A-levels and the dangers of predictive modelling

It turns out we’re not quite so in awe of predictive modelling after all. How different it was back in March when Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College published their paper predicting 250,000 deaths from Covid unless the government changed course and put the country into lockdown. It was ‘the science’; it was fact, beyond question. Yet no sooner had the A-level results been published last week than a very different attitude began to prevail. How terrible, nearly everyone now says, that an 18-year-old’s future can be determined by an algorithm which tries to predict what grade they would have achieved had they sat the cancelled exams.

I agree with the latter – A-level results have been a farce, which the government is apparently going to try to put right through an announcement this afternoon. Trying to predict grades by teacher assessment, moderated by computer, based on a school’s past record, is no substitute for the real thing: having children sit down and take real exams, which are then marked.