Global exam disruption continues into its second year

The disruption of school-leaving exams which determine entry to university is now entering its second year as countries suffer second and third waves of COVID-19 infections. It has an effect well beyond the individual country’s exams as universities around the world try to assess the varied impact for international student admissions and attempts to be fair to students.

But the experience of last year’s cycle of school-leaving exams around the world, and the likelihood that COVID-19 related disruptions will continue to affect teaching and learning for the current cohort, have led to even greater reluctance this year to suspend crucial national examinations, with many countries believing there is little fair alternative for university admissions.

Japan has pushed ahead with its two-day standardised university entrance exam from 16 January involving some 530,000 students this month despite a new state of emergency being declared in parts of the country including Tokyo due to the latest COVID-19 flare-up.

Students who test positive or are ill on the day will be given a second chance to sit the exam at the end of the month. Last year Japan’s exams were held a week before the lockdown at the virus epicentre in Wuhan, China, was declared on 23 January 2020.

South Korea late last year brought in special lockdown measures affecting all populations not just exam-takers two weeks before its all-important university entrance exam known as the Suneung.

The exam had been postponed by two weeks to give students more time to prepare after disruptions to schooling during the first COVID-19 wave in March-April 2020. But the government was determined to press ahead.

China held its national university entrance exam or gaokao for 10.7 million students in July after a one-month postponement, with heightened health measures. Vietnam also went ahead with its National High School Graduation Examination in August last year after a six-week delay.

But notably Indonesia, Pakistan and India cancelled school-leaving exams, basing results on students’ past performance, but producing knock-on effects for university admissions timetables and much stress for students and their families.

Postpone, scale back or cancel?

The picture has been varied around the world. Several countries in Europe such as the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and some cantons of Switzerland cancelled all school-leaving exams, while Denmark, Israel and Austria scaled back their exams. Italy held only oral exams, cancelling written tests.

Globally, the International Baccalaureate organisation and Cambridge International, which administers International A-Level exams, cancelled their exams worldwide last year. But an online test was developed for the US Advanced Placement (AP) qualification taken by students in the US and abroad.

“Some countries chose to postpone [exams], perhaps because they did not have alternative mechanisms in place,” said Abigail Jones, head of international research at the UK National Recognition Information Centre (NARIC), an agency for recognising international qualifications and skills. “Whereas others replaced it with school-based assessment, satisfied that they had an alternative that could work.”

But university admissions offices “are also starting to think about the 2021 exams because [there are] so many countries where students would have missed at least a hundred days of school and they want to know how that’s been accounted for,” she added.

“That’s going to be one of the key issues for the next round of exams,” said Jodie Duffy, UK NARIC’s information development manager, who tracks school closures and exam disruption around the world. “In 2020 it all happened very quickly and there were a lot of national lockdowns around the same time, but now it’s getting to the stage where experiences are quite varied between countries and even within countries.”

New exam cancellations for 2021

The United Kingdom has been the first to announce this month that its A-Level exams, normally held in June, will be cancelled for the second year in a row this year.

However, Cambridge International, which administers International A-Levels around the world, says it is going ahead with exams. It previously aligned itself with UK A-Levels, cancelling international A-Level exams in 2020 at the same time the UK cancellation was announced.

“We work with schools in 160 countries and most of our schools are telling us they want to run exams in June 2021 and expect to be able to do so in line with guidance from their national and regional authorities,” Cambridge International said in a statement issued on 5 January.

After cancelling the June 2020 exams, “in November 2020 we held our exam series as planned. Most schools told us they wanted to run exams where it was safe to do so, and where they had the necessary permissions from government and health authorities,” said Kevin Ebenezer, global recognitions manager at Cambridge International, in comments to University World News.

“The series took place successfully and we did not run an alternative to exams,” he said. “We are preparing for exams in March 2021 for students in India and June 2021 [worldwide] to go ahead.”

The International Baccalaureate (IB) organisation based in Geneva, which caters for some of the most internationally mobile students in over 140 countries, issued a brief statement on 6 January that it was currently talking to school leaders, teachers and government regulators “regarding their local context, restrictions and the impact of COVID-19 on their students”.

It is surveying schools on whether they feel they can run the May exams safely this year. “We need to capture a full picture of the situations our schools globally are facing,” the IB organisation said in an email to head teachers.

However, for this year, assessments that involve algorithms to standardise scores have been abandoned after their controversial introduction last year by some major examination boards, including for the IB and UK and international A-Levels.

The latter had to abandon algorithm-assisted grading brought in as a contingency measure after an outcry from teachers, students and parents, while the IB organisation became embroiled in a large number of appeals and litigation as students fought to secure university places.

Universities faced considerable uncertainty as a large number of prospective international students’ results were being contested, adding to existing uncertainties over whether students would be able to travel to take up places.

Algorithms abandoned

At the time, the IB organisation justified using the algorithm as “the fairest approach we can take for all our students”.

It used a system that included a student’s grades for assignments, teachers’ predictive grades and grades from past students at their school to predict scores had the pandemic not disrupted in-person exams. But the algorithm, apparently devised by a still unnamed education data analysis organisation, created a huge outcry when many students received much lower scores than they were expecting.

Around 94 schools new to the IB lacked sufficient data, so grades were adjusted to fit the past performance of students from other schools which may have had different circumstances.

It resulted in many lost places at universities around the world and an online petition attracting more than 25,000 signatures, calling on the IB organisation to “take a different approach with their grading algorithm and to make it fairer”.

Several teachers have called on the IB organisation for full disclosure of its model, how it was designed and tested and imposed on an entire cohort of some 160,000 IB students globally without any pilot studies or information for students and parents.

