Hi Sam,I've experience of both sides having been admissions tutor at Imperial and a governor at Chiswick. There is a good reason why there's been a systematic discrimination against state schools this year, and it's an unattended consequence of the way the algorithm has been applied.Schools with small cohorts, which tend to be independent schools, have had their teacher predictions used by Ofqual to determine the grade, and those with larger cohorts, more than 15 and mostly state schools, have seen the Ofqual algorithm applied, with the teacher’s rank order of students in their class forced to fit the grade distribution of previous years. Clearly if a school is improving, as is the case with Chiswick, this really hurts the current year's students. To add to this, independent schools often overpredict to get an offer and then cram the student accordingly. That meant we used to see more dropouts and retakes for some spoon-fed students we admitted from the independent sector, until this problem was identified and we adjusted accordingly. But this year we are compelled to take overpredictions, while we are face the threat of fines by the government if we go over our allocation while trying to compensate for those whom we think have been hard done by. This is not theoretical. We have seen in my department at Imperial rejection rates from state schools well up while independent school rejection rates reduced. It's therefore doubtful we have met our remit of selecting students of the highest academic potential.The worst case is an outstanding student from a large, historically under performing school. There is no chance that such a student would not have had grades downscaled, sometimes heavily.I realise this year would always be difficult, but the current approach is turning out to be very unfair.
Tom Pike ● 2267d