Covid-19 caused several systems and processes associated with the world of education and work to collapse: people were isolated, transmission models had to go online, classes were separated if not disbanded altogether. The consequences of Covid-19 were devastating for schools. The pandemic affected, adversely, “nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and all continents. Closures of schools and other learning spaces […] impacted 94 per cent of the world’s student population, up to 99 per cent in low and lower-middle income countries” (UN, 2020). In fact, the pandemic was the single largest disruptor to the education system seen worldwide in the last 50 years.
Much has been written about the severity of this upheaval and the implications for learning (Lewin, 2020; Hughes, 2020). Research has shown that mathematics and reading achievements dropped significantly because of Covid-19, primarily in 2020 and 2021 (Kuhfeld et al., 2022). Furthermore, the social disruption and sense of alienation caused by the pandemic and by institutional responses to the pandemic were palpable, leading to what some have called the creation of a “lost generation” (UNICEF, 2022). The resultant learning gaps were more or less potent according to the economic situation of the affected countries. “The World Bank estimates that while students in high-income countries gained an average of 50 harmonized learning outcomes (HLO) points a year pre-pandemic, students in low-income countries were gaining just 20, leaving those students several years behind” (Bryant et al., 2022).
Indeed, the problems of socioeconomic inequality that large-scale assessment models are trying to solve by widening access and making assessment relatively cheap were exacerbated when these models fell apart.
What Covid-19 showed the world of education was how much that world depended on examinations — and how fragile it was if and when this evaluation system was damaged or removed.
1 An Analysis of the Inability of Examination Boards to Survive 2020
The most significant effect of Covid-19 on assessment was the implosion of external examinations. A-levels, the French Baccalaureate, International
It was an opportunity to think creatively and wisely about how to assess students without end-of-year examinations. In my school (The International School of Geneva), for students in the lower years of high school — which run without an external examination board — we designed projects that learners could complete at home, giving them a chance to express themselves fully through an open-ended task. We also held oral viva voces online so as to allow a conversation between the teacher and the student on learning. The emotions of learning influenced some of the thinking behind these alternative assessments since anxiety was high among students, and assessment design needed to take this into account. It was also an opportunity to think more broadly about what we were assessing and why.
However, in large-scale assessment systems, such as examination boards and national curricula schemes, alternatives were derived in a very different manner. These were mainly made up of calculations based on historical trends in school- and student-performance data. In the UK, teachers were told to “submit the grade they thought their students would have likely achieved if they had taken their exams [and] to rank their students within cohorts of those they judged likely to get the same grade, from most to least likely” (Timsit, 2020). The grades generated through this process were then standardised by a regulatory body using an algorithm that factored into its calculations the past performances of students and the school. The results were fairly disastrous: roughly “40% of A-level grades were downgraded from teachers’ assessments, meaning that students received lower grades than the ones expected by universities as a condition of enrollment” (Timsit, 2020). Students from lower-income families were downgraded even more.
The International Baccalaureate went through a similar process to that in the UK (Fitzgerald, 2023), calculating student scores based on coursework, teacher predictions, and the school’s history of predicting grades accurately (or not). This led to a flattening of the assessment bell curve and, consequently, a number of potential top scorers to underperform. This caused much anger among stakeholders and led to the press’ deeming the exercise a “scandal”.
In France, students were awarded with grades that were “an average of their grades throughout the year, minus any grades obtained during the lockdown” (Fitzgerald, 2023). As a result, the pass rate was close to 96% — a considerable inflation of previous pass rates — and 10,000 new university places had to be created to accommodate the surplus of undergraduate students.
In trying to solve the problem of generating grades for students without the primary mechanism used to create those grades (examinations), instead of divergent thinking, which might have taken assessment down a very different path, the approach was one of convergent thinking: looking for as close a proxy to examinations as possible and essentially attempting to do things the same way they had been done before.
Some systems, like the Advanced Placement (AP) in the United States, were able to shift online and retain the examination format without the face-to-face structure. This provided some continuity in the assessment system. However, those countries that did not examine students online used quantitative methods to describe outcomes, continuing to view student scores in a mean distribution curve. In fact, it was the science of grade creation rather than the core experience of learning that took over the process. This is not surprising given the sorting function of summative assessment, which — as I’ve said earlier in this book — is less about creating learning and more about judging performance. What the pandemic experience did was to exacerbate this reality.
