Moderated teacher assessment is the answer!

Is it any wonder education unions have "accused the government of a dereliction of duty" over its decision to go ahead with next year`s exams (Star, 12/10/20)? Not only does it make the exams even more unfair than is usually the case, it displays total ignorance of what goes on in England`s state schools, especially those in the more deprived areas, and a lack of appreciation of the anxiety such decisions cause both teachers and students. As the DfE thinks the current system of examinations is the "best and fairest way" of judging students` performance, it is hardly surprising that it cannot devise a "plan B" which only involves mock exams in "controlled conditions". This begs the question as to what sort of "uncontrolled" conditions do they think state schools normally carry out their internal exams! Having "mock exams" as the only back up is obviously another mistake, but hardly surprising in view of the exams taken in most private schools as a way of avoiding A-levels: aren`t these Pre-U exams just like "mocks" in that they are set and marked by their teachers? No wonder 75% get top grades! Williamson and his team clearly cannot understand how teachers use "mocks"in the real world, either to give encouragement to students or to provide extra incentive for greater effort, or how "specimen papers" cannot take into consideration the disruption many students have already faced since going back to school. Pushing back the start of the exams by three weeks, according to Ofqual`s chief regulator, Glenys Stacey speaking to the BBC, will "be particularly beneficial for those who have more time away from school than others"! How on earth could anyone, let alone the person in charge of exams for our state school pupils, reach that conclusion? That could only be the case if all the other exam entrants, who missed few lessons because of the virus, and who suffered no gaps in their learning because of ample modern technology, were placed in isolation cells without books or tablets for those three weeks, to stop them having all that extra time for revision. Adding to all the unfairness is the norm-referencing which determines the number of top grades to be awarded after the papers have been marked. As long as that exists, and clearly doesn`t in the Pre-U exams, the exam system remains flawed. The government needs to have faith in the teaching profession, and go for moderated teacher assessment on a permanent basis/ As the DfE thinks the current system of examinations is the "best and fairest way of judging students` performance", is is hardly surprising that it cannot devise a "plan B" which only involves "mock exams in controlled conditions" (Pupils will sit strict mock exams as "plan B" to prevent rerun of A-level and GCSE chaos, 10/10/20). Williamson and his team clearly cannot understand how teachers use "mocks", either to give encouragement to students or to provide extra incentive for greater effort, or how "specimen papers" cannot take into consideration the disruption many students have already faced since going back to school. As the editorial states, "staged assessments, moderated to ensure fairness" does make much more sense (By failing to plan for next year`s exams, ministers are letting pupils down, 10/10/20).Teachers need to be told to prepare pupils for another year of exam-free assessment, and to set assessment exercises such as "mocks", classroom tests, and research or homework tasks which can be marked and sent to examiners for checking, and verification or amendment of the proposed grades. The need to avoid the use of an algorithm to enforce norm-referencing on state schools` examinations should be obvious to Ofqual, and perhaps even to Williamson, but no doubt private schools will still manage to dominate the so-called "top" universities with grade inflation allowed to continue unabated in their Pre-U exams.