Y11 2023/24 thread 5 - results!

I feel a bit like that with GCSEs. DD has had four subjects reviewed (one paper in each) and three have come back with an increased grade. It's made me really doubt the system - DD is delighted with the outcome but also feels cheated that she didn't get chance to celebrate what she got.

Not a clue, sorry - haven't seen the paper! His school was quite proactive about sending it back. We didn't have to pay. I think because he was only a single mark off an 8, they must have found something minor upon review. It's all a little esoteric to me tbh.

@Scattery thats great news. Do you know where the additional marks came from? I feel some off dd’s answers where she has had to write an answer (rather than a calculation) have been a bit harshly marked

DS's school (with his permission) sent back his chemistry paper for a remark and it went up from a 7 to an 8. He's quite chuffed but I'm feeling some type of way about the whole GCSE process/grading at the moment.

My DD went up to a 9 in a humanity subject but stayed the same in another. She was close to the grade boundary in both.

Papers submitted are reviewed to see if the marking is fair. In essay subjects, a range of marks could be ‘fair’, so even if the reviewer would award slightly differently, if the original mark was fair it would still stand. I think that’s what people mean when they say they are not looking for extra marks.

My DDs humanity paper was reviewed by her teacher and she thought she should have been awarded 3 or 4 marks for a 4 marker, not two. The reviewer obviously agreed as the mark was increase.

DD was 2 below the next grade in physics but the school don’t think there are any marks to be found so we’re taking their advice and leaving it. She was pretty happy with the grade she got thankfully so all good.

@ASongbirdAndAnOldHat I can't explain it except perhaps with science it's either right/ wrong? We weren't going to bother but school approached us at start of term so decided to try. Had both papers looked at.

Can you explain this. I was told that they aren't looking for marks

Got DS Biology remarked, at school's suggestion as he was 1 mark off a 6. Just got it back. Got one mark extra. So v pleased he's moved up to a 6!

I have DS English Language scrips back - 2 points off a 6 - the 6 would be handy acros his marks overall and for the future - is it worth asking for a review or is it to likely it could go the other way and go down to bc a 4

• Pearson not AQA

Yep, very true!

I wouldn’t imagine those who didn’t go up a grade are as likely to post though so that might not mean much

Yes, DS went up 2 marks which took him up a grade. See thread below for others - the vast majority of those who have reported back to the thread on the reviews have gone up a grade (across Lang + Lit)

AQA GCSE English reviews | Mumsnet

Anyone have AQA English Language remarks back?

DD has two subjects back with remarks. 3 papers each. Latin has stayed exactly the same mark and grade. Dual award Science one paper down by one mark, two papers up by 2 each so she has gone over the boundary and has the next grade up. 🎉

Just waiting on Drama now with just one paper being remarked - one mark under the boundary. Fingers crossed.

Fair enough. I see your argument.

I don’t think us laypeople with no insight into the marking process now can say whether it is on balance more or less accurate than in the past.

as far as I know English GCSE component marks are entered into an online system. You’d expect any high-stakes system like this to ask anyone inputting marks to check null values before proceeding to the next stage. And also to identify any inputter with an unusually high proportion of seemingly unanswered questions generating no marks.

my point was, there are always inaccuracies in any process involving human labour and judgements. It may well be that modern methods of marking and awarding are worse, but it’s hard to compare with the analogue years.

@Messen No I don’t think it is the point, or at least not my point. Whether this year is an outlier in the context of recent years is yet to be seen. My point is a different one - where papers were in physical form it was easy (if you had enough people) to leaf through them and check whether every question had been marked and to do a clerical check on the adding of the marks. I said that I wonder how that check is carried out now that they are digitised. Can it be improved, regardless of whether 2024 has been a “bad” year?

If you read my post again you’ll see that I didn’t claim that statistical controls were better in the past. I would expect statistical analysis to be much better now than in the 1980s, especially as GCSEs were brand new when I was totting up the marks in 1988 and 1989.

That’s the point, though, isn’t it?

Are 20- mark undermarks more or less common than previously?

How relatively frequent are 20- mark under or over marks?

Regarding the ‘analogue days’, we don’t know whether there were proper statistical controls either then. Tempting to hark back to the good old days but is just hearsay to say the statistical controls were better then.

Something is lacking in the systems and controls if 20+ marks can go missing on a paper. Academic judgments in level marking are one thing; whole chunks of marks missing because an answer has been overlooked entirely are another. Back in the analogue years of the 1980s I was one of the hordes of Oxford undergraduates who used to earn summer beer money by performing manual checks on the local exam board’s GCSE marking (had every question been marked; had the marks been correctly added up etc). I wonder how that process is done now.

Exam regulator Ofqual is responsible for maintaining standards and rigour. It has acted in the past when it detected unfairness in grading, see modern languages this summer.

Greater than normal statistical ‘noise’ and incongruence between GCSE outcomes and KS2 pupil attainment in English/maths, you’d expect to be picked up. Ofqual and the Dfe have the data to track this stuff using pupil level data.

There will always be:

• some kids who have incorrect marks on the exams
• some kids who did worse than expectations because they didn’t do enough work
• some kids who did worse than expected because of bad luck on the questions that came up
• Some kids that did worse than expected because their teachers marked them too generously during y10 and y1.
• Sone kids who have incorrect marks and it favours them
• some kids who did better than expectations because they worked their socks off
• some kids who did better than expected because they got their perfect questions
• some kids that blew their predicted grades out of the water because they were under predicted by teachers who missed kids’actual ability

You need system-wide data to prove anything. It’s important for fairness that standards are consistent but there is always an element of human error, plus natural variation between cohorts. For each child who feels they didn’t get what they should have, might be a child who is pleasantly surprised by what they did get. Until the full data is out then it’s all a bit of a fools’ errand.

While I agree with you, I'm wondering whether the data will be affected by people who couldn't afford to pay for review/remarks.

My confidence in the exam boards isn't nearly as strong as it used to be after the results DS got vs. what he was predicted/consistently performing at in mocks. Looking at forced retakes of English and/or Maths also makes me wonder what sort of profit certain exam boards are pulling in. Anyhow, anecdotal evidence. I hope we get to see proper data because I'll be watching with interest.

At the meta level, though, it’s a wait and see situation.

it might turn out that marking is more or less accurate or variable than previous years, but until you can see the full range of grades, remarks, and final grades/ percentage of revised-upward/ downward grades, it’s hard to be sure of anything.

it’s easy to exteapolate from a few cases or your own personal experience, but 600,000 pupils or more take GCSE English exams. You’d need more than a handful of wrong results to throw the whole lot on the fire.

It really is awful that there is that much of a problem with the marking, we only put in for a review on the off chance as DS was a mark away, I didn't really consider that there would be such huge issues. Lots of DSs friends did a grade or 2 worse on the AQA English Lit paper (their school does Cambridge language) but I think most of us just assumed that it was due to harder papers/marking this year as they were trying to get back to normal. I don't think many put in for reviews, perhaps they should have!

Presumably the exam board can just do nothing and leave thousands of kids with incorrect grades?

The Guardian reports on English AQA "Across both papers, it moved up 41 marks from a grade 6 to a 9."
"https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/sep/13/unreliable-marking-gcse-english