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 know exactly how my department improved our GCSE results. We came in every holiday this year to work with particular students. We did revision lessons after school every day. Some of us (not me...) did pre school revision sessions. We were on the phone to parents constantly organising the improvement of coursework and providing extra work (all marked).

When I started teaching, I did one revision session a week for maybe five weeks before the exam.

When I was at school myself, only one of my teachers did anything like that, and he was considered very unconventional.

But generally, 'most' people agree that young people know less and less. I have observed this myself. Stuff that used to be considered de rigueur has now been shifted to A Level or even degree courses. Children for whom punctuation is a foreign country, percentages just beyond them etc.

Surely kids leaving with fewer skills and less knowledge bit a clutch of As means there must have been a lowering of the pass Mark?

They know how to pass the exam.

And passing the exam, at GCSE, is a bit about knowledge and a lot about know how to hit the points on the mark scheme.

I would actually disagree that Science GCSEs are easier in terms of content. I gave my top set an O level paper from 1982, and they did pretty well. They couldn't draw and label the ventral surface of an earthworm, but they would be able to answer questions on genetic engineering, which weren't there in 1982...

I spent a bit of time with my top set this year developing skills for A level, but not enough really. But then I am under huge pressure to achieve good grades, and so are they, so that has to be our main focus.

It's a different system now.

Funny that the greater passes year on year is explained as far more complicated than that, but the readjustment that only made grades the same as 2010 is seen as moving the goal posts and oh so terribly unfair.

Greythorne, you can make an exam easier to pass without touching the pass mark at all.
You can take a maths question with several subquestions written as a dense block of text and rewrite it broken up into a) b) c). People will get more marks because it's easier to read. You can change the language used to make it easier to understand what is being asked. You can add a diagram.
You can see all these changes between maths exams in the 50s and now before you even consider the content. That's why things aren't as straightforward as you suggest.

As for fewer skills, don't forget children today have skills that you wouldn't have dreamed of back in the day - technology has advanced incredibly but people tend to be snobby about those sorts of skills.

I believe it was a different style of exam back in 2010 novack so the two are not comparable. You should be comparing the boundaries to the ones in January which were for the same syllabus.

Very interesting, noble.

I am a team leader for GCSE History with one exam board. Our grade boundaries do change, but only in a downwards direction. The expectation is that 45/50 in a particular unit will equal an A*, but some years if hardly any papers hit that mark it might be lowered to 43. It will not be raised to 47.

My examiners never mark full scripts, just individual responses. I mark full scripts if they couldn't be scanned online, so in those cases I do know what the student has achieved in terms of marks, but not the grade until after the awarding meeting.

A change of 10 marks in grade boundaries is unheard of in my experience, so something exceptional must have happened.

Kids get better grades because the teaching is so to the test. I spend hours making AfL activities, writing sample answers, marking practice questions. I took my GCSEs in 1997 and we did one mock exam, the rest was learning facts. My GCSE classes do a practice question with full written feedback every week. They get a grade because they know exactly what is required to get that grade. They still have to learn the stuff, but they know how to apply it to get maximum marks.

I've no problem with it, in fact I'm glad they are finally sorting the mess of grade inflation and falling standards out at last.

It's a bloody stupid approach, novack, midway through an academic year, with no warning and when there are new qualifications with a different name on the horizon to 'sort the problem out'.

These kids are unfairly penalised for happening to sit their exams during the wrong six months in 2012. No one is going to give them a fair hearing.

hanginginthere1
"I believe that my daughter has missed out on 3 A*'s, due to some very strange marking/teaching, call it what you will."

What you call it is very important as they are 2 different things.

Am I the only person who doesn't think it is unreasonable that you should be able to get say 60% of total marks in an exam in order to pass?

An exam in which you had to get at least 60% to achieve any grade at all would have a lot of redundant questions, in terms of distinguishing between, say, a G and a C (a foundation tier GCSE paper).

We don't have pass/fail exams. We have A*/A/B/C/D/fail (U) exams, and C/D/E/F/G/fail (U) exams.

Fairyliz you certainly have to get 60 per cent (30/50) in each of 4 units to secure a C grade in GCSE History.

Grades below a passing level are pointless. If you don't get a minimum pass it should be a fail and you try it again. calling it a D E F G is just wishy washy everyones done well thinking. No you didn't do well you didn't get an A or a B you didn't scrape a C, you failed.

So you see no merit in distinguishing between someone who could achieve a D and someone who could achieve a G? That's daft.

And it's what the CSE used to do. And when I did O levels, CSEs were what the majority of students took.

And honestly, some of my students could take Science GCSE 'til kingdom come, and they would not be getting a C. Even in these dumbed down, grade inflated days...

They're not pointless in that they do actually distinguish between the abilities of the candidates at the lower end. A student who gets a G in maths would be acknowledged to have a much lower level of maths knowledge than someone who gets a D.

It depends on what you think the purpose of the exam is. If it is to give an idea of the ability of the candidate on a wide spectrum then A* to G is fine. If it is to write off 40% of the population (in maths) as failures and of no further interest, then say anything below a C is a fail.

Teachers report that grade boundaries were changed during the year.
A local teacher wrote -
"Schools can submit coursework in January or June. These are the exact same tasks but simply moderated at different points in the year. If schools submitted this unit in January, the total needed for a "C" grade was 56.6%. In June the same piece of work needed to score 60%. Now how can anyone compare schools when they are marked using different rules? Speaking and listening is even more alarming: January a "C" was 55.5% and in June....62.2%. Remember this is for the exact same work simply submitted at different points in the year."
To me this just seems to be downright unfair.

But if you label that 40% as failures, why should they attempt to gain any knowledge in that subject at all?

For some of my students, getting a D or an E is a massive achievement. I have students who don't have the literacy skills to even read the questions, anything they achieve above a U is remarkable. I had one student who arrived at the beginning of year 10 who spoke no English at all. Asking him to make an inference about change from two sources (the easiest question on the paper) was like asking me to climb Everest. Hence why individual students have individual targets, based on FFT D.

That's the crazy thing. The grade boundaries were changed within one exam, not between subsequent exams. So schools which did what Michael Gove expressly supports, entered their students for this component at teh end of the course and not early, have been penalised. The same piece of work, exactly the same, would have gained more marks in January than June. That is stupid.

Sorry, that should of course be gained a higher grade!

BBJ,
I take your point, but unfortunately for my daughter a combination of less than solid teaching, combined with cock ups in various aspects of coursework, has prevented her from achieving her potential. Have yet to really try to get to the bottom of it, but of course no one will accept any responsibility, least of all the teachers concerned.

noblegiraffe - really interesting post of 15:06:47. I think that would clarify what's happening for a lot of people who are puzzled about this.