GCSE summer 2020 thread 6 - Carry on Corona Cohort, Further adventures aboard the Corona Charabanc.

Me neither Eww
I’m surprised at the schools that are doing ‘face to face’ on results day yet are not allowing parents to park in school grounds.
There is to be no verbal communication of CAG or rank at DDs school-requests are to be written and via email to exams officer by the pupil.
Perhaps this is why parents are allowed on site?

Proggy I don't think it will be subject teachers in for results so no goodbyes, I think it will be exams officer, head of year 11, couple of deputy heads & I think there are two heads of sixth form. School plan seems to be give pupils the results envelope then shoo them on to playground to open with mates 'in a socially distanced fashion'. Parents are to stay outside school. Can't think why that would be

Thank you @Monkey2001 @MadameMinimes

MY DD has less then 15 for a few GCES but the historical data for some of her GCSES was much smaller, looking 2 years back. She has also taken a GCSE with no historical data at all so that will be interesting.

DD did Ancient Greek at GCSE and is doing it for A level.
Cohorts at current and new school less than 5 for both qualifications

Lilly- According to the TES article their sources told them that cohorts of 1-4 will be teacher predictions alone, 5-15 will be a combination of teacher prediction and statistical modelling and anything over 15 will be pure statistical modelling.

@LillyM50 there was an article in the TES saying that "small" was 5, and a taper would apply where there were 5-15 candidates. Looks like it is largely irrelevant for GCSEs other than some odd language ones.

"We also know that any statistical model will be unreliable with very small numbers. Where centres have entered a small number of students in a subject (either this year, or in the historical data), which is much more the case at A level than GCSE, we will rely much more on the CAGs than the statistics. "

From ofqual blog published 2 days ago on fairness in awarding:
ofqual.blog.gov.uk/2020/08/06/fairness-in-awarding/

Has anyone got any idea what they actually mean by "a small number "?

@neutralintelligence the boy/girl thing is a whole can of worms for these exams. I am sure the "girls are steady workers, boys pull it out of the bag on the day" is a thing, obviously not for all DCs but certainly is for my two boys - DS1 did very little for most of Y10/11 and started working Easter of Y11. The Education Select Committee will be looking closely at whether whole groups like boys/girls are affected by the method of awarding grades this year.

It was unlucky for your DS, but lucky for the girls that your school chose to exercise some positive discrimination, although it may have been fairer to have 2 equal top sets. My DS's school set maths purely on results which resulted in a top set containing 25 boys and 5 girls which I was uncomfortable with.

Yes, I really don't understand all the targets/predictions. But I do know they were all below his mock results (apart from maths (as explained above, the teacher was trying to scare the bejesus out of them) and Spanish which he should never have taken but we believed all the ebac? stuff).
My expectations were based on old systems of getting targets based on how you actually performed (crazy, right) before all this computer modelling existed. I think my Ds school use some socio-economic factors, which have also counted against us, despite owning our own house in a nice-ish area - but most of the pupils houses at the school are worth more than ours. The school doesn't take account of parental education, despite the education level of the mother being a huge factor according to research in how a pupil performs. I am also from a background where being clever and education is more valued than being rich, so I do a poorly-paid but highly intellectual job. The school takes no account of any of this. It is a very good school and I wouldn't have changed my choice of school for Ds, but I would have stopped him doing the y6 SATs and pushed more for better target grades and maybe made a fuss about incorrect sets. The science sets were a political issue to some extent. The worst-performing pupils in set 1 were all girls and the pupils in set 2 out-performing them were boys, so they couldn't have changed the pupils' sets without undermining their (laudable) huge focus on girls in STEM.

@neutralintelligence I think it’s crazy to set GCSE targets for every subject based on Maths and English tests taken when you were 11. I know children who are very artistic or musical but have low targets for these based on their SATs. And it works the other way too. Just because someone is good at maths and English, doesn’t mean they are going to be sporty, creative or good at performing arts. It just means they are good at maths and English or were taught by their schools how to do well in these particular exams. It doesn’t mean anything.

Luckily our school sets children on how they are actually doing and not on their SATS. They allow children to move between the sets each term.

Y6 SATs and Y7 CATs are used at most state schools to set teacher targets, but that should not be the same as teacher predictions. It is a contentious thing, many schools do not look beyond the SAT/CAT target to asses whether a student is on target, but I have known several kids whose SATs did not reflect their potential due to dyslexia or how much primary schools focused on them. It is ridiculous that art and music have target grades based on SATs in English and Maths.

If your DC got 9s in the mocks, it is very likely that they will get 9s in the CAGs, which will mean 9 in the real thing for the majority or students. However, the effective difference between 8 and 9 is really negligible at the moment, so it really should not matter to you or your DC if they are downgraded to an 8 as it makes no difference other than to their pride. The 9 grade was brought in to distinguish between the excellent and the outstanding, but barely any universities, including Oxbridge, discriminate between 8 and 9. Bizarrely this meant that instead of 9s being the top half of the old As, there are almost twice as many 8/9 as there used to be A, but the universities regard them as equal. It is likely that at some point the universities will not treat them as equal, but it will not change for our lot.

