The whole reason we have a controversy over this is that the teachers were asked to give predicted grade to their pupils, and in aggregate their predictions were improbably high compared to other recent year groups.
Also these days I'd heavily debate your premise- i think exams are more of a test of memory and being able to game the system especially in the UK where you are given a test bank of past papers which are almost identical to exam papers. I was a terrible student until 2 weeks prior to the final exam where I grinded maybe 6 or 7 past papers and at least 3 out of 10 questions were carbon copied from previous papers. I would not be able to approach a problem that fit outside of the structure of the problems in the exam papers in the real world.
Which sounds like continuous, standardised, externally applied examination. Leaves rather little room for individuality in teaching techniques or pace...
> How it currently works is that these types of assessments are treated as second class citizens which i guess was really my frustration.
In as much as these things exist at all, they are part of the teaching method and aren't in any way standardised.
I'm not saying your proposal is wrong, but it would lead to a much more rigid system.
You're trying to work out who is a good fit from very limited data. You can run some practical tests - whiteboard, paper exam - but that doesn't take into account daily variations in performance, and it disadvantages outliers who may have very useful skills or character traits that don't tick the usual boxes.
The problem may be more that education is seen an industrial production line with authoritarian control of outcomes than as a personal development tool. Early apprenticeships and interning opportunities with real tasks to solve and real challenges to face might be better at developing a broader range of talents in context.
I'm currently studying a part-time undergrad in CS at the Open Uni and even they have failed to provide an alternative to exams this year. You would think if any educational body would be prepared, it would be the Open Uni. If an institution that prides itself on distance learning can't make it happen, lord knows what's happening at traditional schools.
Projects sounds like another word for coursework.
Judging on prepared speeches doesn't sound fair at all, unless it's a course on public speaking.
There's a reason things are as they are.
> Maybe continuous in-class real-time questioning to see if the student is keeping up?
So when a student asks a question in class, they have to do so in the knowledge that they may be negatively judged for it? There's a reason learning and assessment are at least somewhat separated.
However, teachers naturally want to motivate their best performers (what teacher would grade so that the best student in their class would get a B- ?) and school administrators have a practical incentive to inflate the grades. This means that subjective evaluation of speeches and projects (especially if you're comparing them within a single institution, not to what projects and speeches are considered good and bad in other institutions) and continuous real-time questioning won't lead to an evaluation that's useful to determine where a student stands in comparison to other students in other institutions, and furthermore, they are going to be optimistic. A relevant headline is "40% of A-level results were downgraded from teachers' predictions." - however, that seems normal and expected to me; do we have the equivalent numbers from last year, comparing the teacher's prodictions with the actual exam results?
Technically you might consider taking the "local evaluation" and make an adjustment for the institution, but this is exactly what they attempted to do this year in UK, and the whole original article is about the limitations of this approach.
Also, fraud and cheating is a problem. There are many approaches that have proven to result in somewhat effective remote teaching and learning, however, we don't have good solutions for effective remote evaluation (this is a problem that I personally experienced this spring in my work). For the pre-COVID remote education, the only thing that IMHO worked was a network of in-person proctoring centers supervising the testing process and identity of the people who are taking the test (otherwise people will get others to take the test for them, it's not a hypothetical issue) or, in certain cases, a privacy invasive and labor intensive online proctoring.
IMHO it makes all sense to separate instruction and teaching from final evaluation and certification, due to the unavoidable conflicts of interest and misleading results that happen otherwise. This is also what UK has chosen as its policy - but as they found out, this means that they can't have a meaningful evaluation if they skip the actual evaluation part this year.
It's about 39%. The problem is that in a normal year, everyone comes out an exam with a rough sense of how they've done. If you come out feeling like you bombed it then seeing your B become a C is not going to be a surprise.
The issue is that "predicted grades" are not expectation values in a statistical sense, if they were then teachers would be pretty consistently doing a bad job of forecasting them.
A predicted grade is based on an assessment of ability: "What do I think little Johnny is capable of when he takes his exam in however months time". Now in theory, results can be both better and worse than that prediction. In practice, the fact that the scale is closed ended (and many more are near the top than the bottom) means that it is more common for the variability of exam performance to lead to slightly worse performance. In other words, more pupils underperform their ability based prediction on exam day than outperform it.
So there is nothing inherently wrong with reducing grades from the centre assessed grades, many newspaper headlines are treating this like the CAG is the "real" grade that is somehow being taken away.
If you look at this table: https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1293979033458417668/photo/1 you can see that the overall grade distribution produced by the model for this year is similar to that for previous years. Not surprising since that is by design.
The problem here is that Ofqual is treating grade inflation like it's the worth possible thing that could happen and has essentially sacrificed individual fairness on the altar of aggregate consistency.
Ranking students might be roughly correct, but many of the rankings in the middle where students are very similar are basically random.
Imagine there are two schools: A typical small private school, which normally achieves high grades, and a larger state school which normally achieves a broader spread. Normally the highest individual grade is achieved at the private school.
The historic average of the private school might be A-star, A, B, but predictions were A-star, A, A. Rankings are correct to the individuals' abilities. "Actual" or "deserved" standard could be A, A, A or A, A, B.
The state school's top 3 grades are normally A, A, B. This year you have a student who's capable (and likely) to achieve an A*. Teacher predictions for the top three grades are therefore A-star, A, A. Rankings are still correct according to ability.
Across the country the top 6 grades are normally A-star, A, A, A, B, B.
The private school uses the teacher predictions, because it has a small class: A-star, A, A.
We're now left with only A, B, B available to give to the top students at the state school, so the A-star, A, A assessed students are awarded A, B, B. Every one is a downgrade.
But it's OK, because across the country there's no grade inflation.
I've always thought those things were better than exams before remote learning regardless and many school boards weigh them similarly in aggregate. Testing was always a bit of a flawed model pandemic or not.