GovWire

This technical report, which follows on from analyses undertaken by He and Black (2020) and He and Cadwallader (2022, 2023), uses statistical methods to investigate the comparability of grading standards across subjects for GCSEs and A levels in summer 2023. Inter-subject comparability is explored over a period of 3 years:

1. Summer 2023, when grades were awarded through normal exams (first time after the COVID-19 pandemic) with protection applied to subjects for which the national performance was found to be lower than in 2019 (Department for Education, 2023; Ofqual, 2022, 2023),

2. Summer 2022, when grades were awarded through exams (with adaptations and different grading policies applied; see Department for Education, 2021), and

3. Summer 2019, when grades were awarded through normal exams (prior to the COVID-19 pandemic).

Authors

Asteria Brylka and Qingping He