An end to grade inflation

Nigel Williams, 9 May 2013

The summer exam season is underway. GCSE’s are perennially subject to complaints about grade inflation. Can anything be done about it?
Exams get easier the harder people work and the better teachers get at teaching. It can be good news when average grades rise from year to year. The worry is that some employers are discovering worrying low skill-levels, beginning with literacy and numeracy, among job applicants with strong exam results. Are the criticisms justified or are we guilty of suspecting that standards were at their highest when we took our our exams and have deteriorated ever since?

There is one way to find out. Most information about the syllabus, exam and coursework conditions, specimen questions and marking schemes is readily available.  Only the specimen answer scripts are missing. If an employer could see those, it would be straightforward to find a standard to meet the job requirements and then to look for someone with that grade or higher. Other disciplines call it ‘calibration’. The most useful scripts would be the ones that just scraped up to a higher grade. It would suggest that there would be few if any people earning that same grade  but for worse answers.
Obviously, there is variety even within grades. Ill health or a lucky guess at which topics to revise could put grades down or up. A medium grade could be the result of uniform medium performance or a mixture of good and bad. Candidates, schools and parents are always liable to argue about particular results. No exam will give a perfect, permanent assessment of a candidate’s grasp of a subject. But a few specimen scripts will give a fair idea of what standard earned which result. Syllabuses broaden and get narrower again. Time-limits and conditions change. We are asking quite enough of exam boards to maintain internal consistency in their exams within a single year. Consistency between years matters much less if we can tell for ourselves how much the standard is changing.