Predictive Futures: The Normalisation of Monitoring and Surveillance in Education | by Tactical Tech | Sep, 2020 | Medium

In 2020, tens of thousands of high school students across the United Kingdom took to the streets to protest the use of an algorithm that predicted their end-of-school grades. The algorithm had lowered almost 40% of grades, meaning some pupils were no longer eligible for their chosen university or college. The algorithmic scoring impacted students from lower income backgrounds the most, despite warnings of the ‘potential risk of bias’, raised in a parliamentary education committee a month prior. Days later, the UK Education Secretary Gavin Williamson backtracked on the decision, stating that pupils who had been marked down would now receive their original teacher-assessed grades. This was a historic U-turn, noted as one of the few times that the government have acknowledged the ‘discriminatory potential of algorithmically-informed policy regimes.’