2 The Return to “Normal”: No Lessons Learned
During the Covid-19 pandemic, when schools and many offices were closed, students and teachers were online, and the whole structure of the working week had been disrupted, there was a promise in the air of this being a learning opportunity — that coming out of the process schools and universities would be able to take whatever learnings had been gathered to create a “new tomorrow”. However, that never really happened.
Zhao and Watterston (2021) identified the following major changes that Covid-19 had the potential to bring about: “curriculum that is developmental, personalized, and evolving; pedagogy that is student-centered, inquiry-based, authentic, and purposeful; and delivery of instruction that capitalizes on the strengths of both synchronous and asynchronous learning” (p. 3). The first two points became clear to educators during the pandemic precisely because the massive structure of standardised testing could not be sustained; it became
The International Commission on the Futures of Education (UNESCO, 2020) stated that, after Covid-19, “we cannot return to the world as it was before”. It noted that, among the changes needed to bring about a better educational system post-pandemic, was a review of the institutionalised and standardised model of schooling so as to explore more intentionally “individual study, group work, one-on-one meetings with teachers, research projects, citizen science, community service, and performance” (2020).
For Fernando Reimers (2021), the post-pandemic imperative was, “at the school or system level, [to] revisit the competencies that students are expected to have gained by the end of each grade, and focus on supporting the development of those competencies (rather than simply ‘covering the curriculum’)” (p. 18).
The idea of a competence-based curriculum framework is not new, but the experience of the pandemic strongly reinforced the need to adjust systems and processes to this effect, taking into account questions of wellbeing, personal agency, creativity, and learning to live together in an increasingly complex, interconnected world. The danger of future pandemics disrupting large-scale assessment design also meant that, by necessity, educators had to explore some alternative methods, including those that would support learners in low-infrastructure settings where access to a broadband connection is scarce and the option of moving examinations online is not viable.
However, despite the identified opportunities and the clear desire from many quarters to change systems for a more life-worthy and future-proof assessment system, the vast majority of schools reverted to the pre-2019 model following the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions.
To give an example, during the Covid years, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme restructured the assessment model by removing some of the examination papers and internal assessment exigencies: students graduated with a lighter assessment model (one examination rather than two in literature; two papers instead of three for the sciences, etc.). This was addressing the problem of curriculum load that affects so many high-school students — whereby the sheer volume of the curriculum makes it very difficult for students to muster deep understanding across such a broad range of tasks, as well as negatively affecting them psychologically and emotionally.
However, come 2023, the International Baccalaureate brought back the full battery of tests that make up the extremely rigorous 2019 assessment model of the Diploma. Instead of seizing the opportunity presented by the realities of Covid-19 to rethink the assessment model, lighten it quantitatively to create
In the UK, “the sharp drop in grades in A-level results in England [in 2023] ha[d] little to do with this particular cohort’s ability. It [was], instead, the result of a government strategy to get A-level results back to pre-pandemic levels, after the soaring grade inflation of the Covid years” (Wheale, 2023). What this meant, concretely, was that 2023 was a particularly difficult year for students, with tougher grade boundaries and lower scores, as was the case before Covid-19.
It is worth reflecting on the fact that the students who had to face this “return to normal” had also been affected by the pandemic, only earlier in their learning. Thus, the logic of reverting to a pre-pandemic system was not focused on the student experience but, rather, on the macro analysis of scores across the entire system, which had to be normalised. This type of statistical approach fails to take into account the individual student experience and is a patent example of how the whole machinery of large-scale assessments fails to do this.
If one walks through high schools today, the learning environment is very similar to what it was before the pandemic: students tend to be sitting in rows with a predominantly teacher-centred, didactic method. When this is not the case (and it’s important not to overgeneralise when making judgemental comments about classroom pedagogy because there are remarkable, forward-looking practitioners in the field), what one can be sure of is that the end of the last two years of high school continue to be focused disproportionately on grade attainment, examination papers, mark schemes — how to score points rather than how to learn.
If one major change in teaching and learning has occurred due to the experience of the pandemic, it is the use of technology. Schools employ technology, by and large, in more innovative and flexible ways than before the pandemic, allowing for more blended and hybrid learning. The question is, has this improved assessment and curriculum fundamentally, or just made the same model more accessible? In fact, many students commented on how tiring and monotonous online learning was during the lockdown, with a transmission model at the centre, limited interaction, and repetitive lesson schemes.
