Well, somebody has cocked up badly. When you know more or less how they did it, it suggests either that they have lazily accepted a proposal from some technocrat at Offtest or whatever it's called, or left it to Cummings. No competent politician has been anywhere near it.
What they have done either implicitly or explicitly is to use teachers' grade forecasts, mock exam results, and any coursework marks to derive a grade. In doing so they have made adjustments directed at ending up with their own forecast grade distribution - a kind of calibration, which seems logical enough unless you want the average grade to go up by around 2 grades this year.
In deciding whose grades get reduced and by how much, they have considered the previous SATS results and school averages of each local cohort. So some entrants have had much bigger adjustments than others. The worse the school, the greater the chance that the arbitrary grade will be below what they are shooting for.
Looked at from the point of view of a student who has an offer based on grades that they know they have to work towards and achieve to take up the place, when they end up with grades that are both below the offer and significantly worse than forecast and or mock results, they are going to feel cheated - justly in my view.
You can't have a grade for a test result when there has been no test, and when the applicant has simply not had the opportunity to work for and achieve a higher grade.
The current row was totally predictable, and would have been foreseen by a competent team applying some thought.
Usual comment. The fish rots from the head, and we know who that is. If there was any justice, Williamson would go and his perfidious, decadent, oafish boss with him.
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