Scotland’s pupils receive their results of the first formal exams since the pandemic.
Approximately 128,000 students from 500 schools, colleges and training centers will learn how they performed on the National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher courses.
The results are expected to be between the record grades of the past two years and pre-Covid pass rates.
Students have received additional support, with a “generous” approach to grading due to the ongoing disruption.
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The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) said this would make it difficult to make comparisons between performance over the past few years, but universities and employers could still have confidence standards were being met.
Certificates will begin arriving in the mail from Tuesday morning, although 52,000 students have also signed up to have their results sent by text message or email.
Exams have been canceled two years in a row during the Covid-19 pandemic and there has been controversy over how scores were determined using teacher estimates and coursework.
The 2020 scores were first downgraded by a moderation system before being reinstated amid claims some schools had been unfairly penalized, while the 2021 scores have been criticized by some as “exams under a different name”.
Results in 2020 showed that the pass rate for Highers increased from 75% to 89%, while the percentage of students achieving As hit a record high the following year.
The SQA said salary caps would be set this year to achieve a midpoint between those results and pre-pandemic levels.
The limits at which A, B and C grades are awarded are reviewed each year, but officials said a more generous approach had been taken in 2022 to offset the impact of an ongoing disruption.
The whole purpose of exams is to provide a fairly standardized measure of a student’s academic achievement.
However, how does that work when students are faced with very different circumstances than in previous years – like a global pandemic preventing them from even sitting in an exam room?
This is at the heart of the delicate balance that SQA seeks to strike.
Ministers and officials alike insist the record results of the past two years are as credible as those of previous generations.
But there has been a conscious effort this year to bring them closer to pre-pandemic levels as things “get back to normal”.
The challenge is to do this fairly to the students of previous years, but also to the employers and further education institutions who rely on the results.
It also makes it difficult to compare grades from year to year, which is important nationally for tracking things like the poverty-related benefit gap.
The readjustment is all the more cumbersome because it is operated by the SQA – which is currently being dissolved and replaced.
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