A number of universities followed a similar arc of reverting to pre-pandemic practices shortly after the lockdown. Yale and Dartmouth decided to revert to standardised tests instead of being “test optional” as they had been during and just after the pandemic. Their argument was that data showed fewer disadvantaged students’ being able to access university places through a test-optional structure (Saul, 2024). This is something we will explore in greater detail in the next chapter of this book.
3
they [high-stakes exams] may not always be the solution for achieving equitable educational opportunities for all as they disadvantage students with difficulties to deal with pressure, poorer students who cannot afford private tutoring, labelling children as failures or focusing uniquely on the test curriculum rather than on individual learning needs. (Huong & Shwabe, 2022, p. 14)
So the problem of equity is not necessarily solved by large-scale solutions. This is a major factor to consider especially when the stakes are particularly high, for it is under these circumstances that the extra pressure on students and parents will drive them to look for material and pedagogic aids that poorer students cannot afford, actually widening the inequality gap. Moreover, examinations tend to magnify the damaging effects of prioritising curriculum coverage over learning.
If educators or others do create alternative assessment systems, they need to take into account problems of reliability since alternative systems have a tendency to be much more subjective — thus potentially less fair. However, the response cannot be to remain anchored in the traditional assessment system, for this does not solve the problem, either. We must bring an entirely new and imaginative design to the forefront of high-school assessment if we want change to be substantive and meaningful.
The experience of Covid-19 shook the foundations of high-school assessment, right at its most sensitive pressure point: the end-of-school qualification. How ready are we for future disruptions of this magnitude? The answer is that we are not ready until a more resilient and sustainable assessment system is in place.
References
Bryant, J., Child, F., Espinosa, J., Dorn, E., Hall, S., Schmautzer, D., Kola-Oyeneyin, T., … & Woord, B. (2022, April 4). How Covid-19 caused a global learning crisis. Mckinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/how-covid-19-caused-a-global-learning-crisis#/
Fitzgerald, S. (2023). Covid-19 and the International Baccalaureate: A computer-assisted discourse analysis of the IB scandal. British Journal of Educational Studies, 71(2), 129–148. http://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2022.2056575
Hughes, C. (2020). Covid-19 and the opportunity to design a more mindful approach to learning. Prospects, 49, 69–72. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09492-z
Huong, L. T., & Schwabe, M. (2022). High-stakes exams and assessments during the Covid-19 crisis: What is the status at the end of the 2020–2021 school year? Programme and meeting document. UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000381686
Kuhfeld, M., Soland, J., & Lewis, K. (2022). Test score patterns across three Covid-19– impacted school years. Annenberg Institute, Brown University. https://doi.org/10.26300/ga82-6v47
Lewin, K. M. (2020). Contingent reflections on coronavirus and priorities for educational planning and development. Prospects, 49, 17–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-020-09480-3
Reimers, F. (2021). Education and Covid-19: Recovering from the shock created by the pandemic and building back better. Educational Practices Series 34. UNESCO International Bureau of Education, & International Academy of Education. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000378626
Saul, S. (2024, February 22). Yale to require standardized test scores for admissions. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/us/yale-standardized-testing-sat-act.html
Timsit, A. (2020, August 19). France has a lesson for the UK in giving fair grades during a pandemic. QUARTZ. https://qz.com/1893452/frances-baccalaureate-handled-covid-19-better-than-uk-a-levels
UN [United Nations]. (2020, August). Education during Covid-19 and beyond. Policy brief. https://unsdg.un.org/resources/policy-brief-education-during-covid-19-and-beyond
UNESCO. (2020). Education in a post-Covid world: Nine ideas for public action. UNESCO International Commission on the Futures of Education. https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/education_in_a_post-covid_world-nine_ideas_for_public_action.pdf
UNICEF. (2022, November 18). UNICEF calls for averting a lost generation as Covid-19 threatens to cause irreversible harm to children’s education, nutrition and well-being. Press release. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unicef-calls-averting-lost-generation-covid-19-threatens-cause-irreversible-harm
Wheale, S. (2023, August 17). A “glide path” to pre-Covid: Why A-level grades are lower in England this year. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/aug/17/a-glide-path-to-pre-covid-why-a-level-grades-are-lower-in-england-this-year
Zhao, Y., & Watterston, J. (2021). The changes we need: Education post Covid-19. Journal of Educational Change, 22(1), 3–12. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-021-09417-3. PMCID: PMC7890782