A-levels: Student foresaw exam crisis in winning story

An award-winning author whose dystopian fiction about an algorithm that types college students into bands based mostly on class says she has “fallen into my very own story”.

Jessica Johnson, 18, stated the College of St Andrews had initially rejected her after her English A-level was downgraded from an A to B.

Exams this 12 months had been cancelled resulting from Covid and grades based mostly on an algorithm.

Ms Johnson stated it was “ironic to develop into a sufferer like considered one of her characters”.

Her piece, A Band Aside, received an Orwell Youth Prize Senior award in 2019.

“I wrote concerning the inequality in the schooling system,” the Ashton Sixth Kind Faculty pupil stated.

“I wrote concerning the fable of meritocracy and it was about an algorithm that cut up folks into bands based mostly on the category that they had been from.

“I really feel like that’s fairly ironic, I’ve actually fallen into my very own story.”

“I really feel a sufferer of it,” she added.

Ms Johnson, of Stalybridge, Larger Manchester, wanted an A in English Literature for a spot at St Andrews and a £16,000 scholarship.

“I’ve executed plenty of extra-curricular work and I have been provided that scholarship on the premise of my achievements and it simply felt like all of that [has] been taken away from me due to the place I reside and the school I attend,” she stated.

About 40% of A-level outcomes – revealed on Thursday – had been downgraded from academics’ assessments by exams regulator Ofqual, which used a system based mostly on faculties’ prior grades.

Following protests, the federal government has now stated trainer estimates will likely be used and Ms Johnson is hoping she is going to get in at St Andrews.

She stated she was “grateful” and “excited” concerning the authorities’s U-turn however felt it ought to have been executed it sooner.

“It is precipitated plenty of stress and nervousness that it did not have to by making us wait,” she stated.

Professor Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Basis, praised Ms Johnson’s “prescient story”.

She stated {the teenager} “noticed into the guts of what the system represents and her story demonstrates the human means which exams solely exist to uncover”.