At present, Victorian students are still due to complete their VCE examinations in late October and November. However, the current COVID-19 situation in Victoria means that the Victorian government should have a clear plan in place in case this cannot happen. I don’t want to see a knee-jerk response to events when it comes to such an important issue.
Fortunately for us, but unfortunately for them, we have the examples of England and Scotland to draw upon. Both countries cancelled their May/June A Level and Higher exams (equivalent to VCE) and both countries initially had the same plan as to how to replace them.
Put simply, teachers would award grades and produce a ranking of students. This would then be mapped onto previous distributions of exam grades for each school and moderated, usually downwards. The moderation process was necessary to prevent grade inflation. For all the right reasons, when teachers assign a grade, they tend to err on the side of being generous.
Bowing to pressure, Scotland eventually gave up on the moderation process and just awarded the teacher grades. This is unfair on past and future cohorts of students and on those whose teachers saw it as their duty to predict grades as accurately as possible. It also creates a nightmare for university admissions,
England stuck with the moderation but waited until the traditional date to release these results to schools. Although there will be an appeals process, university admissions are well under way and so any successful appeals will come too late.
As Sam Freedman explains, a lot of this could have been prevented if results had been released early to schools – after all, there were no exams to mark – and schools were given the opportunity to ‘pre-appeal’ some results prior to the official release date:
There are two groups for whom moderation would clearly not have worked or gone wrong. The first is small cohorts of 2-3 students in a school studying a particular subject. Such small groups cannot be feasibly moderated and it seems they just received the grades the teachers awarded which are likely to be inflated. Given the disproportionate number of such classes in independent schools, this creates an advantage,
The second group are the outliers. If you are the best chemistry student your school has seen for several years then moderation will not reflect this and you will be moderated down to a grade equivalent to previous high performing students at your school. This will affect students in disadvantaged schools more.
In Victoria, we already have the machinery of a moderation system in place. Students sit School Assessed Coursework (SACs) in most subjects. These are designed by individual schools and then essentially a student’s rank is reported to the VCAA, the examining body. Small cohorts are required to team up with cohorts in other schools and be ranked across those schools, removing an issue found in England.
One problem is that, for reasons best known to the VCAA, many SACs are required to be very different in form from the exam in that subject. Science students, for instance, have to do an experiment and then make some kind of a poster about it. However, there should still be enough quality information available, particularly if the VCAA ask schools to produce the best ranking they can by allowing them to factor in other non-SAC assessments if it is necessary to do so.
What about those outliers? We should definitely follow Freedman’s model of pre-appeals. As soon as any decision to cancel exams is known, the process should begin. Schools should be given a deadline to return rankings and the moderated scores should be fed back to them as soon as they can be generated. Schools can then provide evidence to challenge scores that have been moderated down.
Depending on just where we are with social distancing, this evidence could include a small number of students still sitting the exam. This could perhaps involve just those students going after the top scores.
What is clear is that cancelling exams causes problems of fairness. Those who propose a permanent move to an exam-free system need to explain how those problems will be overcome.
Update 18 August: England have now followed Scotland and abandoned moderation in favour of grades estimated by teachers.
Filling the pail 
As you might expect statistically, small schools throw up all sorts of anomalies. About once every five years there’s a motivated cohort which do anomalously well and 4/5 students achieve a top band. In other years the norm is the majority of students achieve the lower bands. Similarly with change of teacher and teaching practice. The school gets a new teacher and a class does well. Independent exams are the fair, valid and best way to grade students.
Agree that independent exams are the best way of assessing students. Calls to go for an exam free system must justify themselves in the context of the mess caused in England with its teacher grades/moderation system, because that system has not allowed for small groups or for outliers, and cannot be seen as just.