’t have the time. It’s just not possible to do this in an equitable and fair way across England?
Mary Richardson 16:04
Yeah, and safe way because, of course, this is during lockdown.
Will Brehm 16:07
Exactly.
Mary Richardson 16:08
So, we were only allowed out of our houses for an hour a day. So, you know, you can’t do it.
Will Brehm 16:13
Yeah. I mean, that’s right. During this time. So, what was the plan? What was the remedy to not sitting A-levels? Did the government have a plan to fall back on?
Mary Richardson 16:24
Um, not as far as we’re aware. The way we see it is that there was kind of a lot of panicking. And then they did obviously begin to draw committees of experts together and start to say, okay, what could we do? And that’s when people like the examination boards, OFQUAL, at schools, leaders, etc., start to get together and discuss with the Department for Education, what can we do. And the best solution they could come up with was this idea of asking schools to gather whatever data they had together, and evidence they have together, and then try to predict what they felt a student might get if they’d sat the exam, from that evidence.
Will Brehm 17:13
So, is this where the center-assessed grades come in?
Mary Richardson 17:16
Yeah. So, this is why they call them center-assessed grades, because as I said, they are a prediction, but they’re based on a range of evidence. So, teachers had to look at the work students had done to date. They have to discuss it with one another, they had to think about what they would give for a predicted grade. If they’d done them, they could include data from mock examinations as well. But of course, not all schools, and not all students had completed marks by the time Covid happened, etc. so it was very inequitable in terms of the amount of data that was coming in and the type of data.
Will Brehm 17:56
Okay, so these centers are providing these different types of data that then get put into some sort of algorithm that predicts students grades, this is how it was supposed to work?
Mary Richardson 18:07
Yeah. So, what generally an awarding algorithm does, there’s nothing strange about it, it’s a mathematical model. And one of the biggest problems that was caused around this this year, is a misunderstanding of what an algorithm does. In many senses, it’s quite a simple thing. It’s a model that’s created to take lots of variables into account. A variable is anything that could have an impact on the results. So, it might be your gender, or it might be the school you went to. etc. And you feed data in one end, and the model is designed to be able to say, well, okay, looking at that big data set, all things being equal, we would expect X percent of students still to get a grade A, around about this grade this year, compared to last year. And what the algorithm does is it takes this year’s data set and all the other information we have about students, and it also compares it with data from previous series. And that’s a really important function of assessment and awarding algorithms, because they’re basing it on what we call comparable outcomes. The only way that you can reasonably safely award grades over time is to keep looking back and go, well, what happened last year, what happened the year before, what would we expect of these students? And there will always be changes each year, there will be small changes. But I mean, this year, it was a massive change in the actual outcomes. And the reason for that is because we were missing the primary important data, which was the actual exam results from the students themselves.
Will Brehm 19:48
Right, since they never were able to sit them.
Mary Richardson 19:51
Yeah, so they never sat it. So, we’ve got this big hole in the algorithm.
Will Brehm 19:56
And so, what sort of results came out of the algorithm?
Mary Richardson 19:59
Well, on the positive side, almost over 60% of the grades are what each individual student would be expecting. However, almost I think in the end, the figure came in if you round up, about 38% of students got grades that were substantially lower than they were expecting. And some of those grades were really like, I mean, there were instances of students being predicted a B or an A who got an F or things like that, which is just catastrophic.
Will Brehm 20:32
And then that impacts the choices students have for university.
Mary Richardson 20:36
Yeah, because our system is so tight for time, and you are waiting right up until that moment, there were lots of students who woke up on results day, saw their results, and the next email they got was a rejection from their first, second choice universities immediately saying, because, of course, their computer systems are also using algorithms that say, if X achieves A or B equals Yes, if not, No, so that started to happen.
Will Brehm 21:08
Oh, my gosh, the students woke up in August on A-levels day, or whatever it’s called, and they’re getting an email of their results. And then also an email from universities potentially rejecting them for these based on this algorithm that downgraded their results quite heavily.
Mary Richardson 21:26
Yeah. And the way that that system works, there were people who did say in advance, there are problems with this algorithm. And that was ignored. And one of the reasons it was ignored was because the Secretary of State for Education, he is called Gavin Williamson, he said to OFQUAL, you must keep going with this algorithm because the most important thing is to maintain the standard over time, i.e. maintain the cumulative percentages of students achieving each grade at each grade boundary. He was trying to normalize something that was completely abnormal.
Will Brehm 22:09
Exactly, I mean, that’s what it seems like. Relying on history for predicting the future sort of works in normal times but COVID is not a normal time.
Mary Richardson 22:21
No. And it’s also that thing of I think, it’s really interesting how people like our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, famously called this a mutant algorithm a couple of weeks afterwards. And that would suggest that he thinks it has some kind of artificial intelligence or some other thing behind it. No, it’s just a mathematical model. It does what you tell it to do.
Will Brehm 22:43
Right. And ‘you’ being some sort of expert group probably put it together, right. It was humans that made this algorithm and decided how to weigh it.
