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Jessica Johnson
Jessica Johnson won an Orwell Youth Prize last year for her story A Band Apart
An award-winning author whose dystopian fiction about an algorithm that sorts students into class-based bands says she “fell into my own story.”
Jessica Johnson, 18, said St Andrews University had initially rejected her after her English A level was downgraded from an A to a B.
Exams this year were canceled due to Covid and degrees based on an algorithm.
Ms Johnson said it was “ironic to be a victim like one of her characters”.
Her piece, A Band Apart, won an Orwell Youth Prize Senior Award in 2019.
“I wrote about the inequalities in the education system,” said the Ashton Sixth Form College student.
“I wrote about the myth of meritocracy and it was about an algorithm that divides people into bands based on the class they were from.
“I feel like that’s pretty ironic. I literally fell into my own story.”
“I feel like a victim there,” she added.
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Reuters
There have been a number of protests over A-level degrees after exams were canceled due to the pandemic
Ms Johnson, from Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, needed an A in English literature for a place at St Andrews and a £ 16,000 scholarship.
“I did a lot of extracurricular work and I got that scholarship based on my performance and it felt like just that. [has] has been taken away from me because of the place I live and the college where I attend, “she said.
About 40% of the A-level results – published on Thursday – were downgraded from the assessments of teachers by exam regulator Ofqual, who used a formula based on the previous grades of schools.
After protests, the government has now said that estimates of teachers will be used and Ms Johnson hopes she will go into St Andrews.
She said she was “grateful” and “excited” about the government’s U-turn, but felt it should have been done sooner.
“It caused a lot of stress and anxiety that it didn’t have to wait for us,” she said.
Professor Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Foundation, praised Ms Johnson’s “prescient story”.
She said the teenager “looked into the heart of what the system represents and her story demonstrates the human ability which exams only exist to discover”.
