Scottish Government Immoral change of Student Grading System

By | August 13, 2020

The initial grading of Scottish students gave grades that were 1% higher than previous years, so fair and slightly generous.

The results were particularly criticized for marking down students from deprived areas. However, teacher grades for those areas boosted performance by 20% compared with previous years, presumably because the teachers tried to compensate for the deprivation, but that is not ‘fair’. The final results based on teacher grading are far higher than previous years meaning that this cohort has an unfair advantage over all other cohorts, both past and future ones based on exam grading.

The Scottish Nationalist government has done this because they are afraid of the public outcry which would loose them support and votes in future elections. It is an immoral political decision not based on evidence. It reflects a public that makes emotional decisions and rarely bothers to engage their rational thinking to consider evidence. The opposition parties are also immoral in jumping on the bandwagon and claiming the initial system was problematic when it wasn’t.

The results from England reflect those in Scotland with a generous, unfair, increase of 2.4% on previous years despite 40% of teacher grades being downgraded. Despite the unfair increase compared with previous years the opposition claims there is a problem with students being disadvantaged, ignoring all of the evidence.

In general this demonstrates the triumph of self-serving emotional thinking over rational thinking and why humans get things wrong so often.

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