That's the cry in the newspapers today. In lieu of exams in the UK, which were cancelled due to Covid 19 risks, the education departments had to decide how to award exam results to people who did not sit them. 

In Scotland, they took the estimated grades from teachers, applied a normalisation function to the results (as they actually do each year in fact) to try and account for unreasonable fluctuations and to ensure that the results have some meaning when compared to the previous and subsequent years. This meant that many results were downgraded from what teachers predicted, leading to an outcry, leading to the Scottish government changing their tack that no grades would be awarded that were lower than the teacher's prediction, much joy ensued...

Except not everywhere. Hang on a second! I worked really hard and was definitely an A student and now I've found out that another student who was a B at best was awarded As because the teacher said so? That's not fair!

Of course it isn't fair. It isn't fair if you use teacher's grades because some are more generous than others. Some might strive for accuracy, others to inflate their school's overall grades. Some might be looking to give the benefit of the doubt and others are much more religious in their gradings. 

So presumably we should just go with the original idea and adjust everything according to past results? Well that's not fair! Maybe our school improved so much that we would have received higher grades than the system allows for since the affect of the normalising will punish outliers.

OK, let's just use mock results. That's not fair! I wasn't going 100% for my mocks and was planning to work extra hard before my real exams, especially since my memory isn't great and I needed to cram over a much shorter period. I lost that chance and am now being punished for it.

Of course it's not fair. None of it is. It is unfair that people are getting grades lower than they deserve or would have got but it is also unfair that some people who wouldn't have done well are being rewarded by generous teacher grades and are causing the genuine clever clogs to look less differentiated.

The point is, that having a country suffer from a pandemic is not fair. It's not fair that some elderly folks (and some younger) have possibly lost a few years or more due to a disease that we haven't seen before. It's not fair that some businesses have gone bust. That people have lost thousands on holidays and weddings that couldn't take place. Coming to think of it, it is unfair that some people die young, that many do not live out their dreams or are abused or neglected in some way. It is unfair that people in poorer countries can be clever and motivated and still fail to achieve greatness due to lack of opportunity while others in richer countries have incredible amounts of wealth and waste it on cars, phones and TVs that they don't need.

Do you know what, don't dwell on what has taken place. Take what you are handed in life and make the most of it. Many of us missed out on opportunities we thought were a given. Maybe we had someone to blame, maybe we didn't, but we all learned that life does not end when you don't make the course that you intended or meet the grades for the career you were looking at. We moved on, we worked hard and we got to where we are today.

So be content, count your blessings and take the flack on the chin. You'll be much happier for it.