Hina Hashmi, vice principal at Istanbul International Community School, said via Twitter that she had been teaching the IB for 10 years but 2020 was “the first year I have had NO students achieve what I have predicted”, adding that the IB has “cost excellent students their future”.

“We at least deserve to understand how our scores were predicted,” she said.

The volume of appeals has been huge. The Independent Schools Foundation Academy in Hong Kong published the results of its appeals to the IB online. It said that, of 50 students in its 2020 cohort, 39 received improved grades on appeal by at least one point.

“These amended results are a more accurate reflection of the true ability and effort from this outstanding graduating class,” said the school’s head, Malcolm Pritchard. “Nearly all students will be able to take up courses in their first-choice university after the amendments.”

They included, he said, some of the world’s most selective universities, including Ivy League schools in the US, and top universities in the UK.

A-Levels reassessed

In the UK, A-Level results had to be reassessed a week after being released in August last year, after the system “resulted in too many inconsistent and unfair outcomes”, the UK’s Education Department said in a statement.

“Over the last few days, it has become clear that the algorithm has revealed a number of anomalies that had not been anticipated by Ofqual [the UK exams regulatory body] and which severely undermined confidence in the system,” the education secretary said in a 17 August statement.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said the model had resulted in “more inconsistency and unfairness than can be reasonably resolved through an appeals process”.

Exam grading reverted to school-assessed grades that “students were most likely to have achieved, had exams gone ahead”, he said.

Prompted by the UK A-Level assessment changes, Cambridge International announced changes the same day in August.

“It is important to us that Cambridge students can compete on an equal basis with students who have similar national or international qualifications, and that their hard work and achievements are compared fairly,” Ebenezer said this week.

“Although using schools’ predicted grades was not our initial choice, we did provide clear guidance to schools on how to assess the evidence available,” he said. “We received reassurances from universities that the grades would still be accepted in the same way, despite this change.

“Our Global Recognitions team is based around the world and they work closely with universities to make sure they understand Cambridge examinations and our approach to assessment. There is no evidence of leniency [from universities].”

Nonetheless, data collected by NARIC has shown that teacher-predicted grades had led to more students qualifying for university places in Britain and France last year compared to previous exam years. Many universities reported much larger cohorts of incoming students.

Lessons from 2020

“The more transparent the exam boards can be, the better the advice we can give to universities and the more easily universities can make decisions,” said NARIC’s Jones, who notes that universities will have to monitor the 2020 and now 2021 admission cohorts against previous ones to see how they fare against national cohort averages.

“There isn’t a perfect solution beyond making sure that the approach that they have taken is as clear as possible,” she said.

“Obviously this has definitely thrown up challenges of different types of assessment and they will probably be trying to think about contingencies for this kind of thing happening in the future because it’s not outside the realms of possibility that it could happen again.

“But they are thinking about contingencies rather than permanent changes at the moment,” Jones noted.

“We’ve seen lots of different approaches and it’s difficult to argue that one approach is better than another. Some countries had to have a school-based assessment in a system that did not have any coursework and was primarily exam based, and it becomes quite difficult to come to a calculated grade. Then there were other countries where coursework already accounted for a large percentage of the student grade.”

Others “have coursework and then had to account for lockdown and coursework happening at different times; there isn’t an easy answer for the exam boards,” said Jones referring to the debate in Singapore where some students had already completed coursework before lockdown and therefore had access to school resources and teachers, while others had to do coursework under constrained circumstances.

However, how exams are administered would not necessarily impact on universities’ admissions policies. Universities “already see people with a myriad of qualifications which might be broadly comparable, but still students would have studied a variety of assessment methods in a variety of subjects. Entry requirements are a factor, but the learning outcomes of the degree should be the same, irrespective,” Jones said.

Some of these changes such as shifts to school-based assessments could last beyond the pandemic. But she doubted it would affect degree outcomes eventually. “Students still need to meet the requirements toward a degree at the end of their course.”

But fairness is a different issue, with a lot of discussion around the world about the digital divide that emerged with the shift to online teaching. Many countries in East Asia pushed on with large-scale exams as cancelling them creates new problems and discontent among students and their families over perceived unfairness.

Hong Kong authorities in September released a large-scale study involving 80% of the city’s secondary schools after school-leaving exams taken by more than 50,000 were postponed. It showed the accuracy of predictive scores to generate school-leaving exam grades was mostly only between 40% and 60%.

The Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA) research showed that predicted grades “should only be used as a last resort when the public examinations have to be cancelled. In that case, universities should exercise flexibility and consider relevant information about candidates’ other performances for admissions,” said HKEAA Secretary General So Kwok-sang.

Teachers said the study showed it was not worth cancelling exams in favour of a “more unreliable system” that could impact on students’ chances of getting into good universities.

India is now reviewing the effects of postponed exams on the higher education admissions schedule, with the government announcing this month it would set up a committee to study the ripple effects of exam disruption in order to decide the 2021-22 academic calendar for university and college admissions. It would include consultations with teachers, parents and students, a source in New Delhi said.

Several countries that cancelled exams last year are planning to go ahead this year with scaled back content.

“The majority of schools surveyed have told us they want Cambridge International to give students the opportunity to sit exams on the full syllabus if they can.

“However, we are also providing a range of measures to help our students and schools manage the impact of the pandemic, including exemptions and adjustments to some syllabus components, for example, if teaching the component includes access to facilities or equipment that is not possible due to COVID-19, or working in pairs or groups,” said Cambridge International’s Ebenezer.