The Student and the Algorithm: How the Exam Results Fiasco Threatened One Pupil's Future

Josiah Elleston-Burrell had done everything to make his dream of studying architecture a reality. But, suddenly, in the pandemic summer of 2020, he found his fate was no longer in his hands -- and began a determined battle to reclaim his future. From a long read at The Guardian: The algorithm did what it was supposed to do. Humans, in the end, had no stomach for what it was supposed to do. Algorithms don't go rogue, they don't go on mutant rampages, they only sometimes reveal and amplify the cruddy human biases that underpin them. Ofqual's mistake was to think this exercise -- which made plain our usual tricks for filtering and limiting young lives -- would be morally tolerable as it played out in public view.

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