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Original poster

End of year reminder: Flightpaths are bollocks, schools giving ‘working at’ 9-1 GCSE grades to KS3 kids are bullshitting

132 replies

noblegiraffe · 14/07/2018 11:56

Basically that.

If your kid comes home with a report with a wanky flightpath on it, take it with a hefty pinch of salt. There’s no science or data behind it.

If your KS3 kid comes home with a report that says they are currently working at a GCSE grade 4 in Science (or worse a 4+, implying technical accuracy), then know that it is made up, no one knows what a grade 4 in science (or any subject really) looks like, and applying GCSE grades to kids who aren’t studying GCSE courses is just nonsense.

OP posts:
Original poster
noblegiraffe · 15/07/2018 09:48

No, very unlikely that they’d try to compare the performance of a Y7 to a GCSE student. A student who is going to scrape a pass in GCSE would be performing very differently to a high ability Y7. One would have been presented with all the content and be struggling to master it, the other would have been presented with a fraction of the content and have been very good at it.

What’s more likely is that they’ve looked at their GCSE target grades for these kids and tried to decide if they are actually that kind of student. Then worked backwards and fudged it. They may have made up some grade boundaries for a Y7 test (which are complete nonsense, give it to another teacher and they’d come up with massively different boundaries). Another teacher would give different grades, there is absolutely no science, and no standards to benchmark these kids against with any accuracy.

OP posts:
EndoplasmicReticulum · 15/07/2018 09:42

Yup. Mine get a confusing mix of words, numbers and colours. The colours start red in year 7 and gradually get greener as they get up to year 9 so that "progress" can be "demonstrated".

I've told them it's all nonsense and not to worry about it.

Floottoot · 15/07/2018 09:34

My son's end of year 7 report gave 'working at' and 'challenge' grades 1-9.
I assume that what the school has done is liken lower years students' performance profiles to those higher up the school and their GCSE predictions?

Soursprout · 15/07/2018 07:39

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

AlexanderHamilton · 15/07/2018 00:04

Tell me about it. He’s top set maths and bottom set English.

Haskell · 15/07/2018 00:01

That's a spiky profile, Alexander!

AlexanderHamilton · 14/07/2018 23:57

Ds’s report says he’s on track for a Grade 2 in English, Grade 4+ in Science & Grade 8- in Maths!

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