Who else fell foul of English 'downgrading'? Feeling glum.

I know all students don't do their best. My DD was amongt them in year 10.

What I said was students don't use grade boundaries as an excuse to slack off. If the are going to slack off they will do it either way. Most students will look at grade boundaries only to see that they are on track.

What noblegiraffe said...

Sorry. I've hit a nerve. I will bow out now and leave you to get on with it.

Oh FFS know you wade into a thread about English downgrading saying you've read threads and throw your tuppence-worth in and you don't even know what people are complaining about?

AQA English. Read the news. The inquiry. The legal challenges? Then come back and say it's down to kids slacking off.

We can only submit in June. What board and subject are we talking about.

What is the advantage of submitting in January?

Your students are less mature and you are unlikely to want to exercise the 60% rule.

Do you really think all students do their very best?

some do, many don't

know but it is the education secretary who is saying that he had no influence over the exam board taking this possibly illegal course of action to reduce student passes.

know if you submitted your controlled assessment in January and got 43 marks it converted to a C grade UMS score. To get the same C grade UMS score if you submitted your controlled assessment in June, you had to get 46 marks. For the same controlled assessment.

How can you justify that?

I don't believe students sit back and put less effort into later modules. They use the marks given as an indicator as to how they are doing and if they are working to the level they are expected to reach.

Some students will know they are working as hard as they are able and will strive to keep up that effort. Others will know they can do better and put that effort in, in the hope of pushing up the grade boundaries. Then there are the students who don't put the effort in and will drop expected grades regardless of the information they have been given.

Please don't insult students by saying they relax in later modules and aim for a C.

Some dcs work very very hard just to get that C grade and it seems that these are the students who have come foul to this situation. Just because a child is aiming for a C, does not mean they are working any less than a bright child aiming for the A*.

It's not just the Education Secretary who has expressed concerns. Higher education staff and employers have said likewise.

I don't know enough about the grade boundaries for your CAT/subject.

For mine, there is generic marking criteria which won't change from year to year. Looking at the UMS we received on our our CATs, it looks like a linear scale up from raw to UMS, ie no bell curve.

We can only submit CAT marks for June, so there are no January and June grade boundaries.

I have only this year's experience of the new CAT system and I find it very transparent. We were very pleased relieved with our results considering the amount of curriculum time the CAT took.

One of the things I learned from the new CAT process is that it is very important for all teaching staff to attend training. For my awarding body, this was a free course, and definitely worth then travel cost.

And its levelling out just happened to coincide with an excessive rise in the C/D grade boundary and an education secretary who has spent ages banging on about how exam passes should fall?

How incredibly convenient.

Another thought that I have is that grade inflation over the last 10 years or so is completely justified.

It doesn't not mean that exams are easier, or marking more lenient.

Students and teachers have access to a wealth of information now that just did not exist 10+ years ago. Students can access every past paper, mark scheme and examiner comment about their subject. Teachers can network with other teachers to improve knowledge and resources. If a student wants to read around their subject, they are spoilt rotten with Wikipedia, YouTube and other websites.

This, however, has to level out. And it has - this year.

But the controlled assessment wasn't more difficult, it was exactly the same. How can the grade boundaries change for a piece of work that hasn't changed?

It's pretty easy to quell that argument by saying that papers are not of equal difficulty.

Grade boundaries change in every exam series. I can look back in my own subject and see massive variations over the 5 years of the qualification. For some exams, a "c" was 12/36 and other times 19/36. That's quite a difference, and something we just took in our stride.

The statisticians will need to get hold of these results to see if there is a significant lowering of results. My gut feel is that there isn't. It would be interesting to know what the overall result would be if the raw boundary was lowered by 1 mark. Probably thousands of students would get a higher mark.

It is interesting that employers have welcomed a tightening of standards.

I was an examiner for AQA English Lang for many years and they were always rigorously fair in their marking with grade boundaries only shifting slightly every year.Every year there was a public outcry against grade inflation and increasing numbers gaining the highest grades.This year this seems to have been addressed and still there are complaints.
I know that the C/D borderline comes under the closest scrutiny possible.
It is always worth asking for a re-mark if there are real concerns.

But the problem, know isn't pupils doing well on an early module and slacking off later, the problem is an exam board artificially increasing grade boundaries beyond what is normal in order to ensure that more students failed than in previous sittings.

What's also bad is that they excessively increased the grade boundary required for a C grade on the Foundation paper, but not on the Higher paper. It was much harder to get a C in English in June than it was in January but only if you were a lower ability student entered for the Foundation paper.

I've read a few threads on this topics and similar and have been holding off commenting.

Firstly, there is no such thing as a grade for a module (even if the exam board shows a small letter for it). You don't have a grade until the whole qualification is cashed in. Every single UMS point is added together to make up the final result, and only then is the grade awarded.

I think a culture has grown up of students wanting to know what this or that mark means. If they do well on an early module or a CAT, they relax. They aim for just making the grade, asking "what do i need to do for a C?" They don't want to put the effort into going way over the grade boundary. Some schools support this mentality by putting all the teaching/revision/clinic/resit effort into C/D students.

Well, their gamble failed this year.

Students should be encouraged and expected to get the very highest mark they can and forget about grade boundaries. Even if they are predicted an "a" on a module, they should be aiming for as high a mark as possible, because the extra few marks will contribute to their overall score and make up for weaker modules.

I am also very surprised at the reports on Mumsnet of scaling down of CAT marks. Did the teachers not attend training courses? Can they not read mark schemes? It's not rocket science.

Ofqual has announced an investigation already rosajam.

Same as BeingFluffy: DS got an A* in Language which wasn't predicted and an A in Lit, where he's stronger.

Just to clarify a point, even under the new linear exams, resits will be available for maths and English (only) in November each year so that students who miss out on a C in June will still have a chance to get into college etc.

DD got a B in english lit, which she was delighted about because her teacher was marking her practice papers really low. I've just looked at the grade boundaries and she is 5 marks off an A. I can't find a comparison to see if she has been affected by moving the boundaries.

She was two points away from Bs in three other subjects. I can't help thinking it would be fairer to mark subjects with an overall percentage.

My SS got a D as well. A*/A's in science and math but he's going to resit the English. He's always had major issues with spelling but his content is good so he's in second top set for English at school. We'd expected a C due to the spelling tbh.
At least he can resit - if I understand the current plans that option is going to disappear.