The entire entrance process pretty much uses grades as the first filter - changing that would be a huge amount of work not to mention a lot of people will have conditional offers that are expressed in terms of these grades.

So picking a course at random (Physics at Edinburgh) requires: SQA Highers: AAAA - AAAB or A Levels: AAA - ABB

https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/undergraduate/degrees/index.ph...

However, the governing principal of Cambridge University, for example, is that all operations are done at a human scale, and I think when you factor in the large numbers of staff whose labour the Universities have access to, it becomes possible.

For a group of applicants for Computer Science at a Cambridge college, for example, you would have a Director of Studies and one or two other staff ranking around 20 applicants for half as many places. (The ratio of applicants to places is much higher prior to interview.) It is a tractable problem to solve, even if for other institutions the process is scaled by 2x/3x (4:1 / 6:1, up to Nottingham’s reputed 13:1) or maybe even more.

An idea we mooted over dinner last night was for these applicant rankings to be fed to UCAS — the University and Colleges Admissions Service — and for UCAS to combine these rankings with the applicant preferences to fill up each course from the top down. No need for grades, just use the desirability metric provided by the institutions.

Grades themselves are a strange beast. By their nature they are different to raw marks. A grade speaks to your ability as part of the entire cohort of examined pupils in that subject. Without the exam, taken nationally under examination conditions, it just doesn’t seem to make sense to refer to grades.

If we called them “exam grades” perhaps the folly of trying to assign them to pupils, who have not actually taken an exam, would be clearer.

(I speak with no real authority, but I am a high school teacher in England.)

There's still a substantial bias in offers towards public schools, but a lot of that is because such schools are selective like the universities, actual student ability does still matter and better schools still improve student ability more, and there's a strong self-selection of candidates for top universities (a lot of people who might get accepted for oxbridge don't apply because they don't think they have a chance) as opposed to old-school elitism in the application process. (Not that all of the above factors are actually fair from a grand socioeconomic viewpoint, but they are reasonably fair in as much as the university judging the merits of the applicants it gets).

It's also a single grade per subject, so the university /employer will usually have 3-5 grades to work with, as well as the broader picture built up from the personal statement/cover letter and interview.

The current system isn't coping well with COVID-19 but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

The current system is simple, and that means it can be seen to be fair. If studying X at university Y needs grades AAB that's easy to understand and you know it's not biased.

I much prefer that to the American system where every university has an opaque system that purports to look at a complete picture of the student then mysteriously picks white students over Asian students with better grades and can't explain why.

If only it were that simple. Universities often also take in to account the outcome of in-person interviews which are inherantly biased.

Some courses like Medicine do have interviews at institutions that usually don't interview.

You're right that grades are reductive, but the alterntive isn't more of the same information.

Fundamentally it's a hard problem: the admissions require more information than is available. But...

> All this fiasco does is demonstrate how unnecessarily reductive the whole concept is.

...there never really was enough information. This is an important factor IMO. The system has always been unfair, now it's less fair and in a colder, more obvious , more systematic way that resonates with the current political climate around technology. Politically it's hard for this government to get away with standing by a policy that adversely affects poor students in the same way it would have been hard for a left-wing government to institute the current fiscal policy.

>kids

Nit: almost all of them are now legally adults. At university they can look forward to this twilight age where they are treated as an adult when it's about financial obligations and treated as a child when it's their institutions forcing policy upon them.

But much middle class [1] and some working class Tory support still believes in the social status dream, and this fiasco has directly undermined that narrative.

The party is getting huge heat from its base over this, not just because of their future prospects, but because some of them are now wondering if "Work hard and get ahead" has ever been true for them.

[1] Note for the US - in the UK "middle class" specifically means "Highly educated professionals with significant cultural and political capital" not just "People with a degree making decent money."

But it's not as simple as that, either. Coincidentally, I just read an obituary of John Hume, who was born into poverty in Derry and rose -- through education and hard work -- to become a leading politician and a Nobel prize winner.

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/john-hume-o...

> It's an outright lie, because the reality has always been "Go to the right school and have the right parents and get ahead."

There have been and will always be exceptions, cherry picking a few of these is a form of straw man.

I think it's a shame this was the exception rather than the norm.

I watched the news broadcasts when the results were announced. There were TV journalists at schools in deprived areas interviewing students before the grades were released, with the journalists giving dour warnings about the impending problems they expected. When the results were announced the students were leaping about with joy, hugging and celebrating, it was like a world cup win. The journalists didn't seem to know what to say. back in the studio the best the presenter could do was mutter that "I'm sure we'll find some students that were disappointed later".

I'm sure they did.