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Hello and welcome to a brand new series of more or less. We are the show that tries to help

you interpret the numbers all around all of us, both in the news and in life.

This week, how many people have died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986?

And more importantly, one of the chances that my producer produces a baby before she produces

the final show of the series. But first, I'm joining the studio by Ben Carter. Hello, Ben.

Hi, Tim. Now, a newspaper headline caught my eye earlier this month.

Revealed A-level results are 48% wrong. That was from the Times on August 11th.

It's a pretty amazing claim to make, nearly half of A-level results are wrong.

But is it true? I asked Dennis Sherwood, who's an independent consultant with a significant

interest in education, who's done work for the English exam regulator, Offqual?

Overall, on average, across all subjects for A-level AS and GCSE, there's about one

chance in four that you're awarded a grade, which is different from the grade that a senior

examiner would have given you had a senior examiner marked your script. So about 25% of grades are

wrong in that sense. But how do we know about these grading anomalies? Well, Offqual carried out

some research over several years, which Dennis Sherwood says was of extremely high quality.

They published two major reports, one in 2016 and the other at the end of 2018.

The essence of the research was to take very large numbers of scripts,

whole cohorts across subjects, and to have the scripts marked by an ordinary examiner

and given a grade and having the same script marked by a senior examiner and given a grade.

For all those scripts, they were then able to compare the grade from the ordinary examiner

to the grade from a senior examiner and say, are they the same or different? So they had literally

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