This Grading Algorithm Is Failing Students

Schools around the world are trying to figure out what education in the time of Covid-19 will look like — and specifically how, where personal contact isn’t possible, to monitor and assess students’ progress. The experience of Hadrien Pellous, a high school senior in London, offers a caution: Don’t leave it up to an algorithm.

Pellous attended one of the more than 3,000 schools — most in the U.S. — that offer a standardized curriculum managed by a Geneva-based organization called the International Baccalaureate. The program includes high-stakes final exams, which typically account for 80% of the final grade in a subject and can thus decide a student’s college prospects. When the coronavirus pandemic made in-person testing too risky, the organization cancelled the exams and replaced them with something very different: a statistical model designed to predict how students would have done.