Daily Mail, November 18 2002

The A-level scandal refuses to lie down and die.

A senior A-level maths examiner, Roger Porkess, says the Tomlinson inquiry into the results crisis vastly underestimated the number of wrong grades awarded last summer. Mike Tomlinson, the former Chief Inspector of Schools, investigated claims that the exam boards had been pressured into arbitrarily slashing the A-level results to avoid claims of grade inflation and sliding standards.

As a result of his inquiry into the fiasco – for which he said no-one was to blame –1,945 AS or A-level grades were improved, resulting in just 168 students becoming eligible to switch to their first choice of university.

But Mr Porkess has calculated that, at a minimum, 35,000 results were wrongly downgraded -- and the figure might even be as high as 50,000.

Mr Porkess is not to be dismissed lightly. A Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, he is an experienced examiner and a designer of one of the largest maths A-level syllabuses -- which happens to be examined by the Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR) board, the body at the centre of the re-grading scandal.

The boards were accused of moving the goalposts at the eleventh hour by significantly raising the mark required for each grade. Mr Porkess has now revealed the staggering fact that Mr Tomlinson did not obtain from the boards all available information to work through this statistical maze. Instead, he based his inquiry on an assertion by the OCR chief executive Ron McLone – the person who was most in the frame for alleged misconduct.

According to Mr Porkess, Mr Tomlinson accepted on face value Dr McLone’s claim that, in the past, the board had typically adjusted A-level grade boundaries by five to six marks. As a result, he confined his inquiry to those results where the grade had been raised by six marks or more.

But according to Mr Porkess, such a huge rise was not typical at all. It was simply unprecedented. Grades wouldn’t normally rise by more than one mark.

By restricting his inquiry in this way, however, Mr Tomlinson only detected the most outlandish downgradings -- for example, where a predicted ‘A’ turned into a fail. He would have missed the vast majority, where less glaring reductions meant that the students themselves may not have suspected they were victims.

Students taking Mr Porkess’s own maths papers were downgraded by three marks. Thousands of these students, he says, were given the wrong grades as a result. Yet these papers were not even looked at by the inquiry.

In frustration, Mr Porkess contacted Mr Tomlinson – who told him, he said, that the adjustments to his maths papers ‘weren’t large enough’ because Mr Tomlinson was only using the figures the exam boards had given him.

The new Education Secretary Charles Clarke has rejected calls for a fresh inquiry. Now the exam scripts themselves are due to be shredded in two days’ time. The evidence will then vanish.

But if Mr Porkess is correct, the wool has been pulled over Mr Tomlinson’s eyes, and the integrity of the exam system will have been destroyed. These revelations demand a far deeper and more robust inquiry. For there is a corruption at the very heart of the education system.

The re-grading scandal occurred because A-level standards have slipped. And the root cause of that is the huge expansion of the universities, and the government’s aim to get half of all 18 year-olds into higher education.

This vast rise is also the cause of the crisis over university funding, which has led the government to float the politically explosive solution of ‘top-up fees’ for students.

The Higher Education Minister Margaret Hodge last week raised the prospect of middle class families having to pay top-up fees of £15,000 for a three year degree course -- because it wasn’t right, she said, to ask the ‘dustman to subsidise the doctor’.

This latest class-war soundbite is insufferable. For as Cambridge university has rightly protested, top-up fees are grossly inequitable. The rich won’t notice them. The poor won’t have to pay them. The people who will be clobbered will be – once again – the aspiring middle classes.

The real issue here is the visceral animosity against ‘privilege’. Ms Hodge says it is wrong to subsidise graduates who earn on average £400,000 more than non-graduates over a lifetime. But top-up fees will penalise not the graduates but their parents. The dustman whose son becomes a merchant banker will end up subsiding his offspring’s Porsche.

It’s true that money alone doesn’t put people off university. If only the government would realise, after all, that relatively few want or need a degree. But it defies common sense for Ms Hodge to claim that the prospect of a huge debt plays no part in the decision to give university a miss.

Some – including, it is said, Mr Clarke, until he arrived in the education hot seat -- think a graduate tax is fairer. Such a tax would certainly conceal the debt. But it would still be inequitable.

It would mean that graduates in teaching, say, or management, or the police would pay more in tax than non-graduates doing identical jobs. And it doesn’t follow that higher qualifications invariably mean more money. Lecturers, for example, are paid less than school teachers.

What’s more, if it’s unfair to subsidise a degree, it must also be unfair to subsidise any vocational qualification too. Ms Hodge’s dustman may be enraged to discover from her that he is subsidising a nurse or a social worker. As result, when he calls chez Hodge for his Christmas bonus this year, he might be tempted to leave the odd champagne bottle littering his patron’s elegant front garden.

Progressive taxation is fair because people on low incomes should not contribute disproportionately to the common weal. But a tax on learning is a different matter. It is not – as Mr Clarke has implied – like spending on a holiday or a car. Education benefits the whole of society.

The real problem is that university degrees no longer benefit all of us. By being spread so thinly, they are now hurting society by devaluing education standards.

So even the dumbest now get degrees. And what is the government’s response to this rampant degree inflation? Why, it proposes to do away with degree classifications altogether! The words deckchairs and Titanic come to mind – with Ms Hodge playing the role of the iceberg.

There is something off-putting about well-to-do, upper-middle-class ministers -- who themselves have benefited from free university tuition and maintenance grants -- pulling up the gang-plank behind them and their children in the name of attacking ‘privilege’.

The universities and the head teachers should put the pusillanimity of a lifetime to one side. They should both demand that the A-level papers be preserved and a proper inquiry held, and they should also start telling the truth about the collapse of standards in schools and universities.

As for our class-war government, it is presiding over the implosion of education, resulting in a corruption at the heart of the examination process – and it now proposes to punish the middle classes for the privilege of watching it happen.

Posted by admin at November 18, 2002