To want to shout 'it's not the marking, it's the boundaries'...

[GetDownNesbitt]

At the TV/ radio/ newspapers/Internet every five minutes?

There is no evidence that GCSE English marking has been inaccurate. Markers don't give grades. Exam boards take the marks, set boundaries and allocate grades using those boundaries.

I need to take a deep breath, don't I?

I have no idea why I thought this was going to be about a neighbour/property dispute

OP

you canshout as loud as you like.

It will always be the teachers fault.

I marked English and found the standard to be consistently poor. I got stopped at one point because I had begun marking too generously, thinking perhaps I was being too harsh. I wasn't.

The Welsh government have launched an inquiry. Please let them find out it's Gove's fault.

No pressure on the exam boards my arse. Isn't it just an extraordinary coincidence that results for both A-levels and GCSEs have fallen after he has spent so long banging on about them needing to?

To clarify, by poor I mean that a large proportion of the responses I marked fell into the lower bands.

It doesn't matter if the standard was 'consistently poor' Farty because it wasn't lower marks that caused results to fall, but higher grade boundaries.

I was also expecting a neighbourhood feud.

I realise that. I was just making a related observation.

The boundaries are ridiculous. For the foundation tier, pupils needed 43 marks on the exam in January to get a C. In June they needed 53. Yes, we expect grade boundaries to change slightly from exam to exam, but not by ten marks. AQA have been speaking on tv saying that the C/D grade boundary has only been moved down by three marks - yes, on the Higher tier. Foundation - which is after all where most of the C/D borderline kids are found - has been really badly affected.

What they're not also mentioning is that boundaries for controlled assessments have been altered. So kids who were entered for their CAs in Jan would get more marks for them than if exactly the same work was entered in June. And yet Gove apparently hates early entry and wants all kids to sit linear exams at the end of the school year...hell in a handcart, I tell you.

The various reports that I have seen show that the fall is (depending on which subject/board) only about 1.5%. So achievement in 2012 was about the same as achievement in 2010.

I don't see increases in higher grades achieved every year as inherently desirable. And I don't remember an outcry in 2010 about inadequate achievement.

Farty your comment suggested that the standard of the scripts was poor and that was why results fell, whether you meant it to or not.

People, especially those with affected DC, need to know that AQA deliberately made the decision to fail more children, and then implemented it by a substantial rise in the marks needed to get a C. So children who would have got a C at Christmas for the marks they scored and got into college will now have a D and be wondering what they can do next.

Edith, this is not about inadequate achievement, this is about a deliberate manipulation of the grade boundaries in order to make more children fail.

Without warning, the goalposts changed, and children (and teachers) who had every reason to expect a C grade for the work produced, didn't.

That's not fair.

But if 10 years ago, you needed, say, 50% to get a C and gradually the results have been getting better and better, not through DC bei g smarter or teachers suddenly teaching better across the board, surely it follows that the pass Mark has been creeping down? To, say, 40%.

So, if Gove the ex am boards go back to saying 50% is the pass Mark, they are only bringing the Mark to where it was a few years ago?

noble

Edith, this is not about inadequate achievement, this is about a deliberate manipulation of the grade boundaries in order to make more children fail.

But surely what has happened over the past 20 years has been deliberate manipulation of the grade boundaries in order to make more children pass?

Greythorne the reasons for the increasing pass rate are far more complicated than a year on year decrease in the grade boundaries. It would also be impossible to look at year on year grade boundaries to see if there is a trend as the exams change so bloody often.

If the exam boards and Gove had said in advance 'This summer we want more students to fail and therefore the number of marks needed to get a C will increase artificially to X%' then at least people would have been prepared - and importantly could have opted to take the January sitting over the June one and got their C.

As it is, they changed the standard halfway through the year, for the same course, with no warning. Students in the same year group who sat the exam in January were lucky that their school had opted to do something that the DfE specifically recommends against, and students who sat the exam in June have had their futures screwed with unexpectedly.

noble
I am genuinely interested. How do you explain 20 years of grades going up and up?

I don't live in the UK, but in France where it is a point of pride that the exams seem to get harder and harder!

Don't even start on this. I'm supposed to be on holiday - had to go to work to deal with ranty parents who never read a newspaper, watch the news or turn on a radio. I don't mark the fecking things, I am not the exam board.

We can only enter marks for a CA in the June series, same as coursework. This was our first pass at CAs with year 10 (Science, so legacy with year 11, new specs with year 10), so we had no grade boundaries to work with. And I mean absolutely no indication at all what they might be.

Even with the legacy coursework, I have never given a grade, because you can't be sure how it will pan out and I won't make promises I can't keep, but there was a lot of consistency year on year. Next year, there'll be the same conversations for Science. A lot of our year 10s will be re-taking their core Science GCSE next year...

'CA'?

Controlled Assessment.

My daughter's french writing coursework was described as Aby her teacher. I am a french teacher, and I would have marked it as an A. We discovered yesterday that it was moderated as a B. It was not a B.
Something drastically wrong somewhere. Similar story in her Physics, taken as a separate science.
I believe that my daughter has missed out on 3 A's, due to some very strange marking/teaching, call it what you will. A's still very good, but she is left feeling somewhat deflated by it all. Will we ever get to the bottom of it all? I doubt it very much.

Greythorne In no order of importance and this list is not exhaustive (so don't see the number 1 as my main reason!)

1. Exams getting easier (note - this isn't the same as grade boundaries going down). I can't speak for other subjects, but as a maths teacher, the current maths GCSE is an embarrassment for the brighter students. The scrapping of the 3 tier system (Foundation, Intermediate and Higher is now just Foundation and Higher) a few years back in particular was a huge mistake as now the most able are insufficiently stretched.

1. Teachers getting better at exam preparation - I would say that the students I teach are now way better prepared for exams than I was at school. Assessment for Learning techniques in particular help them pinpoint exactly what they need to do to improve. Teachers are also shit-hot at knowing what the exam boards require to get precious marks (see point 4).

1. The internet. Students can now access a far better range of resources in order to revise than ever before. I have kids who go home and watch videos on the Khan Academy or Youtube to go over stuff they got stuck on in lessons. They are no longer limited by the efforts of their teacher. They can also download past papers, mark schemes, and go on forums like The Student Room to ask for expert help with individual questions.

1. League tables. Little Johnny is no longer allowed to fail if Little Johnny is a lazy arse. Little Johnny is kept behind for intervention lessons and revision sessions and coursework catch-up until Little Johnny damn well gets the C the school needs. A lot of pressure is put on teachers to make sure that every single student meets their target grade (and not just the magic C grade, every grade counts towards value added scores). This results in a lot of teaching to the test. Everything else goes out of the window if it won't improve their GCSE grade.

1. Modular exams - this isn't the same as exams getting easier as the content is the same, however having to remember less stuff in one go is less stressful. We could make strategic decisions over which tier to enter a student for, entering them at Higher tier for module 1 and Foundation tier for the others, for example. Knowing what grade they were currently on and what they needed to get in the next exam to achieve their target was genuinely motivating. Students could also resit individual modules if they thought there was a genuine chance of boosting their grade. (I know some schools routinely entered kids for resits on the off-chance but that costs money!)

'CA'?