Predicting A-level grades accurately ’near-impossible task’

Predicting A-level grades is a 'near-impossible task', and the system needs to be overhauled to reduce inaccuracies that can lead to unfair disadvantages for some students, says new research from the UCL Institute of Education. For the working paper published today (Tuesday 11 August 2020), academics from UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO) and Oxford Brookes Business School studied data from 238,898 pupils' GCSE performance to see whether they could accurately predict their subsequent A-level results. For the first time, they found that even by removing any opportunity for bias - and running additional checks on pupils' gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status - they could only predict one in four pupils' best three A-levels correctly. The researchers say the disruption COVID-19 has brought on formal examinations this year - with pupils instead assigned calculated grades by their teachers, which are then moderated by exam boards - highlights a wider problem with the general UK system. The paper also shows that high-achieving comprehensive school pupils are more likely to be under-predicted compared to their grammar and private school counterparts. Among high achievers, where under-prediction is most common, the team found 23% of comprehensive school pupils were underpredicted by two or more grades compared to just 11% of grammar and private school pupils. One of the paper's authors, and CEPEO Director, Professor Lindsey Macmillan (UCL Institute of Education), said: "This research raises the question of why we use predicted grades at such a crucial part of our education system.