Our school uses Unifrog which is a tool for supporting the transition from school to university. It has lits of features - including the ability to select a shortlist of university courses. To do this you select your GCSE performance from a drop-down box with the options "straight 9s", "mainly 8s and 9s", "straight 7s and 8s", "mainly 7s 8s a few 6s", etc. Then there is another box to say whether you are doing A Level, IB, BTEC. After that you say what subject(s) you want to do at uni. The tool finds all the courses that broadly match, and divides them into 3 columns labelled Aspirational, Solid and Safe. Courses that they consider to be out of your range are labelled with a red exclamation mark (which doesn't stop you selecting them for your shortlist but they will be clearly labelled as "out of range" if you do, so it's a bit of a psychological barrier).
It's a good concept, but it's ruined by the fact that they use the GCSE performance (and nothing else) to predict your A Level grades and seem to make a hash of it. For example, if you select a GCSE performance of "mainly 8s and 9s" all of the most aspirational university courses that require A A A are labelled as out of range. The only way to bring them back into range is to select "straight 9s" for GCSE. I know you have to be bright to get onto one of those courses, but very few students get straight 9s and I'm pretty sure getting a few 8s is no barrier to getting top A Level grades.
It seems so unnecessary. Why not just let the students predict their own A Level performance instead, or enter the predicted grades their teachers have given them?
I did email the company, and they said it was designed in consultation with schools etc etc. Maybe it was designed for the old A,B,C grades and they've done some crude upgrade that translates Straight As into Straight 9s, but if so I'm surprised schools aren't complaining about it.
If your school uses Unifrog, maybe take a look and see if you have the same issue.
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Unifrog predicting A level grades from limited information
25 replies
jammambo · 08/11/2019 19:02
OP posts:
Alsioma ·
10/11/2019 00:59
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