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In August 2018, Ofqual announced that it had intervened to adjust the GCSE Science grade boundaries for students who had taken the "higher tier" paper in its new double award science exams and performed poorly, due to an excessive number of students in danger of receiving a grade of "U" or "unclassified".
In foundation-tier papers, pupils can obtain a maximum grade of a C, while in a higher-tier paper they can achieve a minimum grade of a D. Higher-tier candidates who miss the D grade by a small margin are awarded an E. Otherwise the grade below E in these papers is U. In untiered papers pupils can achieve any grade in the scheme.
A Uniform Mark Scale, or UMS, is a way of standardising the marking of papers across different examination boards, allowing someone to compare two marks marked by two different examination boards. Grades are then calculated using grade boundaries set at particular UMS scores.
On 4 August 2020, secondary school students in Scotland received their Higher grades. Having also been unable to take their exams because of the pandemic, their grades were estimated by teachers, but the body awarding the qualifications was reported to have downgraded around a quarter of the marks awarded in order to "maintain credibility". [ 41 ]
The 9-1 grading system for GCSEs began in 2017 in England.
After these extremely low grade boundaries added flavour to many news headlines, Ofqual said that they were confident the grade boundaries this year were "sound", so shifted their focus onto the previous year's grade boundaries for the new Mathematics A-Level for the 2,000 students who sat it after studying it for one year. Ofqual said "We want ...
This evoked heated debates among students, teachers and educationalists; the corresponding grade boundaries for the respective exam were thus adjusted accordingly, with a pass mark as low as 34%. [16] The SQA later admitted that one of their Higher Maths exam papers had been unusually hard and unfit for purpose. [17]
In 2020, Ofqual, the regulator of qualifications, exams and tests in England, produced a grades standardisation algorithm to combat grade inflation and moderate the teacher-predicted grades for A level and GCSE qualifications in that year, after examinations were cancelled as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.