In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland large parts of the cohort that will enter undergraduate courses in the autumn took A level exams in May and June this year.
SQA results day has already happened in Scotland – as we will see is very instructive for those in other UK nations.
The operative word here is “exams” – after two years of grades being awarded on (moderated) teacher assessments, 2022 saw a return to the more traditional (and arguably less effective) method of assessing what students can do by sitting them at a desk on their own in the gym for three hours.
Will these students have learned more? We’ll never know from the exam results – after two years of grades being based on attainment we are returning to a system of grading to a curve. Results will reflect a staging post between the criterion-based 2022 results and the grade distributions that lasted largely unchanged between 2010 and 2019s.
