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?

See, you think you want a return to linear (which there is for your DD's year group by the way), but I'm not sure it will work out like that in reality.

And your DD will be the first year group to do them.

And possibly the last, the ways things are currently going. Our new GCSE spec has had a one year shelf life after all..

My DSs French CAs were composed by a French national who has a PGCE and has worked for 15 years teaching French in a UK secondary school to A level. Yet it was only marked as a B! If a French speaking woman can't get an A* in French you really have to wonder!

Eh? Surely your DS did his own controlled assessment?

I did laugh at a Polish boy in my school who failed to score 100 in one of his Polish A level modules though...

catwoo I don't understand your post. How are they your son's CAs if the were 'composed by a French national'?

TheFallenMadonna did you also laugh at any English students who didn't get 100% in their ENglish A levle? OR even GCSE?

We had a German boy who only got an A, not an A* in his German GCSE. Better still was the German A-Level student who got a much better grade in his Russian History module than his German History one. Thankfully I taught the Russia!

Marking = the process of giving a candidate a mark ie So everything up to and including deciding what grade is to be printed on a results slip is 'marking'

Give over. We laughed about it together. He is 18 years old, off to do a degree in the subject I teach, and yes, we found it amusing that he had dropped 2 marks on an exam designed for students with 2 years experience of the language!

Marking = the process of giving a candidate a mark ie So everything up to and including deciding what grade is to be printed on a results slip is 'marking'

But the markers aren't responsible for anything other than putting the mark on the script. And get it in the neck every time.

Confused now by catwoo's ds's CA.

Maybe catwoo is suggesting that her son's French teacher wrote an essay in French, and catwoo's son memorised it and wrote it out for his controlled assessment.

THat's what i thought, cinnamonnut. WHich would be cheating. I swasn't sure snyone would be that blatant about it, though, so thought I'd give an opportunity for clarification.

That would be cheating.

Oops.

It was not his French teacher it is a neighbour who teaches French but at a different school.To be fair DS wrote it and she just corrected and improved it then he memorised it.

To be fair, I do try to point mine in the right direction with CA i.e. a paragraph about this would be good, have you thought about which factor was most important etc. However a lot of my students appear convinced that their knowledge of the Vietnam War is far superior to mine so ignore my careful prompts.

If that's the case, it wasn't 'composed' by her, then. I still think that might be a bit more help than is allowed for in the specification.

I know our French department set their own CA with their own bullet pointed prompts, so unless the second French teacher had a good grasp of where the marks were being awarded it wouldn't necessarily be a good way of cheating.

I'm too lazy so we use the exam board set CA, but unless you actually sat down with the markscheme it isn't immediately obvious what they want.

Blimey. All of the marks for ours come from two high control previously unseen exam papers. We give no help at all. Perhaps we are doing our students a disservice...

Ours is an investigation leading into an essay, followed by two source based ones. They get the question for the essay in advance and have to research, so that's where I say - think about this, maybe this would be good etc, but they have to do the work themselves beyond that. I don't mark anything. The sources they have for two weeks then have to do the question - I don't help with that as it is pure skills and they have been taught these before.

In our old Coursework days they used to write drafts and drafts of each answer, so I like the CA for less marking, but it doesn't pull them up as much as course work did.

Catwoo, did you ask your neighbour to improve it to A* standard? Perhaps it only got a B because that's the standard your boy is at and she didn't want to give undue help?

She offered, did it and then said that it was A* standard .His own teacher said she thought it was too (she said she glanced through them before she sent them in) The school actually ended up having the whole year groups French written looked at again now I come to think of it (this was 2011 not this year)

Controlled Assessment for MFL is marked in school then moderated, not just glanced at then sent off.

elliepac Sorry to disagree with you but putting students into an exam with only the chance of achieving e f or g result seems pretty pointless. It surely would have been far better use of their time and the taxpayers money to educate them in an area they would actually learn something since whether you like it of not e f g is a fail and demonstrates little knowledge of history full stop.

I thought this was going to be about football