Mary Richardson 22:52
Human beings put this together. Absolutely right. And the one thing, I mean, I run a Master’s in educational assessment and the one thing I tell my students time and time again, and we always start from this basis is, there is no perfect assessment, there is no perfect test. We will never create one and there never will be one that is absolutely able to clearly and validly measure human knowledge or outputs or whatever it may be. And that’s simply by dint of the fact that we are human beings creating these things and we are riddled with inconsistency. So, even when we try to apply mathematical and statistical models to things, there will always be glitches in them, but they don’t need to be as big as they were this year for goodness sake.
Will Brehm 23:42
So, what ended up happening? I mean, it sounds like Boris Johnson calling it a mutant algorithm, he seemed to sour on the government’s approach to the A-levels. So, did they make any changes?
Mary Richardson 23:54
So, he just tried to blame the algorithm and then tried to return the blame back to OFQUAL. Now, OFQUAL are the regulator for examinations and qualifications in this country so they sit between the government and the awarding bodies and schools? So, they are civil servants. So they are, you know, they’re not a government department. But they have this responsibility to try and be an independent feature of expertise. And I guess, as is the way in politics, you know, it was trying to blame someone. So, the blame went back on to OFQUAL.
Will Brehm 24:31
Oh gosh, who were just doing their jobs, I would imagine.
Mary Richardson 24:36
In many senses, yeah. And I think they were doing their best. And I think one of the really interesting things about this comes back to what I said at the beginning about public perception of assessments and qualifications is that, we have a huge amount of, I don’t know, we put a huge amount of stress on them, okay. That they are somehow determining every aspect of our lives and in many cases they do but I don’t believe that that’s the right thing. I think we need to change that perception of them. Because these tests are just a tiny snapshot of one point in our lives. They’re not a determinant of how smart you are or not, or how much you do or don’t know about something. They’re an indicator to help you move somewhere else. And I think the fact that we place so much emphasis on them is part of the problem, and that fear and anxiety trickles down. And that’s what happened this year. Suddenly, there was this explosion of reaction to what had happened with the test. And the biggest problem, and I’ve written about this, with poor outcomes, the students who were disadvantaged the most who got the lowest grades come from the lowest socio-economics groups in society. And those are the students who are already disadvantaged, double, if you like, by COVID. They’re the students who, when schools locked down, didn’t have good access to the internet, don’t have so many books in their home, don’t perhaps have someone who can support them at home, don’t maybe have anywhere quiet to work. So, their efforts, trying to continue with their education has been hit at every angle. And to me, I think that’s the most disgraceful part of this, of that, what we did to those students at that point.
Will Brehm 26:24
That’s a really interesting insight about some of the real limitations of just assessment more generally, and how, in this particular moment, it’s made and seen in sharp relief. Do you think it’s going to have any impact? What has happened in the UK this year? Do you think the UK, or England I should say specifically, will begin to rethink assessment going forward? Or is that too much to hope for?
Mary Richardson 26:50
I think it’s too much to hope for given that at three o’clock this afternoon, what’s that, two hours ago, I read a news report from the Department of Education a release saying they’re already trying to plan for students to sit the full range of examinations next year. And I think one of the major things from this year was -back in 2013, we changed our high stakes testing system from a system that encompassed coursework and continuous elements of assessment across those two years, culminating in some exams at the end. And you brought all that evidence together then to have to create your A-level or GCSE grade. Now students study for two years, take a bunch of exams and when something like COVID kicks in, you’ve got nowhere to go. That’s it. You’ve put all your emphasis on one thing. So, what happens is what happened this year. That little cluster, in case anyone’s wondering, why hasn’t she said, what’s happened to the 38% of students?
Will Brehm 27:53
Yeah!
Mary Richardson 27:54
Well, what had to happen to them was over that weekend, there was this kind of infamous weekend where the Secretary of State said, well, they can appeal. And then of course, over the weekend, he realized, oh, my goodness, we’re going to have thousands and thousands of appeals, who’s going to deal with that? And he suddenly by Monday went, No, they can have their original teacher assessed and center-assessed grades.
Will Brehm 28:19
Wow. So, they just went back to the original teacher-predicted grades?
Mary Richardson 28:25
Yeah. So, what he said in the end was he said, you can either have the grade that you got after it had been standardized using the algorithm nationally, or you can have the center-assessed grade that was sent in to be put into the algorithm originally, whichever is higher.
Will Brehm 28:42
Wow. Okay, so most students have done better than they probably imagined on the A-levels in the end.
Mary Richardson 28:48
So, some students, yeah, will have done better than they imagined. But overall, what’s happened is it’s inflated the grades across the board. And we’ve got a much higher number of students getting A’s and A stars in particular. And of course, then what happened was, students had gone back to universities and said, well, hang on, I got my grades now, it’s all changed.
Will Brehm 29:10
So, the student who woke up and received the email from some university that said, sorry, we’re not going to accept your offer, are now saying, hey, look, I actually did get the offer, or I did get the grades, can I have my offer?
