GCSE 2022 Results - the moment of reckoning!

@Womblesaremyfavouritefood exactly that.

The last normal summer series we looked at about twenty in our centre and requested one for lit for review which went up hugely. It was clearly unreasonably marked the first time.

You only get the money back if the grade changes, too.

ie without taking it further to your Stage 2.

(Why doesn't MN have an Edit button?)

@MrsHamlet Presumably if the marking of the scripts are considered "reasonable" then we don't need to take it any further, and the original grade will stay as it is?

@Fiddlersgreen definitely worth looking into this. What were his school predicting him?

I’d do the following:

1. chat with school: do they have any idea why he’d have seemingly underperformed to such an extent? Ask if this is a trend: were lots of students expecting higher grades than they received? If so, was this across the board or in DS’s class?
2. if there is no reason for such a disparity between previous performance and exam result, ask what the marks for DS’s papers look like. Is there a big difference between papers: for instance, 60/80 achieved on one paper and 20/80 on the other. This could suggest examiner error. Ask this in relation to both Lang and Lit: the school already have this information.
3. if the above throws up any oddities, request access to DS’s scripts. This won’t happen until 5th September but then the school can have a look and see if they think the mark scheme has been applied fairly and consistently. If they spot issues, request a review of marking. Be cautious of doing this if DS is at the bottom of the grade boundary. They can go down but that’s unlikely.

Hope that helps.

@FrippEnos as far as I'm aware it still has to be the cohort. I'm not sure whether there's grade protection on that. There certainly isn't with exam reviews

MrsHamlet

The last time we had NEA re-moderated they did the whole cohort.
Has this changed?
As we had to get permission from all the other pupils as well.
This was sometime ago.

@Jaxx 8 is a very good grade! Please pm me if you'd like

English marking this year seems a odd one as so many are talking about grades were so different to predictions.

Same situation here for my ds. He has got a 9 with English Lit and 6 for Language where initially were predicted way around. He has got 8 or 9 for every other subjects. My ds’ hand writing is terrible though, we are guessing the person who marked his paper was put off by his bad hand writing.😅

We are requesting the script, we did the request form yesterday and need to hand in on Tuesday as bank holiday on Monday. We need to pay £18 for this (IGCSE), we will be asking his teacher to have a look the script to see if worth to request a review. He hasn’t been given the raw marks on his results paper so we don’t know how many marks off from a 7.

NEA will have been moderated so - unless you're asking for remoderation - there will be no movement there.
OFQUAL have been very clear that reviews shouldn't penalise the candidates who don't go for review - so small mark changes shouldn't happen.
If you can get the papers for free and get someone with experience to look at them (I keep saying that because my HoD is keen to ask for borderline scripts to be reviewed and he's wasting people's money) before making a decision, then it's worth doing that.

DS missed a couple of 9s by 1 or 2 points. We are not bothering to remark or whatever it's called now. It won't affect his future in any way so there's no point.

Not AQA but Pearson here for English. DS got 5 and 5 although in his two sets of mocks he was getting 7s and 8s, not sure if he just under performed or whether we should be looking at this. He certainly didn’t feel the papers had gone badly. @EngHOD

Dd missed a 7 by one point. Do you think it’s worth asking for it to be checked? She doesn’t need it so not sure if worth bothering but it’s literally one point and it’s media so a large part was her NEA?

school haven’t said anything

@MrsHamlet thank you. We have actually questioned if he was being overmarked in the past, so I do accept that as a real possibility. Feel free to message me with a quote if you are willing to have a quicker read through his scripts to help our decision.

It is difficult to know what to do. This was his only 8 which complicates things. We are so proud of his results and all the work he put in to get them, we don’t want to risk him thinking we are disappointed by asking for a review. I don’t think we would have even asked for his scripts if it wasn’t that lots of people are questioning AQA’s English marking.

@Womblesaremyfavouritefood not a problem. You need someone in the centre to have a proper look at the marks, remembering that if they're "reasonable" they won't be moved, and that marks can - and do - go down as well as up.

