It’s unfortunate that you dropped 4 points from your predicted grade. I can sympathize because the same thing happened to me (45 to 41, remarked to 42; EE from predicted A to C), except I took my exams in November 2019. I had my personal lack of mastery to blame for that, which I imagine is much more comforting than being graded down by a statistical model.
I agree with you that the IB should have been more open about how their model functions (i.e. what inputs does it use, sample data, what measures if any were taken to avoid discrimination on race/sex, etc.). I also want to unpack some of what you have said here, as it’s indicative of how many people in the IB community are feeling about recent events.
The strictness on IA grading and other components of any other year shouldn’t be enforced on a batch that had to simultaneously worry about family members dwindling between life and death.
This is the precedent claim; if grading students is in and of itself unjustified due to COVID-19, it follows that the IB should not have offered final grades (or diplomas, for that matter). I don’t think this is a fair assertion to make, given that universities still need some quantitative metric of academic performance in order to determine which students to accept. Grading continued in other curricula and universities still required grades; I don’t think that it was ever an option for the IB to simply not award them.
The alternative for the IB — that you point out — was to be more generous with grades. I don’t fully understand how this would work; inflated IB grades (as compared to systems like AP and local curricula) would be unjust for the non-IB students undergoing the same pandemic competing for spots at the same tertiary institutions. If IB and non-IB students alike suffer from grade decreases, this leads to fairer competition overall than if the IB ‘adjusts’ candidates at the expense of other students.
The Assessments of May 2020 cannot be made to compare with any other year
I agree with you, but I don’t think this is a relevant objection. Disrupting schooling was never going to allow results to be compared with other years. What system would you propose whereby such comparisons can be made? Clearly, it isn’t as simple as bumping people up arbitrarily on account of a situation which has impacted every person’s grades differently.
And then they also went to the extent of level-grading candidates into missing a marking band, because they fell short of a mark or two. This comes through as frivolous and facetious with the only motive of keeping the grade distribution intact like past years.
I’m interested in finding out why you think that strict grade boundaries exist solely to keep the grade distribution intact. Unless I’m missing something, this contradicts your earlier observations:
- Disruption has had a net effect of reducing academic performance, of which grades are an indicator, because of factors beyond students’ control (you reference potential illness in the family among other things).
- The IB was strict with grade boundaries when they could have rounded upwards, reducing (or failing to increase — same thing) scores.
- M20 grades were at a four year high.
If the IB wanted to keep the grade distribution stable and academic performance was lower in M20 than average, wouldn’t they be rounding grades up? If the IBO truly did pack students 1–2% below boundaries in order to maintain the distribution, are you claiming that the real grades should have, on average, been even higher?
I’m also interested in your position on grade boundaries on non-COVID-affected cohorts. Do you think that having unyielding boundaries is always “frivolous and facetious”, or just in this specific instance?
IB has shit-talked us into believing that they have used the best possible “algorithm” to assign us grades, and their ignorance is not only outraging but also an example of one of the many failures of institutionalized education, where the institution has complete power and influence over paramount decisions that heavily dictate the future of thousands of IB students.
Again, where’s the alternative? Unless you intend this piece to be read as a wholesale critique of the modern education system (as opposed to a criticism of the IBO specifically), how do we get better decision making in education? At its best, the IBO is a large body of educators and experts which makes decisions based on years of experience and feedback. At its worst, it has the potential to make bad decisions without being held to account.
In my perspective, bad decisions are a byproduct not of dictatorial examination boards but of the very act of making decisions. If we had students or teachers vote on how to deal with the situation, I don’t have any reason to believe it would have led to a fairer outcome. If we gave the power to school administrators, there might have been even greater discrepancies in marking between schools. If we gave each student their predicted grade, surely there would still be reason for many to complain. Short of running the actual exams — virus be damned — what decisions could have been made that would have lead to better outcomes? What decisions can still be made?
Overall, I sympathize with you and fully agree that the IBO’s lack of transparency is objectionable. I don’t mean to excuse the handling of this situation from criticism. I simply want a reasonable dialogue and fair consideration of the IBO’s decisions in the past few months.
I hope you take the time to clarify some of the issues I’ve touched on here, but regardless I wish you good luck for the future and congrats on finishing IB.