My DS was has said that he will be OK with it as long as nothing moves down from the last predictions in his report by more than 1 grade, but he might be inclined to do the autumn exam if he is 2 grades down on one of his favourite subjects.

use

I am not minimising your worry btw and can see where you are coming from, but , in all honesty, if he did so well in his mocks, that is something the school will definitely look at. That's the hard evidence. Some schools sue the word prediction in a confusing way, I think, and that isn't helpful. they actually mean 'eternally value added target'.

We have decided that whatever happened, we would give my DD a reward. I asked her what she would like and she said she wanted to watch a family movie.

neutral all (state) schools use KS2 SATs to set targets. Some might combine it with equally flawed things such as CATS but Ofsted and external targets all come form KS2.

I agree it's a bit crap, and each school does something a bit different (so my DS had the same 'MEG' for every subject whereas my own school fine tunes them).

By the way, I come from a family of teachers! I am not anti-teacher. One of my parents was a chief examiner. I thought I knew how things worked, but y6 SATs seem to be king when predicting GCSE grades at my Ds school and I don't like it.

Nard75 - your Ds sounds like mine.
I am worried he will be in a minority of pupils who get awarded lower marks than they achieved in mocks.
I trusted that y6 SATs would never be used to assess the individual child, only the primary school, then found my Ds school based their predicted grades mainly on y6 SATs. Wish I had stopped him sitting them now.
My son is best at science and humanities, and less good at English literature and maths, so y6 SATs and modelling based on these in secondary school have worked against him.
I always thought, oh well ,it will be OK in the end because he will take the exams and get the results he deserves anyway and the school's sets and predicted grades won't matter. I worry this won't happen now. We should be looking forward to a set of results mostly 9s, maybe 8s in a bad year of lots of clever kids. All the control has been taken away from us and given to teachers that decided who were the clever kids in year 7 (or even in year 6 before they even arrived secondary based on SATS) .

My DS is confident that he will get 9’s in all of his subjects and possibly an 8 for one subject. I am now really worried that he is going to be disappointed after working so hard for the last 5 years. He took his mocks really seriously and revised as if they were the real thing. Surely they can’t downgrade pupils can they?

EwwSprouts yes, that is lucky!
DD was hoping to see her subject teachers to thank them and say goodbye in person.
Looking at the info for the 20th it’s likely it will be SLT only at current school and a quick in and out- hopefully I’m wrong.
I’ve asked DD wether she intends to open her envelope in school or outside with me. She was of the mind to wait and open with me but I’m thinking it may be best for her to open it inside and if disappointed flag it to exams officer.
Keeping my fingers firmly crossed she walks out with a big smile on her face as I really don’t want to see her upset.

@Bluemarigold - it is horrible, isn't it. The conservatives removed all continuous assessment from the exam system and now it seems the pupils are actually being given marks based partly on 5 years of informal continuous assessment that they didn't know would ever happen. I hope your Dd can get some credit in her grades for that.

It is really unfair. We should have been looking forward to results day to some extent - a reward for hard work and progress since year 7. But that has been taken away and now I am thinking how I can keep my Ds safe if the exam results he could and would have got have been taken away from him.

@Piggywaspushed - it is not the Ofqual use of year 6 SATs that I am worried about. My Ds school is overly reliant on these results to predict GCSE results and won't accept that their system is flawed. My Ds was predicted 5s and 6s based on his Year 6 SATs by the school. His year 10 exams were mostly 8s and his year 11 mocks were mostly 9s. But they still won't accept that their modelling doesn't work for everyone. It is not a huge school, they could easily have given more individualised marks. In the end, his predicted grades were still at least 1 grade below his mocks. They also kept the kids in sets based on these inflexible predictions, so my Ds never got out of set 2 science despite consistently achieving higher than many in set 1. So that worries me for the school's ranking.

@Nard75 - yes, my son's maths teacher did this. I don't think the teacher even gave the pupils marks for working out! Maths was the one mark that was below his predicted grades - a 5, but then at parents evening the teacher said Ds would get an 8 or 9! But since Ds didn't get to sit the exam, a 5 in these non-exam results would stop Ds doing any of his career options, getting into any of his university courses etc.

Neither of those things will be used against your DS as an individual. The KS2 SATs are just used as statistical modelling to predict outcomes across the cohort. These have been sued for years by schools, LAs and the gov to predict outcomes (your DS may have been give a target grade, for example, which is generated form this). Don't panic about this affecting him as an individual. Our stats guy used these to tell use how many 9s, 8s, 7s etc. we might expect per subject and we , more or less, fitted our CAGs to this.

It's the rank order that matters. Ofqual did respond as someone e said, tot he articles yesterday, distancing themselves form the idea that pupils were set to get wildly unexpected result.

I do think schools have been predicting too many 9s to students in the last year, thereby creating a situation where lots of students become 'disappointed' with 'only' an 8. For context, my reasonably high achieving comp allocated 7 9s out of 400 students for English. We'll probably see about 5 of them get them, I suspect. 9s should be astonishingly good. For my DS he could feasibly get a 9 in 3 subjects but I think he will only be top of the rank order in one : we know eh may get 0 9s. That's OK. Come back to me if my DS gets 7s or 6s for any of those! That may get a different, less philosophical response!

We just have to be optimistic in the face of anxiety!

I am getting really worried now about results day. My son got all 8’s and 9’s in his mocks but what relevance do year 6 Sats have to how well a young person will do in their GCSE’s. Also my sons school marked pupils down on grades in their mocks to motivate them to do better in real thing. They predicted pupils would get at least 1 grade higher in the real exams.