Remark Grift?
A rant and a speculative grudge on how education systems have failed the Class of 2023
For this article, I want to address some sour grapes. You might remember more than a month ago I wrote this piece:
Pinned Note: A Context Free Normality
Disruption has become a theme over the past few years. Changes socially and politically have impacted societies around the world, and the COVID pandemic has brought major shockwaves in every aspect of modern life. As time marches on, people adapt. Less people wear masks on the streets, PCR tests become incre…
As I am officially going to enter university, I believe it is the appropriate time to add some nuance to the article and a quick background to why I wrote this piece in the first place.
To say I was disappointed in my final IB results is more than just an understatement. I was two marks below the score which my conditional offers require me to enter university, and the subsequent two weeks were followed by chaos and anxiety as I race to file my appeals for the IB to remark my scores, find alternative options like taking Foundational courses in the UK, and suffer through a barrage of emotional baggage sent from my parents on top of my stress getting the best of me at times. The good news is, after a painful twenty days, HKU’s Bachelor of Journalism approved my appeal right after CUHK’s Politics and Public Administration department approved my appeal as well. I chose to study Journalism in HKU and everything was set from there. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the aftermath which followed the dismal results from the IB. As I started my Japan trip right after confirming my spot in HKU, I discovered I had records of high blood pressure during measurements, a self-diagnosis that my family hypotheses comes from stress such as the reaction I had after getting my IB grades.
While I dealt with the trauma in the days after receiving my grades, I started getting outraged. During my conversations with my friends, we spotted a pattern that many students have. They achieved far lower scores than their predicted grades, and just like me, are a few points short of reaching the conditional offers set by universities. My rage grew even further after I received my detailed report on my IB grades. Exams I am confident in and have achieved a steady mark throughout my two years in the IBDP have gotten worse, papers I usually obtain a 6 or a 7 are dropped to a 5 and sometimes 4. And even essay scores that are not affected by the pressures of live exams also took a hit, as I saw more abysmal grades for the same Internal Assessments I have repeatedly checked and discussed with my teachers responsible for grading them. Among friends, “Fuck the IB” and “We’re all fucking screwed” were more than commonplace during DMs.
More and more, as I started thinking about all the connections, my emotions were built up. And in a fit of personal release, I wrote the article linked above. It was catharsis, and if you still did not get who I am referring to in that piece, it was the IB.
But after more than a month from the revelation of my grades, I still think it is important to redress my grievances because the pattern of disappointing grades for the Class of 2023 as a whole is not limited to myself, the school, or the IB.
As the SCMP reported in the morning of the day all students received their IB results on July 8, 2023:
Twenty-three Hong Kong students attained a perfect score in the International Baccalaureate (IB) exams this year, down from 93 in 2022, with the awarding body saying the distribution of grades was back to pre-pandemic levels.
The more than 70 per cent decline in the number of top scorers locally was in line with the global trend. Only 179 candidates achieved full marks, compared with 640 last year.
A total of 2,275 students in Hong Kong and 179,917 worldwide received their results for the IB’s Diploma Programme (DP) and Career-related Programme (CP) on Thursday.
…
All schools recorded a drop in the number of top scorers compared with last year. The global average score was 30.24, lower than last year’s 31.98.
Two weeks later, IB students have the temporary relief that they were not the only people who fucked up. Again from the SCMP:
Four students have achieved perfect scores in the Hong Kong university entrance exams this year, marking a record low.
The top scorers were among 48,762 candidates who took the Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) exams between April 21 and May 18. Candidates will receive their results on Wednesday.
As you can see, there is a global trend, regardless of educational system and region, the Class of 2023 students achieved much poorer grades than the years that came before them. But among the noise of official examiners and teachers being patronizing and saying some version of “don’t let your grades define you” or “it’s okay you are not the only one going through this,” one stood out in particular.
In the same SCMP article on the IB perfect scorers, they referenced from the IB’s official side:
The IB said its grade awarding system was similar to the one employed in 2019. In response to pandemic-related disruptions, it introduced “appropriate grade boundaries” in 2021 and 2022.
“Students taking their final assessments in the May 2023 session will be the first cohort to have experienced only limited disruption to their studies due to Covid-19,” it said. “In line with other international awarding bodies, the IB had decided that the distribution of grades awarded for our qualifications returned close to those of May 2019.”
IB director general Olli-Pekka Heinonen said: “This year again, IB students in Hong Kong have shown outstanding resilience, adaptability and dedication to their learning. Their academic results reflect the IB family’s shared commitment to excellence.”
“My ass,” my friends commented to me after I referred to the piece during my conversations with friends that night. And personally, I feel quite rightly so! Dismissing our hard work through a grueling course by not only giving us a poor grade but giving such condescending remarks makes students like me feel very disappointed in ourselves, hence the other motivator which led me to write the context-free reality article.
What made me want to revisit this case comes from two sources. One reported on the news and one from a private source.
According to the HKFP, one-third of students who sat through the DSE this year requested an appeal to remark on their papers:
Around 34 per cent of candidates who sat Hong Kong’s university entrance exams have lodged appeals of their results, according to the city’s examinations authority.
…
In a press release issued by the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA) on Wednesday morning, the authority said over 16,600 candidates who sat this year’s Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE) had applied for their exam papers to be checked or marked again, 1.7 per cent more than last year.
As you can see from the table and the information above, the amount of people requesting a remark is not a small number whether you read it directly or calculate the proportion it has towards the number of total candidates. Not to mention the DSE system has a more rigid and by-the-book grading system compared to the IB, which leads me to my second source.
On Monday, I received an email from my old school with an update on my IB transcripts. After remarks, all students have to wait for all the remarks of all the students to be finished by the IB before being given back their updated transcripts. The email said they are still not received by the school, but this was not the part I am focused on. As I clicked the send to list, it shook me. 68 students were on the receiving end of the email, which leads to the conclusion that nearly seventy out of more than one hundred and thirty students in our school alone have appealed for a remark in at least one of their subjects. After some quick calculations, the percentage of students requesting a remark is a whopping 52%.
That is just the remark rate of one Class of 2023 cohort in one school; we have no idea what the numbers are in other international schools and places that teach IBDP courses. Unlike the DSE system which provides remarks services for free, the IB system requires a fee of $855 HKD to remark on one subject. For me, I chose to remark on all six subjects I have studied. Even if you generously assume all 68 students only requested one remark on one subject, it still rakes in a profit of $58,140 HKD, and that is the bare minimum profit.
Even though most remarks ended up with most subjects seeing either no increase or a measly one or two-point increase in my total scaled moderated mark. But for English, it saw a nine-point increase in the total scaled moderated mark but unfortunately was one point short of changing the score from a 5 to a 6. Learning that on top of everything I have just written about is really something because a part of me feels that remarks are a scam, despite the warnings such feelings are very hard to swap away.
To be clear so I am not charged with defamation by anybody, I am not claiming the IB is scamming people. But for education authorities, I do want them to seriously review what has happened. The situation for the Class of 2023 is unique, they have not received the benefits the previous two years have awarded due to the status of the pandemic, and the Class of 2024 will undoubtedly receive a much lenient grading curve and better grades after the fiasco this year. What is important is not only to prevent what has happened from happening again but to make sure the effects of the pandemic are fully recognized. For alumni from the Class of 2023, I guess this is the best we can hope for after such an agonizing experience.