The government’s last minute change to include mock results in my opinion is another in a long line of superficial measures, which I struggle to see will help many people. It certainly doesn’t help me, as my mock results were pretty inconsistent with my usual performance as I had a busy December (with exams at the beginning of January).
I would like to echo the problems regarding standardisation and also highlight that mocks (at least at my school) do not cover the whole course and in my opinion can’t be substituted for the actual exams.
Also, I believe that this disproportionately helps the students who are at the top of the class anyway, as not many people in my experience take the mock exams particularly seriously, which is another reason why it is unfair now to base our whole result on it.
Furthermore, I feel it should be fairly obvious that the government has a more accurate alternative than mock grades: teacher assessments! Why can they not just use these for their “triple-lock”? I know my school had a proper procedure for their grades and I’m sure others did too – all of this focus on percentage point increase makes us feel like we are just numbers!
I feel it is unfair for the government to have thrown a spanner in the works here, particularly given the already confusing and scary situation.
