At a hearing of the Education Select Committee on 12 October 2022, Ofqual’s Chief Regulator, Dr Jo Saxton, stated that the fact that:
… very few grades change when marking is reviewed … is a key piece of evidence that exam grades are right …
This can be quantified by reference to Tables 1 and 2 in Ofqual’s statistics, published yesterday (15 December 2022), relating to the summer 2022 GCSE, AS and A Level exams in England: a total of 53,765 grades were changed, 0.9% of the 5,967,675 grades awarded.
Whether or not more than 50,000 grade changes are ‘very few’, or indeed few enough, is a matter of opinion; more interesting, to my mind, is Dr Saxton’s subsequent assertion that this ‘is a key piece of evidence that exam grades are right’. My understanding of these words is that Dr Saxton is saying that the fact that only 0.9% of grades were changed – and so must have been wrong when awarded – implies that the other 99.1% of grades must be right. How reassuring.
