The story of Josiah Elleston-Burrell’s struggle to be awarded fair marks in his A-levels (The student and the algorithm: how the exam results fiasco threatened one pupil’s future, 18 February) is heartbreaking and infuriating, as well as completely unnecessary. Relying on one test for determining a mark for a course of study lasting one or two years is a very poor assessment approach. Many countries use continuous assessment of students’ achievements to create an overall grade point average (GPA) or similar.
I attended school in the US where GPA is the standard measure of academic achievement at both school and university level. This meant that when an adverse incident like Covid happened, or in my case being held up at gunpoint the evening before a final exam, the final mark could be based on multiple samples using essays, presentations, written tests and many other forms of assessment. We should be putting resources into helping schools to use a robust, valid and fair suite of assessment methods to build a result that is far more indicative of actual ability than a single, closed-book, timed test. Such a portfolio approach also would not allow the kind of biased and unreliable result that happened to Josiah.
Dr Jean McKendree
York
