What are GCSE Grade 9s for...?

Jeez loveyouradvice you are right! 😱

dicky .... this all feels so mad... level 9 is already going to more people than A* did in its first years....

you gave us 2.8% in 1994 versus 7.3% in 2012 and already:

4.3% are 9 in 2018…..

How ON EARTH is any employer ever meant to compare people who did their exams 10 years apart?!?!?!?!?!

Grammar, though not a super selective.

The really unfair thing will be if they want to go to uni later. For example some dentistry courses required A at eng language regardless of whether you did it prior to the a star being introduced or the old a level. So if they start adding numbers on it could reaLlysfaen disadvantage the early takers of the new gcses.

A 7 is not equivalent to an A back in the day. It's more like a B

dds school said its a 'low A'
An 8 is a high A low A*
and a 9 is a high A* and beyond

Incidentally, if any DC got a 9 in maths, they can enter a Casio competition for a free colour graphical calculator (would be great for A-level) calculators.casio.co.uk/gcse-results

Private or selective?

Quite a few all 9s at DS’s school!

Damned radio saying 9s are the new As, no they're not!

Well the results are out now so it may all.be clearer...

Yes but that wouldn’t account for the standard of the exam.

I wish they did it by percentages of the year as a whole...
Top 5% = 9
6 to 10% = 8
11 to 20%= 7
21 to 30% = 6
31 to 40% = 5
41 to 50% =4

That way you top know who were the cream of the year.

GCSEs started in 1988.

lljkk - you mentioned comparisons between 1985 and 2015. I'm old enough to remember GCSEs don't go back that far, because I took most of my O-level exams that year, and an additional one in 1986 (Latin was only offered after school for 2 years and then in the first year of 6th form). I think the first year of GCSE exams might have been 1987 (they were definitely in by 1988 because I have a sister who would have done them that year).

holidayshopping, if that's 8 grades those students must have had marks of 9 in everything. However, they were mock exams - presumably internally marked - was the marking tough enough? Particularly given the lack of previous history and establishment of what a 9 would actually look like.

Just to make it clearer, the mocks are based on adding the scores of your top 8 subject grades together.

DS tells me that at his school-15 students (which is 10% of the year) got over 70 points in the mocks, which is good wedge of 9s each. It will be interesting to see what it all looks like tomorrow.

Noble - fascinating linked article re comparable outcomes and performance.

Also, am I right in understanding from it that GCSEs only switched from fully linear in 2011 exam year - ie really quite recently?

I have struggled a bit with the whole discussion about how horrific the switch to fully linear is in the current round of reforms (maybe a levels were non-linear for longer?) as I am old enough to be one of the last to take O levels, and most of my friends with older children who have talked about such things over the last few years are at schools which have elected for igcses and Pre U expressly to avoid course work and modularity, so I never really got a sense for the other system.

I see what you mean-I’d forgotten that the new maths (and English?) started last year.

Are you expecting many 9s in your cohort, Noble?

Because of the ‘sawtooth effect’ - performance is always much lower on the first year of a new qualification because teachers are less familiar with the spec, there are fewer resources, no past papers and pupils aren’t as well prepared. Performance then recovers over the next couple of years as the new specs are embedded.

So if the maths papers this year are of a comparable standard to last year, the grade boundaries should be higher as pupils will perform better on the papers, but comparable outcomes mean results have to be similar to last year.

(I also got the impression that this year’s Edexcel Higher papers were easier than 2017 - Foundation were deliberately so as last year’s were inaccessible to the bottom end and Edexcel had to make changes).

It would actually be very interesting to see the exact distribution of percentage results of all pupils taking an exam, showing what percentage of pupils got 100% all the way down to the lowest mark. Does that get published?

Why do you think they’ll be higher this year, noble?

Do you think the headlines tomorrow will be ‘lowest top grades in years’ types?

Wow, that is quite low. Then you almost already need a grade 10 for the 'very' top performers, say those who get over 90%?

Last year for Edexcel maths it was 79% for a 9 and 52% for a 7.

Although they will no doubt be higher this year.

Oh, sorry, just realised you meant 80% for a 9. But that's still quite low, in that you can't differentiate between those that got 80% and 99% correct.

Really, do you think the grade boundary for a grade 9 in Maths is only 50 odd percent?