The higher / foundation tier cock up

On results day there will have lots of talk about how the grade boundaries are so low but with no mention that in fact the exams have been made much harder and have content for A level standard and above. This is so disheartening for students and teachers.

I totally agree Backintime. My dd is very bright. That GCSE maths exam was hard, much harder than anything I ever did. the fact that 17% was what was needed to get a Grade 4 only reflects just how hard the exam was. If it was an easy exam then you would need a much higher percentage.

The whole thing is ridiculously complicated and grossly unfair putting so much extra pressure on teachers and students. These exams are not fit for purpose and do not fairly asses the curriculum at the right levels.

What really gets me is the stories in the media scoffing at today’s students ‘only needing 17%’ to get a pass, painting all young people as dumb snowflakes when they really have worked so damn hard. But no let’s blame the kids for all this for all this instead of Mr Gove

Dd is really panicking about English Lang. Under the old system she would have been an A* candidate and she was hoping for/predicted an 8 but she completely messed up the second paper (thanks Edexel for including questions about stroke victims the day after dh had what we then thought was a mini stroke).

I've told her what will be will be, special consideration has been applied for but I don't know what that actually means in practice and her school is not going to stop her doing A level English as they have described her as one of the brightest English students they have had.

But if the boundaries are high that won't help.

Up quite significantly for one of the language papers. It was odd because the big jumps were only on certain grades.

Students who scored a grade 6 in June would have been low 5 in November (I think off the top of my head. I'm not at home).

Maisie did the November grade boundaries shift up or down for English?

For maths they went down!

We were given vague information about the same % wpuld get 9-4 as previously got A-C and that 7-9 would be the % as old A/A. 9 would be the top x% in any year.
In a nutshell we had to make educated guesses for all 1st entry.

For English I took the highest boundaries I thought it could be and worked with those provisionally (there was a massive shift between the June 2017 and November 2017 resit boundaries). Really we are at the mercy of the boards and these are the boards who send trainers out to schools and give contradictory advice about what questions want when you compare notes with different teachera across the country.

How could any teacher know anything about any grade boundaries when the exam had never been taken before?? That goes for every single subject, except possibly Maths and English, although they had had just one exam to base it on.

Her teachers didn;t have a clue during mocks

No - no teacher in the entire country had any clue during mocks.

In languages we used to be able to choose different tiers for different students. Now we can’t. I absolutely hate choosing tiers of entry.

Catslife - that worried me about ds who is due to sit his GHCSe's in two years time. He is predicted 5 for chemistry, 6 for physics and 3/4 for biology. Unusually his school are letting him drop biology completely and sit single science Physics & Chemistry.

Dd hets her results on Thursday. Her teachers didn;t have a clue during mocks. Unfortunately she suffered some poor science teaching from a due to retire teacher in years 8-10 and the new teachers in year 11 had a lot of cathing up to do with them but none of the three science teachers had any clue about gradeboundaries during mocks. Hence she was given 4 5 6 mock grades in each science for fairly similar percentages.

It has always been easier for pupils to get a C grade on the higher Maths paper than to get one on the Foundation paper. Everyone knows this is ridiculous and soul destroying for the kids sitting the higher paper. Now with a 4 in Maths at around 18%, of course schools are still entering pupils for the higher paper. Science Departments will take the same view.

It's complicated - what do you do if a pupil is much better at Biology than Physics, for example, and you are no longer allowed to mix tiers for entry for the Combined award?
In past years, controlled assessments would have made the difference for some borderline pupils but these have now gone.

What an absolute muddle.

What noble says, but they aren't a like for like comparison on reality as what students have to do to get those marks/grades has shifted too (certainly in my subject).

4 is low to middle C, 5 is high C to low B. 6 is middle to high B.

Ish.

Is it right that a 4 is a low C and a 5 is a high C?

Interesting, mmmz. I think March of Y10 was probably too early. Ours was November Y11 and the results were dire, there was a definite panicked tone to the analysis! We didn’t get grade boundaries either, but some lovely graphs that showed the crap distribution of marks. March Y10 you would probably expect not very good marks and think that things could improve.

Noble edexcel ran a free year 10 mock in march 2017 for combined science that was exactly like the maths mock in 2016 you described. Results came out last September. Each student (who did the e am) was given a % mark, but, there were no grade boundaries, and therefore, no levels.
Doing it was not mandatory but all schools had access to the conclusions.

I am slightly curious about this making TES now. DD's science teacher told them this would happen before the end of term. It feels rather like news management in advance of a shocker on Thursday!

This has made me angry enough to stop lurking.

Noble is right. As a science teacher I had almost nothing other than gut instinct to help decide tier of entry. All we had from AQA was an indication of the 7 boundary for the end of Y10 paper. Even more anxious about Thursday now.

jufus
Usually the post 16 phrase for level 3 courses is '5 good passes at gcse' which was (in old money) 5 A*-C, often including maths and English.

Now a 4 is classed as a standard pass and a 5 is a strong/good pass. Colleges can choose which they want (But schools are judged 9-5).

Your local college isn’t being precise enough in their language! A 1 is a pass. A 4 is a ‘standard pass’ and a 5 is a ‘strong pass’. So do they want 5 passes, standard passes or strong passes? I suspect standard passes.

The whole thing is a mess, tbh.

noble probably a bad example in my case as we have an average score requirement but say for instance our local college says 5 gcse passes - is that 3-3 a pass or not? I thought a 4 was a pass?

Erk, I mean duff and good in terms of the requirements. Obviously there are students for whom a 3-3 would be an excellent result worth celebrating.