@Jaxx I mark both Lang and Lit and the marking criteria are very different. In my experience in centre, some teachers are very generous with their own candidates - they often give the benefit of the doubt that examiners cannot. That's not to say you shouldn't consider a review though.

We are also considering putting in for a review for AQQ English language.

He got an 8 which is great, but scored 70% when he has been consistently received 85% plus in mocks and assessments. He got 129/130 for English Literature as a comparison.

I requested the scripts on Wednesday afternoon and was emailed them around 9am yesterday morning!

No clerical error, so will get an English teacher to check if it is worth getting it reviewed. The one thing that stood out was the SPAG points on both question 5’s. He has never scored below 14 before, but got an 11 and 10 in the exam, but it is very possibly he has been over scored in the past.

Since there are a number of us querying English, do you think it it’s worth having a separate thread?

@MrsHamlet Thank you soooo much. We're at the start of this (Stage 1) - I thought the scripts went back to the school, but I was so focussed on DC getting back in to do the A levels of their choice, that getting a re-mark was a long way down our list of priorities as it isn't vital to them continuing. We're at the "free" stage, but I'll definitely pay (anything) if we've got grounds to chase this.

@Womblesaremyfavouritefood
There are several stages and I'm not clear where you are in the process so forgive me if I'm telling you what you already know.
1 Requesting priority scripts - it's free with aqa this year. Other boards may charge. They come back to the centre electronically and someone on centre who knows what they're doing should look over them before stage 2
2 requesting a review of scripts. Costs £38.35 per paper. There's a 20 calendar day time scale for this. They get reviewed electronically and the clocks starts when the review goes in. The result of the review goes back to the centre.
3 an appeal if there are grounds. That's got to be done within 30 days of the review result and costs £115.
All of these have to be handled by the centre.

@MrsHamlet Thank you. Scripts were requested on Thursday. I got the impression that they go to the school who then look at them to see if they think we have grounds to appeal, and at that point the request is made. (I might have got that wrong - it was quite a stressful few hours).

It's 20 calendar days from the submission of the request to the completion of the review, for AQA at least. I don't know what the timescale is if you're appealing the review.

Very happy here. DD got:

5 (x2)
6 (x3)
7 (x2)
8 (x2)
and a D2* with the highest marks in her year.

So I’m very pleased for her. She thought she’d fail at least Chem but she got a 5 in that so that’s almost the part she’s happiest about. She always struggled in Maths but pulled a 6 in that so again made up with that.

So it’s not the highest grades she’s happiest about but the ones she achieved despite struggling. I’m proud of her.

School know how they expect their pupils to perform in any given subject, based on previous cohort’s results and individual students’ performance in year 10 exams, mocks, class work etc.

It’s not a case of English language being an outlier generally, but seemingly this year’s results being markedly out of step with previous years.
Add into that the reports of chaos among the examiners specifically for English and alarm bells start to go off.

Obviously, there will be some students who just didn’t perform as expected, but there seems to be a general trend in some schools.

Does anyone know the "timetable" for re-grades/looking at scripts etc. The school said that the deadline was 28 September - is that for initial requests to go in? I know that the actual GCSE certificates don't come out until about November, so presumably we have to wait until October some time to hear the whether an appeal has been successful? Thank you.

There is no direct correlation from letters to numbers but this is the guide. Realistically it only matters what a college, sixth form or employer asks for in the numbers.

@dee73 A grade 5 is an old high C / low B. It is a 'strong pass'.

Just a thought but if loads of people put in for reviews of the Eng. Lang. (and potentially get upgrades), won't it then totally skew the bell curve distribution of results?

I'd be interested to hear what the English teachers on this thread think, but personally would have thought that Eng. Lang is a bit of an 'outlier' in that it's possibly more difficult to 'learn' to ace the papers than for some of the other subjects?

For my hard-work averse DD, it didn't surprise me that she got one of her best marks (7) in Eng. Lang. simply because she writes creatively very well (less good at the comprehension and language analysis side), and more importantly could do it 'off the top of her head', i.e. without any revision.