Will emergency measures prove to have been the key to fairer admissions, based on potential more than performance?

A slightly shorter version of this blog originally appeared on Wonkhe as part of its ‘Build Back Higher’ series of short articles about the potential positive impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on UK higher education.   

In the face of the difficult logistics of feeding his troops, Napoleon looked for innovations to ensure his forces could carry supplies that would remain edible over lengthy campaigns. As a result, margarine was developed as a substitute for the more perishable butter and the canning process was invented. Without war, we would not have baked beans.

As the clichés have it, desperate times call for desperate measures and necessity is the mother of invention.

The pandemic has undoubtedly driven a host of inventive approaches to teaching, assessment and much else that we may want to keep. But surely no one will ever hail the exams debacle of 2020 and the centre-assessed grades that followed as a welcome novelty?

Maybe we should. One day, we might look back on this cohort as the experiment we never could have done otherwise. 2020 may be the year in which almost everyone got the grade they had the potential to get, rather than what they scored on the day of an exam, when they were ill or the exam room was too hot, or when they were fine, but their examiner’s dog had just died.

As Denis Sherwood (@nookophile) has shown, almost half of all exam grades in some subjects are wrong and even Ofqual’s head, Dame Glenys Stacey has acknowledged that exam results have a fuzziness of a grade either way.

Meanwhile good teachers know their pupils and understand what they’re capable of at their best. Surely students should be admitted to university based on what they might achieve if given a chance rather than as a prize-giving ceremony for one day’s performance.

I’d like to think that after this year we will revisit Level 3 assessments (that’s A-Level and their equivalents, but it applies to other levels too, for that matter) and ask whether summative exams tell us what we need to know in order to allocate places in higher education fairly. We’ll reconsider the role of continual assessment and, rather than dismiss teachers’ professionalism, we’ll work harder to eliminate any bias in their judgements (because it’s not as if examiners are immune to bias).

As a result of pandemic panic grading, this year’s entry cohort may turn out to be the most diverse yet and if their learning proves to be as successful as other years, it will be hard to argue why student recruitment shouldn’t take more account of context and less of exam results.

For further reading on this topic I recommend Mark Corver‘s brilliant analysis of admissions driven by predicted grades in HEPI’s recent collection of essays Where next for university admissions?

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Robert Jenrick was the cabinet member given the unenviable task of doing the media rounds today on the morning after the UK passed the grim milestone of 100,000 Covid-related deaths.

His exculpatory approach was to blame a lot on ‘the Kent variant’ as if the UK had simply been very unlucky. It’s worth considering the extent to which the UK made its own luck.

Let’s contrast our bad luck – being the crucible of a highly transmissible and possibly more deadly strain – with the good luck of, say, winning the lottery.

If no one buys a ticket (ie. no one has the virus), no one will win (no new strain will develop).

If a lot of tickets are bought, it’s more likely someone will win, ie. a widespread virus makes it more likely there’ll be a genetic mutation and so new strains will develop.

If one individual buys a large percentage of the lottery tickets, it’s more likely that, if there is a winner, it will be them, ie. if the UK has widespread virus cases, it is more likely that a new strain will emerge here than, say, in New Zealand.

It’s no surprise that significant news strains emerged in the UK, Brazil and South Africa – countries all with relatively high numbers of cases. There was no guarantee this would happen, but failure to control and contain made the bad luck more likely.

The failure to understand these basic statistical and genetic facts is why the arrant, arrogant pigheadedness of prominent lockdown sceptics (who I won’t do the service of naming) is so dangerous.

A key failing of the UK Govt was to approach the pandemic as if it were okay to have a manageable number of ‘lottery tickets’ so long as we “flatten the curve!”, “protect the NHS!”, wait for herd immunity or for the heroes to ride over the hill with a time-reversing vaccine.

The Government knew the risks of not minimising the numbers: even if SAGE advisors were not warning about the possibility of new strains (which I doubt), you couldn’t miss other epidemiologists shouting about the probability.

The UK was unlucky to be hit by the Kent strain, but our approach made those conditions more likely and more damaging. Jenrick did not acknowledge this nor that the situation was dire long before the Kent strain nor that the response to that strain was more of the same.

It is barely credible that we still do not have comprehensive testing, tracing and isolation procedures and proper amenities and incentives to enable compliance.

Instead, we see the result of Boris Johnson’s chancer mentality – bluster through till it’s all okay in the end – and his belief in heroes who save the day rather than collective action for the common good.

That is my sad valediction for the hundred thousand in this country, the millions around the world and for the many more who will follow until we do what Johnson for so long exhorted us to do – to take back control. This time though, it means something. 

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