On Thursday afternoon, journalists were taken into the basement of a Westminster building, fed chicken satay and walked through Ofqual’s report on the recent English GCSE. During the summer, a late shift in grade boundaries shocked schools, leaving many high-flying schools with significantly worse results than they had been expecting.
The most striking outcome of the Ofqual research is that it seems to find evidence of cheating. It is incidental to the main purpose of the review, which was to ask whether the shift in the grade boundaries was correct. But it’s a stunning – and quite clear – finding.
Here is the issue: English GCSE can be taken in such a way that the pupil has done everything except for teacher-marked “controlled assessments” in the final months. If they do that, the teachers know what marks each pupil needs. And teachers give those marks.
In the graph below, Ofqual have worked out how many marks candidates needed from their teachers to get a C. If they got a mark to the right of the red vertical line, the teacher gave them a high enough grade to get the C. The shape of that distribution is, frankly, a sign of something horribly wrong. Teachers are massaging marks.