Is our grading system fit for purpose?

An 18 year old, let's call him 'Teenager A', collects his A level results. He has received a 'B' for maths. This is because he achieved 184/300. He would have needed 185, 1 more mark, to have received an 'A'.

Also collecting his results is 'Teenager B'. He has also received a 'B' for maths. This is because he achieved 151/300. If he had achieved 150/300, 1 less mark, he would have achieved a 'C'.

This is how grade boundaries work, and many A level maths students in 2019 (the last pre-Covid cohort to sit externally marked exams) would have found themselves comparing their total marks and being part of this scenario.

Separated as they are by 34 marks, and at opposite ends of the same grade boundary, 'Teenager A' clearly has more in common with A grade maths students than he has with 'Teenager B'. 'Teenager B' has more in common with C grade maths students than he has with 'Student A'. Yet, unhelpfully, they have received the same grade.

Any system which awards a definitive final number or letter to a sentient being should be scrutinised for its efficacy as it seems to be an absurdly facile and cruel habit. The current system in the UK, which has a 9 point numerical scale for GCSE, a 9 point letter scale at A level and only a 4 point scale with bizarre classifications at undergraduate level, does not differentiate student performance effectively.

This is the case before we even dig into the thorny depths of examiner errancy. A young English teacher, keen to impress his superiors with his efforts to understand the GCSE English Literature mark-schemes remembers his train journey to the angular, lego-style plot that is London's Russel Square. He had been successful in his application to become an examiner, and was on his way to the first training meeting. He had spent hours reading the sample students' work. He had dutifully entered onto the exam-board pro-forma, in spidery, fine-line biro, his justifications for the marks he had awarded, and the meticulous detail of these notes posed as the very manifestation of diligence.

Seated near him on the train, and seemingly compelled to out-do each other in the loudness of their joy at having found each other, were two ladies who, it quickly emerged, were also due to attend the very same training session as him. It also quickly emerged that they had both, in their Friday night delusion, believed that they could bend space and time (the training was on a Saturday), decided to use the train journey to complete the pre-training tasks. Trying to plate-spin the balancing of coffees whilst swapping school stories and shuffling the blank paperwork meant that neither of them was able to marshal their concentration towards actually completing their pro-forma, let alone reading the students' work, before the train pulled into St. Pancras. It was as if they gradually became twinned in their acceptance that the work would simply not be done, that the likelihood of it being done was inversely proportionate to the time left before the train arrived, and, worryingly, that they then drew strength from each other's knowledge of the other's hopelessness.

Once in the training session itself, he noticed, with that same dismay of students who have invested hours into a homework that is never collected in, that the pre-training work was never going to be submitted or scrutinised. Each of the sample student's pieces was discussed, with the delegates volunteering as much or as little information as they wished. Around him, teachers' eyes were furtively skim-reading the sample student work whilst they leant heavily, wrist to elbow, over the empty sections of their pro-formas where, on his, there sat, perkily, detailed biro notes.

Another teacher remembers a year in the nineties that one of her English Literature A Level students had her grade lifted from a "B" to an "A", following a UK-wide review into why that subject's grades had been so low. She had, however, by that point, lost what should have been her place at Oxford. Another teacher remembers the review of marking of an A level Theatre Studies student producing an extra 17 marks on one question, also lifting her grade from a"B" to an "A". Like the English Literature student, this girl ended up with 4 "A" grades, and neither would ever experience the joy of opening an envelope on results day to see a clean sweep of top grades.

The exam boards try to ensure that a national standard is applied, but examiner errancy is real. It happens both ways, of course, as the English teacher whose students enjoyed grades beyond all expectations one year will testify. Or not, of course.

So, once our students have suffered the lottery of hoping to win a diligent examiner who commits to the workload of the training (a sack of exam papers was once found at the bottom of a canal) before then applying the mark-scheme correctly and to a national standard, they face their years of study being whittled down to a number or grade between 1 and 9 (GCSE, with the "9" being highest) or A*-E (A level). I'm not even going to mention the degree classifications which seem to belong more coherently to an episode of Blake's 7. Is this distillation of our students' widely differing abilities sensible? Or fit for purpose? How can an employer or further education provider possibly know that 'Teenager A' has achieved 34/300 marks, a fairly significant 11%, more than 'Teenager B'? They can't. So what is the answer? And surely it needs to be a bit more robust and sustainable than bunging an "A*" at the very top of the A level grade scale (2010), or introducing STEP tests for universities to tweezer apart the very able from the very, very able.

Is it time for employers, further and higher education providers to bear the ethical brunt of deciding which young person is most suited for which role? The many measures used to assess the effectiveness of schools (what percentage of GCSE students achieved 4-9? 5-9? What about A-B at A level? What about how much value the school has added to a young person who was expected to achieve x based on their prior attainment but actually achieves y?) would need to change. One also imagines the Ofsted bureaucrats gleefully boiling urns at the thought of having to design yet another system for quantifying the efficiency of people (they have just decided that they would like to also judge schools on the students' "cultural capital"). One has sympathy for the significant re-training programme that would move exam boards away from schools and into post-16 or post-18 institutions, and, of course, one sympathises for the victims of yet another overhaul to another system.

But one could also imagine the joy seeping back into the classroom as our young people move away from having their target grades advertised on their lanyards (this has happened), learn freely rather than becoming trained for specific exams, enjoy a happier autonomy with subjects that do not end in qualifications, lose the fear of mock exams and, eventually, demonstrate their knowledge to their future placements with an honesty that is not subject to the cold whims of examiners and exam boards but is instead measured by the people most invested in placing our young people in the right places.

Is it time to remove the middle-men?