Justice and the need to speak about Jesus
by Martin Davie:
The argument over the summer about Ofqual’s ill-fated use of an algorithm to help determine this year’s A level results is interesting, among other reasons, because of what it tells about our society’s commitment to justice.
If we ask what the argument was about, the answer is that that the issue as stake was how best to ensure that those who had taken A levels got the grades they deserved for the effort they had put into their studies.
The reason that Ofqual decided to use an algorithm was to try to ensure that in, the absence of A level exams as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic, reliance on the A level grades predicted by teachers did not result in higher than normal grades being awarded to pupils taking their A levels this year. This, it was argued, would be unjust because it would give these pupils an unfair advantage in relation to other pupils who took their A levels in the past, or who would take their A levels in the future. The algorithm was designed to prevent this unjust outcome by adjusting pupils’ predicted grades so that the grades awarded to pupils from a particular school or college were in line with those achieved by pupils from that school or college in previous years.
By contrast, the reason why there were protests against the A level results was the conviction that the use of the algorithm meant that those pupils who had legitimately outperformed pupils from previous years were not being awarded the grades their efforts deserved. They were being given lower grades than they deserved because of the historic performance of their school or college and this was regarded as unjust because in did not take the efforts of particular individuals into account.
Regardless of which side of the argument was correct, what is clear is that both sides were motivated by the belief that justice ought to be done. The argument was not about whether justice should be done, but about how justice might best be achieved in this particular case.
What this fact illustrates is that our society still believes that justice ought to be done and that it views justice in terms of ‘giving to each their due’ as the Roman writer Ulpian famously put it. Thus, A level pupils ought to be given the grades they deserve, workers ought to be given a just reward for the work they have put in, and criminals ought to be punished for the crimes they have committed.
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