New GCSE levels - what should a top student be aiming for?

Exam systems have to differentiate between candidates - I completely agree. I think the regrading is a good thing. I think that, for A levels, a C used to be the average grade, which imo is a good idea. My Dad went to Oxford, albeit quite a while ago, and he said it was almost unheard of for a student to get straight A's at either O or A level. I think most of his peers had one A at A level with a mixture of Bs and Cs.
If the exam system can't distinguish between the brightest students then it isn't working.

The top grade is a centile i thought? The top 3% or something of the grade 8s

I've been marking dds past papers and I've been really surprised that for aqa biology you only need 47 out of 60 for an A*. Thats 13 marks just floating around!

I suppose a '9' in the new GCSEs equates to a 55 out of 60 or something similar

when I did O levels and A levels all marks were normalised so they could be compared year to year.

If say physics was a particularly hard exam one year and a bit easier in the year before an A still meant you were in the top 5% of candiidates. That is what employers and universities want to know. They know candidates dont change from year to year on average so they just want to know where a candidate is compared to peers.

The stupid grade inflation of the last 20 years means employers now have introduced their own online English and Mathematical ability exams before they interview anybody.

Oxford and Cambridge always had exams to find the very best candidates.

Exam systems have to differentiate between candidates - not everybody is going to get the top grade whther you call it A* or Grade 9.

I don't understand the hysteria. Bring back exams that are hard enough to differentiate and then normalise the result to make them comparabe between years. It is common sense.

Also cut the number of university places from 50% of the population going to just 25%. Thats a different arguement but really we need only the most academic going to university and we need an exam system that identifies them and then fund them properly so they don't come out with huge debts.

The numbers of students taking GCSEs each year must be large enough that percentiles would be a useful measure.

I'm sure data exists to be able to work out the historic position and from that gauge where the functional level for English and Maths falls. Obviously it won't be exactly the same place ach year but I bet you could come to a pretty reliable small range.

That's useful in that it tells you where your child is compared with their year's peer group.

But useless if you have no idea whether their peer group is particularly bright or not.

What if kids just left with a percentile rank rather than grades?

Because it doesn't give you any idea of what the kids can actually do, just how they performed against their peers.

So if someone got a C in English you'd expect them to be able to read and write, but if they were at the 50th percentile, what does that actually mean for their literacy skills?

What if kids just left with a percentile rank rather than grades?

I've long said that reporting the pupil's position is far more useful than any kind of grade/mark reporting, especially as we know that grades are "normalised" in different ways to produce the result that the educational establishment want to portray.

At our son's school, they don't give grades in the year end progress tests. They give the actual mark, the year's subject average, and tell you which quartile they are in. That's useful in that it tells you where your child is compared with their year's peer group. They are also very open with reporting GCSE and A level results by grade for each paper, so you can compare year by year and see that, eg, 25% get A in Physics, so if your child is in the top quartile, they're likely to get A.

Grades, whether A-E or 1-9 are a very blunt instrument, especially when in some subjects you need 90% plus to get A* yet in others you only need sometimes as low as 70%. Worse still is the fact that in some subjects you can "pass" i.e. C or above, with a mark of less than 50%, i.e. you can get more wrong than right but still pass!

Bird in the hand rhoda.

What if kids just left with a percentile rank rather than grades?

Opposite, Rhoda. Definite known grades are a real advantage in the Uni application game, over predictions.

Grade inflation makes sense to me, human beings get better at things so of course they get better at teaching to the test. Anyway, the top GCSE grades were only given to about 6.5% of test takers in 2015 (iI hope that link is reliable). Top% could be capped simply by fitting a normalised curve, if it's so important that only 2-3% of people can possibly get a 9, regardless of the standard of their work.

For plenty of teens getting the pass grade is all they need.

"load of Cs are really pretty much worthless because they simply don't represent the level of a C twenty years ago. "

There are whole rafts of children (not the children of mumsnetters, obviously! ) for whom Cs are absolutely bloody vital. There are whole rafts of children(even more not the.....) for whom any paper qualifications at all are absolutely bloody vital.............

Of course, there should be more to education that exam results, but, unfortunately, in the modern employment/FE world, your future is almost defined by your exam grades. Yes, loads of jobs and FE courses advertise "minimum" qualifications which look reasonable, (i.e. a recent job my nephew applied for cited 5 GCSEs grade C or above), but in reality, there were so many applying with far better results that anyone with "the minimum" wasn't even short-listed.

Unfortunately, the education establishment has shot itself in the foot with the grade inflation of the last decade or two. In the 80's, an A was the exception rather than the norm, most of my peers (many of whom became professionals) were happy with a clutch of Cs and Bs. Now, so many people get a string of As and A*s so a load of Cs are really pretty much worthless because they simply don't represent the level of a C twenty years ago.

The 1-9 grading is the first step towards re-alligning the grading system so that only the top few percent get the top grade. That's how it should be.

"Very few people are gifted at everything which surely a clutch of 9s would indicate."
I agree. Trouble is it's difficult to get that message across in a world where all As/A*s is considered fairly usual........

tiggy won't the majority applying at the same time have taken the new exams ? That will establish the benchmark for any GCSE grade criteria for offers rather than universities basing it on the minority of gap year students.
In the end it is achieving the required A level grades that will count the most.

The focus on grades distorts what school is about. Children (and parents) seem not to understand that the need to own knowledge and skills far outstrips the need to get a string of top grades in fairly meaningless examinations.

And it's swings and roundabouts.

While stress levels might rise over the ultimate grade, at least there won't be endless CAs puncturing years 10 and 11 like a bad guest at a party.