9th January 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Concerns have been raised over the inaccuracy of predicted A Level grades with only 48% of predictions being correct in 2012, and nearly 10% of the predictions being wrong by more than one grade. Reported on the BBC, the statistics were published by OCR, looking at exams taken in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Predicted grades are an important part of university applications, which is why it’s considered important that they’re not inaccurate.
UK universities use a number of criteria to decide whether to offer a student a place, and to decide the difficulty of the offer, but predicted grades are generally seen as the most important factor. Modules and AS Levels have allowed universities to assess how well a student is progressing, rather than simply relying on a predicted grade, but there remain many non-modular A Level courses, and there is an increasing movement, pushed by Michael Gove, to return to A Level results determined solely by a student’s final exams at the end of the course.
An alternative way to view the statistics is that 90% of predicted grades are accurate to within one grade. However, the worry is the tendency to be over-optimistic when predicting a student’s grade; 39% of predictions were higher than the final grade, compared to 13% of predictions which were lower. This creates one of two problems; a student might receive university offers which are too difficult, resulting the student having to go through clearing to find a university place. Alternatively, a student given accurate predicted grades might just miss out on their preferred university in favour of a student with optimistic predicted grades.