Predicted Grades for UCAS

secret I meant at my school it's dead man's shoes. I expect if I changed schools I could find one that would be happy to let me teach it. In my department, I've been teaching 8 years and am the least experienced, so well down the list. My maths department is pretty unusual though.

Grade boundaries change according to the difficulty of the paper. They decide how difficult the paper is in part by looking at how students actually did on it compared to how they were expected to do. So yes, if fewer students than expected score high marks, this could lower the grade boundaries.

noblegiraffe It's dead man's shoes to get to teach it Off topic slightly but is that really true? I thought there was a shortage of FM teachers?
DS1 is aiming to teach FM.

"Although prospectuses for 2014 are asking for A*AA-AAB for RG universities, which would suggest that lots of places may remain unfilled, come results day."

You really don't have much of an idea how this stuff works, do you?

It's ABB now library. And it won't be lowered to BBB in the near future.

"Do the grade boundaries lower if there are fewer students scoring very high marks?"

I think they may do. Since a year or two ago something called 'comparable outcomes' rather than criterion referencing has been used to set grade boundaries. This is supposed to ensure that a year group isn't disadvantaged or advantaged compared to previous year groups especially when there is a syllabus or exam structure change. So if they use the same methodology this year, the final grades should be similar to before even without the resits. But there may be some political pressure to reduce them.

If you got a D at AS in 2009, it was statistically more likely to move up one or two grades than it was to stay the same, and much more likely to move upwards than downwards.

That's probably due to students who are unlikely to improve on their D grade dropping the subject, so you are left with the more hopeful D grade students, IYSWIM.

And what you say of B grades is of course correct, but it is also true that a third of B grades to elevate. That's not to be sniffed at is it?

Where did you get a third from? I can see nearly 20% going from a B to A/A*, not a third. As mentioned, that would have been in a year with more resit opportunities than now, too. When there were January modules we spent time carefully analysing UMS totals and advising students on a borderline to resit select earlier, lower scoring modules in the hope of tipping them over into the next grade. Without those January results, we're flying blind.

Sorry a resit taken at the end of year 13

Library, almost by definition a re-sit is going to produce a higher mark - they know what to expect and how hard they need to work. Coupled with the fact that exams and resits were spread across the year made it much easier to improve a low AS.

That isn't possible anymore, and although I'd guess a re-sit taken at the end of year 12 would also produce higher grades on average, it would almost certainly be at the expense of the A2 exams so the overall grade at A2 would be unlikely to go up now.

And who only knows what will happen in a few years when AS's don't exit

"Do the grade boundaries lower if there are fewer students scoring very high marks?"

Not necessarily, no. A Levels haven't been norm-referenced since the 1990s. It might be seen as grounds to look at the criterion-referencing, so might trigger discussion when deciding the scaling from raw to UMS, but unlike in the past there is no defined proportion of the cohort who will get particular grades.

"If you got a D at AS in 2009,"

2009 is another country. Because there were still January resits, and January modules. There are no more January exams. So in 2009, you could take C1 in JanY12, C2 in JunY12, C3 in Jany13 and C4 in JunY13. If you wanted to resit, you would thus be able to do it a few months after completing study, alongside one other module.

Now, someone who is not working at a sufficient level will not know their C1 or C2 result until they've taken both at the end of Y12, and their first opportunity to resit one or both (most likely both) will be alongside C3 and C4 at the end of Y13. That's a substantially harder task that for previous cohorts, especially as people tend not to just do badly in one AS. and therefore will have similar issues in other subjects as well.

"I've never heard a school kicking an A level student out for not getting a B grade at AS. That sounds a little extreme. (Can you name the school?)"

www.elevenplusexams.co.uk/forum/11plus/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=28405&start=10

Statistically, predicting a B from a B is the safest bet. In fact a B is more likely to drop to a C than it is to go up to an A

www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/images/109919-predicting-a-level-grades-using-as-level-grades.pdf

See page 4.

Maybe the teacher believes that with teaching qualifications and experience of teaching A-level that their professional judgement of whether DS's friend can get an A should not be overridden by what DS's friend with no experience of A2 reckons he can get.

I can see their point.

What backforgood said is true.
This article was entitled "we shoot a few just to encourage the others".
It's about how many selective and independent schools maintain their position in the league table.

The most selective private and state schools are increasingly using public exams to weed out their worst-performing pupils, forbidding them from returning in September,

Library my school does, I don't personally. It's dead man's shoes to get to teach it

"My godson improved his grades from DDCE to get AAB"

With resits, presumably (even with 100% UMS in the A2 papers at the end of Y13, that wouldn't be sufficient).

Much harder now, as January 2013 was the last opportunity to take module resits other than in the summer.