Mary Richardson 29:22
So, then the following week, they’re back going, hey, Mr. Williamson said I can have my original predicted grades. And then of course, the universities are going, we don’t have any more places.
Will Brehm 29:34
Right? Because we can only teach so many students based on number of professors and lecturers, and physical space in many ways.
Mary Richardson 29:43
Exactly. And particularly given what’s happening at the moment. You know, like my institution, UCL, a lot of our buildings are in a very beautiful bit of London, but they’re in really old buildings. A lot of our buildings are really difficult to set up for social distancing, for ensuring we can keep everybody safe. So, many people, myself included, we’re not doing any face-to-face teaching this term, at least. And we might not do any going forward this year, we don’t know. So, the other knock on effect has been that the admissions departments across universities in England are completely overwhelmed now. Swamped with extra students, with trying to deal with them and figure that out for this coming year.
Will Brehm 30:31
Do you think there’ll be knock on effects in future years from this particular sequence of events?
Mary Richardson 30:37
Of course, I think one of the biggest problems going forward that this government faces is how is it going to reinvoke any kind of trust in the assessment system? Students are already afraid that they’re being labeled as the Covid year. And yes, I think they are. And I think they will be going forward. This will really hold on. And I’m just trying to think what else really going forward to next year, what might happen is, the other problem is just trying to redecide on how you award the grades next year because we can’t include this year’s dataset. So then jumping a year might include it. But the other factor -and this is why this is also complicated- the students who are taking their exams next year have missed about four to six months of teaching and learning, so everything has to change for them. So, at the moment, the awarding bodies are trying to figure out, what kind of exams can we give them next year, and what will the content be, and what will teachers have to teach? The term has started, by the way, everyone’s back at school now. So, just be glad you’re not a teacher.
Will Brehm 31:48
It’s just a really amazing story because you realize how systems can be rather fragile in crises, and then how their fragility has sort of material impacts on students’ lives, and on teachers’ lives, and on professors’ lives, and on the civil servants’ lives that are making up all these different bodies that are part of this rather inflexible system that exists. I mean, it’s really an incredible story,
Mary Richardson 32:19
I think you’re absolutely right. And one of my big, kind of, campaigns for my life in assessment research is to try and help people understand assessment better, and particularly, to try and really challenge the idea that somehow it’s only externally set examinations and qualifications that matter, because actually, in terms of learning, they’re not very good assessments of anyone’s learning ever. So, anyone who’s listening to this, who thinks no, exams are the only way, my question to you is: how many times in your life since you left school or university have you ever, in employment, had to sit in a room and be quiet and write everything you know about something for two hours? Never.
Will Brehm 33:11
I’m getting nervous even just thinking about doing that.
Mary Richardson 33:14
Yes, exactly. Whereas there are so many really great ways to assess learning, and understand learning and help students stay engaged with their learning that don’t ever involve a test or a qualification, but involve helping people really understand themselves as learners, and really re-engage with education and engage with it properly, in a really substantive way. And I just want to say one other thing is that, in case your listeners think that I am really anti-testing and some kind of rabid anti-examination person, I’m not at all. I want the doctor who’s a surgeon, who is about to cut me open, to have done loads and loads of exams and passed them all, or the pilot who’s flying us to have done loads of repeated measures tests so that he can get me up and over the Atlantic or wherever. That there are tests that are so important and exams that are so important, but it’s about the right thing for the right subject and the candidate and everything we do. And I think we’ve reduced our children’s experience of education by the kind of testing and assessment we have. I think that’s a global issue too.
Will Brehm 34:31
I think that’s right. My hope is that COVID has, sort of, laid bare some of these problems with assessment in education, and our reduction of education to high stakes examinations. And so, like you, I do hope that we can reimagine what assessment looks like going forward but maybe it’s just wishful thinking. I guess we’ll just have to have you back on the show to talk about how things played out in the next year, because obviously this drama is still unfolding. Mary Richardson, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It really was a pleasure to talk today.
Mary Richardson 35:09
Thanks so much. It’s great to be here and I’d love to come back and say more. Thanks.
Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com
Related Author Publications
Rise of the machines? The evolving role of AI technologies in high-stakes assessment
Beneath the patchwork quilt: Unravelling assessment
Mentioned Resources
Predicted Grades – what do we know, and why does it matter?
What are center accessed grades and calculated grades?
How does university clearing work and what happens next?
Exam Boards: Guide to UK’s examining bodies
Related Resources
COVID-19 GCSE, AS and A-levels in 2021/22
A-level and GCSE grade inflation ‘inevitable in English system’
Students’ experiences and perceptions of studying for A-levels: Implications for enhancing students resilience
Lessons from the A-levels fiasco: Putting culture and values at the heart of policy making
How have school exams changed over the past 150 years?
British education: Still selecting and rejecting in order to rear an elite
Public failure and fiasco in education: British examinations crises of 2000-2002 and other episodes
What the world can learn from UK’s A-level grading fiasco
The COVID-19 exams fiasco across the UK: Four nations and windows of opportunity
Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com
