What are GCSE Grade 9s for...?

Going back a couple of years the headline prediction for this year was that only 1 or 2 students in the country would get all 9s.

It has been suggested since that it should be more than this, maybe in the hundreds, as if you’re bright enough for several 9s, you’re likely to get them in even more subjects than that as the grades aren’t independent of each other (i.e. being good at English would support good results in humanities).

It will be interesting to see on Thursday!

Only 2000 pupils got 3 9s last year, far fewer than that will get straight 9s this year (far more subjects).

Well if everyone else who applied for a course got 9s and you got 8s you aren't going to get in

I’ve just realised that I think I know the answer to my own question. Comparable outcomes will continue but once you’re past the first year of the spec the formula that they are using this year won’t be needed because you’ll be able to peg all of the grades to the last year not just grades 7, 4, 9 and 1.

Yes, comparable outcomes will continue (it’s how grade boundaries are being set for maths and English this year). They are giving up using KS2 data to decide how bright a cohort are though, they’ve introduced national reference tests in Y11 which means they will give a sample of Y11s the same test each year and use the results of that to decide if that year group should do better or worse on their GCSEs.

You know how the pass rate for grade 4 and grade 7 have been pegged to last year’s C+ and A+ so that the proportions remain the same?

That has been happening every year since 2012. They use KS2 data to decide if each cohort is brighter or less bright than the previous year, then based on that decide what the pass rate should be so that a student with a particular KS2 profile who passed last year or got an A last year should (on average) pass or get an A this year (comparable outcomes). Then the grade boundaries are set to meet the established pass rate.

Comparable outcomes mean setting grade boundaries so that the proportion of students achieving certain grades (9, 7, 4 and 1 I believe) is roughly the same from one year to the next. It’s whats being used to set those grades this year (with grade boundaries for the other grades spaced out between them as evenly as possible). Have we had confirmation that comparable outcomes will continue to be used to set grade boundaries noble? Last I saw, although it was quite a while back, it was only confirmed for this year. Being cynical I assumed that once they’d reassured everyone that these new exams were super tough then the grades would gradually start to creep up again as evidence of how much the government had raised standards.

So that John Humphries can stop saying "Everything was done so much better back in my day!" ?

Human beings get better at doing the same things, over time, they figure out how to do it better. So the teachers got better at teaching their pupils to get the best grades. If the GCSEs stayed about the same difficult but we didn't see 'grade inflation' that would imply the teachers weren't humans with human cleverness about being able to gain skills and learn how to do the same things better. Funny that.

Cross posts baloo!

What does that mean, noble? What is comparable outcomes?

Comparable outcomes mean that grade inflation can’t happen any more.

But the government also want increasing standards.

Year on year kids were getting better grades due to this , which looks great for governments. Makes me wonder why they've reformed it.

Yes it's really telling! Grade inflation over the years is real:it's there in black and white. They kept increasing the proportion getting the top grades year after year until the A was the old A. Now they've realised A doesn't really distinguish between the top students so they've gone back to the old system. No doubt it will happen again and they'll introduce a grade 10.

But the overall A-C last year was 66.3%. There will be variability from subject to subject but seeing as a 4 is going to be roughly pegged to last year’s C around 2/3 of results this year will be grades 9-4.

Now the top 2/3 of the grades (9-4) will go to the top 2/3 of the entries

How do you figure that? It depends on last year’s A*-C which isn’t 66%. Maths was 71%

Hah Dicky that’s pretty funny!

I’m hoping for at least a couple of 9s in my class this Thursday. They are going to be less common than A*s but not vanishingly rare. I have about 7 girls in my class who I think will get an 8 and I hope at least one or two of them get a 9 (although I wouldn’t try to guess which ones).
Although I wasn’t in favour of changing the grading system, and I think the change wasn’t necessary there is actually some logic behind having 9 grades. Previously around 2/3 of the grades awarded were A-C and around 1/3 were D-G. A-C and D-G each represented half of the grades. Now the top 2/3 of the grades (9-4) will go to the top 2/3 of the entries and the bottom 1/3 (1-3) will go to the bottom 1/3 of the entries. Put like that it’s actually quite neat.

noble so roughly the percentage of students who got A the year the A was introduced? 2.8% in 1994 versus 7.3% in 2012:
www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/sep/17/gcse-exams-replaced-ebacc-history-pass-rates#data

The top 20% of papers getting grades 7 and over will be awarded a grade 9

This was the original plan but was changed to a formula.
Percentage of those achieving at least a grade 7 who will be awarded a grade 9 = 7% + 0.5 × (percentage of students awarded grade 7 and above)