Colleges will not make unconditional offers on the basis of AS grades alone".
That means the final A-level results published on Thursday may differ from forecasts based on GCSE grades alone.
When she talked with department chairmen, Dean Malkiel said, they told her that none of them could rein in their grades alone.
"Unless you have a very keen sense of this high school or that high school, you can't always tell how good a student is by grades alone".
Yet at the same time, changes to A-levels, such as the removal of most January AS-level exams, mean some universities are struggling to select students from predictive grades alone and are introducing entrance exams and interviews.
Earlier this year a survey by the University and College Union found one in 10 admissions staff said their university was making unconditional offers based on predicted grades alone.
The education system has been undermined by the "tyranny" of testing to such a degree that grades alone can no longer be trusted to identify the best university candidates, AC Grayling has told private school heads.
But numbers and grades alone did not prove to spell success at Google and are no longer used as important hiring criteria, says Prasad Setty, vice president for people analytics.
