PICKING WINNERS IS A MONKEY’S GAME – Predicted Grades

As a teacher of Economics, I try to encourage my students to get involved in the Student Investor Challenge. It’s a fun activity where teams of 4 have to invest virtual money on the London Stock Exchange and make as much money as possible through buying and selling at the right time. If they beat all of their competitors, they win a trip to New York! The original competition used to also include two non-school teams – a group of real-life investors and a monkey team.  The monkey team would choose their shares randomly and surprisingly they would always do well, normally out-performing the real-life investors and a lot of the students.

Even though this is surprising, it really shouldn’t be as this happens quite a lot. If you search on Google about monkeys beating hedge funds, you will find a large number of articles as research shows that time after time, a randomly chosen portfolio will beat the experts. Here is an article by Mark Skousen about it, where he references a famous economics book called ‘A Random Walk Down Wall Street’.

How is this similar to target grades in school? Hopefully it is quite obvious. We have all of this data at our disposal with regards students and their past performance but ultimately it is still very difficult to predict who will get what grade at A Level. There are lots of different factors that come into play and here are just some of them.

1. Mock exams are often the key predictor but students often don’t take them as seriously as they should or they mess up on timings because they are not used to doing a full exam. Good revision works and if students really grasp the concepts of spaced and retrieval learning as well as inter-leaving, then they can make great gains in the final couple of months. Especially if they are disciplined enough to study mark schemes and examiners’ reports.
2. Some students though will do better in a mock exam because it is not as pressurised as the real thing. We can watch an A*/A student produce fabulous writing throughout the 2 years of study but under timed pressure on a hot June afternoon having taken an exam in the morning and feeling cognitively drained, produce a flawed performance that doesn’t recognise their ability.
3. After mock exams, there are many parents that feel the need to get their daughter/son some extra tuition in the subject. Depending on the skills of the tutor and the efforts of the tutee, this could make a big difference.
4. A subject like Economics is like a jigsaw, where some students see the big picture right at the end and can’t start making connections once all the content has been taught and revision has started. These connections can be at the heart of good analysis and evaluation and therefore sometimes students just ‘get it’ late and improve rapidly their exam technique.
5. Outside factors in subjective subjects like History, English and Economics play a huge role in determining the final grade for a student. It is not uncommon on teacher chatrooms to hear of big increases in marks for some students. I’ve been on courses where we’ve all looked at a 6 marker and some have given it a 6 and some have given it a 2. Obviously training occurs for examiners in order to get consistency but even then, you can interpret what someone is writing in a number of different ways. Here is an interesting TES article on it related to the marking in English.
6. Some subjects are just harder to get the grades in and therefore you can’t be sure as a teacher how lenient the exam boards will be in giving out A*/A grades. This is also the case across qualification bodies, for example, it is easier to get an A* in Edexcel than it is in OCR, hence the decline in entries for OCR. Check out this document shared by Harry Fletcher-Wood about inter-subject comparability.

I’m sure other teachers could add to this list but it’s quite clear that it is difficult to predict grades and therefore it should come as no surprise that you get headlines like this TES article where it says that ‘Five out of Six A-Level Grade Predictions are Wrong’ or this story from the Guardian stating that predicted grades are a lottery.

So what should happen? From my perspective, we should change the system as David Olusoga suggests in the above Guardian article, which is that students should apply once they have got their results. And yes…there will be challenges but I have no doubt that these can easily be overcome.

In the meantime, I know that a monkey could probably predict better grades than me and that doesn’t seem quite right. Knowing this, I have changed my approach and many won’t like it. I predict the grade the student wants for her or his chosen university. If I have seen previously that a student could range from an A* to a B or an A to a C or an E to a C, why shouldn’t I be optimistic and give my student every chance they can to get to the university of their choice? I do explain to them (if I genuinely think they won’t get the grade) that I think it is a tough ask and that they might have problems if they get offers that are too high but most students are willing to take that chance. It’s the confidence of youth!

And on results day I am often amazed what students get…both good and bad. It’s all rather depressing how unpredictable it can be.