EPI’s David Robinson and Sam Tuckett explore 2022’s A level, BTEC and T level results.
Summer exams in 2022 were the first to go ahead since 2019. However, although exams may be back, it is far from business as usual as this year’s students faced yet another unique series of challenges. Most students finishing 16-19 study in 2022 will have been among the cohort that were awarded teacher assessed GCSE grades in 2020, meaning that most of these students won’t have taken a formal exam before this year.
This cohort also faced severe disruption and will have lost out on a lot of face-to-face teaching time throughout 2020 and 2021. To account for this widespread disruption, a number of adjustments were made to exams such as more notice of exam content, allowing formula sheets and giving students greater choice over which exam questions they answered. More significantly, this year’s grading distributions were designed to be somewhere between pre-pandemic levels, and those of 2021, when teacher assessed grading led to record levels of high grades. This represents the first step in the government’s plan to gradually return exam results to pre-pandemic levels and avoid a large drop in results for a single cohort.
