Tens of thousands of students to have A-level grades reviewed

Tens of thousands of students are to have their grades reviewed, the head of the inquiry into this summer's A–Level exams fiasco said today.

A total of 31 subjects are affected – all but seven of them involving exams set by the Oxford and Cambridge and RSA (OCR) exam board.

They include English Literature and English Language A set by the Assessment and Qualifications Authority and OCR, and French set by all three exam boards, including Edexcel.

The re–grading will cover 104 individual AS and A2 units out of a total of 1,438, for which the total number of entries was 304,205.

Former chief schools inspector, Mike Tomlinson, who led the inquiry, hopes the process can be completed by October 11, ending weeks of uncertainty for thousands of students.

The fact that their entries were wrongly graded by examiners, who were attempting to ensure parity of standards between the old and new versions of the A–Level, has forced the Government to postpone the publication of secondary school league tables.

The tables were due out in November but the Department for Education and Skills said they would not be published until ministers were certain they were based on "reliable" figures.

The announcement of which subjects have to be re–graded was expected on Tuesday but Mr Tomlinson gave the exam boards, Oxford and Cambridge and RSA (OCR), the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) and Edexcel more time to "double check" their work.

OCR faced the most complaints about "bizarre" grades and was likely to have most of the re–grading work to do, while the other boards have insisted few, if any, of their exams were affected.

Mr Tomlinson said he expected the total number of affected subjects to be "around 12" when he unveiled his first report on what happened to A–Levels in summer 2002 last Friday.

He found no evidence of political interference by ministers to make A–Levels appear tougher, but ruled that a lack of understanding about standards of the new version introduced in 2000 ran right through the system.

The confusion caused examiners, obliged to maintain standards in line with previous years, to adjust grade boundaries in such a way as to penalise some students and Mr Tomlinson said a re–grade was necessary to sort out the mess.

Students who have started degree courses and whose grades end up being changed will have to decide whether to stay at their university even if it was not their first choice, try to change mid–year, or take up their first preference place next year.

Universities have said they will do their best to accommodate everyone's wishes, and Education Secretary Estelle Morris has promised to give them the necessary cash to do so.

In his report last week Mr Tomlinson called the problems "an accident that was waiting to happen".

The second report of his inquiry, due in November, will focus on what needs to be done to prevent the drama of the last few weeks from happening again.

He is also investigating the validity of AS–Level grades, as the confusion about standards which hit A2s, as the second half of the new A–Levels are known, was common to the exams taken by lower sixth formers this summer, he said.

Mr Tomlinson told a press briefing "I very very much hope that this process will be completed and that the students know the outcome by October 15 and I hope it will draw to an end the anxiety and uncertainty which has had to be endured by students over recent weeks, and I trust that this will go a long way to put that to rest."

Mr Tomlinson said he had been unable to determine a number of individual candidates who were affected by the announcement – one of the reasons that this could not be done by today had been simply that some students were sitting examinations with more than one board.

But he confirmed after questioning by reporters that "tens of thousands" of candidates would be affected.

He said the panel that would "do the job" on the units where the regrading issue arose would include two people – one would be a chief examiner in that subject from another board, and the other would be an independent observer from the profession who would be nominated by the teacher associations. This observer would not have been involved in the examination process this year.

Mr Tomlinson said that 97 of the individual units to be reviewed were in exams set by OCR, five were in papers set by Edexcel and two by the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA).

The OCR units were drawn from the following subjects – accounting, art, chemistry A, classical Greek, computing, economics, electronics, French, geography A and geography B, German, government and politics, history, information and communications technology, Latin, media studies, music, physical education, physics B, religious education, science and Spanish.

OCR would also review grading in English literature and psychology because of the "concerns which have been expressed about the subjects", Mr Tomlinson added.

In Edexcel's case the subject list consisted of Arabic, French, modern Greek, ICT and Spanish.

The AQA subject list was English literature and language A and French.

The actual number of entries affected could end up being higher than the 304,205 specified in his report because of the inclusion of OCR's English literature and psychology units in the grade review process, for which no entry figures were provided by the inquiry.

Asked why OCR's list was so much longer and what problems that suggested were specific to the board, Mr Tomlinson replied: "I don't think I know what's going on there in that sense, I really don't."

He insisted that no individual was to blame. "What I've said is this is a systemic failure rather than a personal failure."

Mr Tomlinson also stressed that the grades review would not necessarily lead to students' final awards being changed.

"It's a possibility that no grades will be changed," he told a news conference in London.

Asked why the list of subjects was longer than the 12 he mentioned last week, Mr Tomlinson replied he had taken movements of grade boundaries up or down by six marks as an "arbitrary cut–off point" to highlight those that were causing most concern.

Following further discussions with the boards he had decided that movements of three or four marks had to be looked at again, with the result that the listed units came to total 104.

Mr Tomlinson said the students affected did not have to do anything but wait for results to come back to their schools.

If they were still unhappy with their grades the deadline for appeals has been extended to 25 October and they should make their representations in the normal way.

Asked why the deadline for completion of the grade review had been put back from 11 October to 15 October, Mr Tomlinson replied that he "wanted it done properly".

He added: "We can't lurch anywhere else on this. The date must reflect the capacity of the board with the biggest task to do it."

OCR is the smallest of the three boards and Mr Tomlinson said that the process could have been completed more quickly if the bulk of the units to be reviewed had been in exams set by Edexcel and AQA.

He insisted the boards had co–operated and had not had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to this point.