So now @GavinWilliamson has promised free A Level appeals, let's look at how that might work out. Let's take a real student predicted AAA but who ended up with ACC due to the way that the stats analysis was applied. What can they do to get a fairer outcome? /1

They cannot appeal their teacher grade, but they wouldn't want to as the teachers predicted AAA. They might want to appeal the ranking (this might give them an A or B instead) but they cannot do this. Such an appeal would be impossible to uphold anyway - how would one decide? /2

They know an error has not been made as they know what their centre sent in. The school could appeal if they felt the historic data was wrong, but this will be a small number of centres where really major changes have occurred. /3

So far no ability to appeal. They can however appeal on grounds of discrimination (this again seems unlikely as the teachers predicted them well, even if they were placed lower in the rankings than others). You are equally actively discouraged from appealing on such grounds /4

Short answer: you have little or no recourse if you are in the same position as the student I have just described. If you have been screwed over by the statistical model, the message is essentially to just suck it up as having statistically similar cohorts is more important /5

Of course other students would have grounds to appeal. In most cases these grounds would be similar to those in a normal year. Nothing here fundamentally deals with the unfairness of the grade awarding process in a year where nobody actually sat an exam. /6

While we are on it. This from @ofqual is disingenuous in several ways. 1) Those 2 aims were subservient to maintaining "standards" (see second image) 3) Being "within 1 grade" is a big deal!! Just 55% saw no change and 2% were upgd 4) The appeals process is very, very limited /7

And of course, as @Samfr pointed out: @ofqual and @GavinWilliamson trying to blame teachers for "over-predicting" is extremely poor form! https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1294032966293827585?s=20