New York – 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 United States — 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 percent 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.
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