
The Secret Algorithm That's Keeping Students Out of College - aspenmayer
https://www.wired.com/story/algorithm-set-students-grades-altered-futures/
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aspenmayer
Yikes. The appeals process has a fee, and I believe the testing process has
fees per test per student, but they are sometimes covered directly or
indirectly by the student’s school. In any case, this is a situation ripe for
abuse due to the forced arbitration of going through the IB appeals process.
We dearly need international standards bodies to make standardized testing
truly standardized and accessible to the world. Private companies may have a
role in this, but they need not be the only way to get test scores that are
valid.

> Teen regrets about grades aren’t unusual, but the way the foundation behind
> the IB Diploma Programme calculated this year’s grades was. The results,
> released Monday, were determined by a formula that IB, the foundation behind
> the program, hastily deployed after canceling its usual springtime exams due
> to Covid-19. The system used signals including a student’s grades on
> assignments and grades from past grads at their school to predict what they
> would have scored had the pandemic not prevented in-person tests.

> Nagpal and many other students, parents, and teachers say those predictions
> misfired. Many students received suspiciously low scores, they say,
> shattering their plans for the fall and beyond. Nagpal’s backup plan if she
> missed out on NYU was to study medicine in Germany, but her lower-than-
> expected grades don’t allow that either. “Like so many, I was extremely
> shocked,” she says. “I basically cannot study what I want to anywhere
> anymore.”

> More than 15,000 parents, students, and teachers have signed an online
> petition[1] asking IB to “take a different approach with their grading
> algorithm and to make it fairer.” The foundation declined to answer
> questions about its system but said it had been checked against five years
> of past results and that disappointed students could use its existing
> appeals process, which comes with a fee. The foundation released summary
> statistics showing that this year’s average score was slightly higher than
> last year’s, and it says the distribution of grades was similar.

[1] [https://www.change.org/p/international-baccalaureate-
organis...](https://www.change.org/p/international-baccalaureate-organisation-
ibo-justice-for-may-2020-ib-graduates-build-a-better-future)

