<https://twitter.com/HUCKmagazine/status/1294985562106015750> <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20/world/europe/uk-england-grading-algorithm...> Even after a final term with schools closed for the pandemic, Sam Sharpe-Roe was optimistic about the coming school year. Teachers from his West London school had given him grades — three A’s and one B — that were strong enough to secure him a spot at his first choice of university next month. But after the British government used a computer-generated score to replace exams that were canceled because of the coronavirus, all his grades fell and the college revoked his admission. Mr. Sharpe-Roe, along with thousands of other students and parents, had received a crude lesson in what can go wrong when a government relies on an algorithm to make important decisions affecting the public. Experts said the grading scandal was a sign of debates to come as Britain and other countries increasingly use technology to automate public services, arguing that it can make government more efficient and remove human prejudices. But critics say the opaque systems often amplify biases that already exist in society and are typically adopted without sufficient debate, faults that were put on clear display in the grading disaster. Nearly 40 percent of students in England saw their grades reduced after the government re-evaluated the exams, known as A-levels, with the software model. It included in its calculations a school’s past performance on the tests and a student’s earlier results on “mock” exams. Government officials said the model was meant to make the system more fair, balancing out potentially inflated scores given by some teachers. But students and their parents, particularly those from lower-income areas with struggling schools, were outraged that their futures had been turned over to lines of code that favored students from private schools and wealthy areas. [...]