Eng GCSE grade oddities

There are hundreds of thousands of candidates and thousands of examiners. We don't just get to have at it 🤣

Sounds like it. I think I naively thought someone just got a bunch of papers and sat marking them through. Clearly I know nothing!

Gosh!! What do they mean by seeds? Also what keeps stopping them. Is there someone double checking all the time and stopping them?

No school can ever hand on heart give out 9s because is a normal examination year such as this one was they simply cannot tell whether their star pupil is in the top 4% of a national cohort.

It is a shame that the school hasn't managed expectations of what a normal curve distribution looks like.

This appears to shed some light. Bloody hell. What a shit show for everyone including the examiners.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeachingUK/comments/14cicvs/marking_for_aqa_nightmare_this_year/

My son got 4 mocks and 7 in exam! It's an oddity but I'm taking it!!
However he also went up 3 grades in Eng Lit too and missed a 30 mark question so I guess he just turned things around? Or they liked the way he wrote.
It all does seem very inconsistent.

Thanks, we have had a similar surprising result but AQA.

p.s. Edexcel

Yes, certain. And his teacher seemed to be able to confirm that somehow - not sure if she's had sight of the paper yet. Still waiting for an update.

is he certain he didn’t miss any questions? That’s really awful if they just missed including the marks. Do you mind me asking which board?

DD got unexpected 9 - had been getting solid 7s. SHe was in second set and they all did better than expected, top set all did worse. Interestingly it appears her set were marked harder in all mocks whereas top set were achieving higher grades. So, her class put more effort into revision which paid off.

She's at a comp and does absolutely no reading for fun so the theory above is absolutely not true in her case. What she does have is a forensic understanding of grading schema and mark expectations per paper and tailors her answers accordingly - it's so sad it's come to this but she's scored outstandingly using this method.

I've already answered that upthread. It's a data management issue in the centres not an exam board one. You'll have to ask the centre.

Was also going to ask this

My DC was consistently predicted 9 for Eng Lang and 8+ for lit, but came out with a 6 and a 5! All his other grades were 9, including other "writing" subjects like history and RE. His papers are going to be downloaded and checked by the school - we already know there's a definite admin issue for literature as the online check showed two of his questions were awarded zero marks.

@Busornobus67 interestingly, DD did get Exceeding in SATS for Reading, Grammar (SPAG?) but not for Writing but has since far exceeded the results and predictions of those in her primary who did get Exceeding. Does make you wonder about using SATs so much as a basis for predictions (though I know not all schools do solely). And her school friends are at the same secondary so that hasn't changed either! Go figure...

@immergeradeaus Can I ask how far from the grade boundary your DC was?

Yup, same here. DS got straight nines except english. We’ll get them remarked, as he had a 9 in one paper and 5 in another, and he’s never got a 5 in any practice or mock.

It does seem like maybe an error. But scaling the scores does create a mess.
We had similar with the sats. Dd did much better on maths than i expected. And only scrapped exceeding for reading. So yes maybe maths affected by lockdowns more than reading.
Did the ones predicted 9 get exceeding reading and writing for y6 sats?

Really well done to your DS @IndiganDop :) Sounds like the school found an approach that suited him.

Mr Salle's theory wouldn't work for us (up from 6 to 9). Only had online teaching in Jan-April 2021 lockdown. Live in NW where our lockdowns were longer and he was in and out like a revolving door when they sent the kids sat close to a case home for ten days.

What his school did do was teach them to prewrite a basic story and adapt it to any given prompt - eg add a few lines about setting if it says "write a story set in Winter". He writes extremely well but is not quick at coming up with creative ideas, and I think having his basic story sorted was very very helpful.

Odd results for us too (predicted 9, got a 6). Someone posting a theory in the other GCSE thread which I thought was interesting. Here is it copied and pasted: "We had an unexpected Eng Lang grade here too. I watched a Mr Salles (English teacher) YouTube video from just after the exams where he predicted that some lower grades would go up and some higher grades would come down. He said that the pandemic affected this cohort's education differently. Some students still had access to full online (or in person if they are boarding) education. Some students also spent the lockdowns reading a lot more and maybe writing their own stories etc. At the other end, many students missed out on a significant amount of learning (+ skills and exam technique). The grades are essentially a competition. If the top 3% get a grade 9, then students who may be talented enough to a get a 9 most years may be pushed down to an 8 or a 7 by those who had access to a full education and take the top grades. At the other end, more students have missed out so will get lower grades. This means your grade 4 student could get bumped up to a 5 or 6 as there are already so many people being given grades 1-4 who scored lower than them. It's a normal distribution graph so there are always more people with the middle grades. The gist of what he was saying (if I recall correctly) is that there are more students at the upper and lower ends this year due to COVID and therefore students have been shunted towards the middle (up or down). In theory this means that the students aren't necessarily getting grades that reflect their ability or that are comparable with previous year groups. It does show their national ranking though."

Strange here too. DD is doing Eng Lit for A-level and got a 9 in that but an 8 in Eng Language.

Of course these are great grades and doesn't stop her from doing anything but just curious as hers was an iGCSE where there was a CW component (in which she scored 95%).

So she must have scored around 65% in the exam but DD thought after the exam she'd scored around 85% (I know predictions like these are not always correct but she was only a few % points off on the others) - she actually thought it was the exam, out of all subjects, she did the best in!

For context, DD was predicted a 9 throughout Y11 and scored 89% in the Feb mocks (the average at her highly selective school was 65% I think), after minimal revision. Similar story in Y10.

It could be that she relied too heavily on CW to make sure she upped her slightly, then, weaker science subjects but I do find it odd that she got her prediction so, so wrong especially combined with the massive drop from her mocks (for which she'd studied only the day before) and previous end-of-years.

She's too far away from the boundary for a review, and it really doesn't matter, but I think we'll request the script just to find out where she went out as a learning opportunity.

Sorry I mean English Lit/Language but he wants to do just English Literature and I believe that’s a facilitating subject so requires the higher GCSE grade.

I absolutely agree with this.
Lang A level is much harder than lit and a huge step up from GCSE.