to think thank fuck we don't live in England with this stupid results system going on?

[ssd]

by christ Michael Gove has really fucked up with this, it seems to be a change for the worst and is very confusing

why was this introduced, it doesn't seem to be clear to anyone, this is an awful system for the kids to get their heads around, this gov should be ashamed of themselves.

OP is in Scotland?

Where we have had (teacher and parent here).

The dreadfullly woolly Curriculum for Excellence (or the Curriculum for Fun as one of its architects, Brian Boyd, wanted to call it.)

The fiasco of the introduction of the new qualifications with no clear examples of work / past papers and the constant cry of "use your professional judgement".

An appeals process (actually, no appeals any more) that is a joke and allows serious errors to get through unchallenged.

The unbelievably useless National 4 which has no credibilty.

The over assessment of the huge number of units (now scrapped) and the vast amounts of teacher hours spent on preparing for and assessing some things over and over again.

Falling standards in Numeracy and Literacy - probably down to the new Curriculum.

Mass end of term truancy in many schools, plus issues that go untackled during term time - but hey, parents are in charge (Until their kids fail))

Pupils in my classroom do pretty well - but then I have management support to set my own (high) standards and ignore much of the nonsense.

But at least we don't have to cope with learning to use numbers instead of letters to determine grades! Lucky us.

Not to mention that school in Inverness where a whole class failed, two,years in a row.

One reason is that the papers can vary in difficulty/questions/topics between in exam boards.

Can someone clarify the above please as I did not grow up in the UK and am new to all this. Do students sit different exam papers in the same subject depending what exam board the school are going with?

Yes sunshine thats right

if someone gets 99% in a test then they get 99. There is no confusion there about how well they did

Depends on the questions in the test. The questions one year could be generally easier than the next year.

So someone could run the race in 9.2 seconds but next year the track was at an angle and someone else ran it at 9.4 seconds.

If pupils sat exactly the same exam with the exact same questions every year, then you could compare like for like. But I bet the exam would be on Student Room

They are not graded linearly on raw results. Statistical methods are applied in order to relate them to previous years' results.

Okay well if I am an employer with two identical applicants, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to tell who did better if I can see that one of them scored 5-10 percentage marks higher than the other across the board than if all I can see is two identical pages of A's across the board. The fact that last year's exam might or might not have been harder is just the luck of draw. I have zero idea whether my GCSEs were harder or easier than the previous years. I also have no idea if my A was better or worse than all the other A's in my year group. But if I had my percentage grade, I would know

yes and you could still give the top bands the A but publish the percentage as well. it shouldn't vary too much but if it did everything if one year the bottom of the A band was 89% and the next year it was 71% then we'd k is the exam boards were being a bit crap and they could be compelled to sort it out.

Okay well if I am an employer with two identical applicants, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to tell who did better if I can see that one of them scored 5-10 percentage marks higher than the other across the board than if all I can see is two identical pages of A's across the board

If maths is so important to an employer, they could do their own maths test on both applicants.

It's what the Government does to see if trainee teachers can do maths, despite insisting they have Grade C or above.

It's like the Government doesn't trust its own exams.

the world 100m.rexord holder is the one with the fastest time and everyone else lines up behind them. it doesn't get adjusted the next year so that the one that was 0.2 ms slower is now the winner because it was a bit windy that year.

If maths is so important to an employer, they could do their own maths test on both applicants.

I didn't mention maths I said "across the board l"

I also suspect (having spent a year in close quarters with some real perfectionists ) that giving a percentage abs opposed to a grade might encourage some people to aim for the 100%. There is a lot more satisfaction in knowing You got 100% than knowing you got "possibly 100%, possibly less but your grade is the same either way."

Employers who were that keen on percentage point will not be even looking at GCSE results. All my time in recruiting if a job description asked for 5 GCSE inc maths and English that was all that was checked the recruitment process then whittled the candidates.
A hundred metres is just that 100m, you do not have to change it to keep the athletes guessing. The do use wind when accepting world records.

There is a lot more satisfaction in knowing You got 100% than knowing you got "possibly 100%, possibly less but your grade is the same either way

I have no doubt that there are going to be even more grades:

80 - 85 = 9
86 - 90 = 10
91 - 95 = 11
96 - 99 = 12
100 = 13!!

It's not very difficult to look at their times and say "ok, mr A ran in 9.27 seconds, man B ran in 9.34 and man C in 9.77 so that's first second and third place." I'm not sure why that means GCSEs need letter or number grades. confused if someone gets 99% in a test then they get 99. There is no confusion there about how well they did.

Yes in one race. But the runner who got Gold in one year may have a time that would put him 7th in another year. If the race is in Mexico it will probably be faster.

if someone gets 99% in a test then they get 99. There is no confusion there about how well they did.

But one year it might be easy to get 99% and in another difficult to get over 60%.

Go back to the sprinters, if you were to look purely at the times and compare them to previous years then all finalist may well have run faster than at a previous Olympics. In 1992 only one finalist was under 10 seconds.

I don't remember this hand wringing over A-E (O'Leve;ls) then 1-5 (CSEs) followed by A-G, then A (GCSEs) . I'm sure we will all cope counting from 1-9*

I remember when GCSEs came in and exactly the same thing happened and there was a huge drama and everyone moaned. People just don't like change.

TBH - if someone can run 100m in 9.3 seconds and someone else can run it in 9.4 seconds, I would say they can both run really well.

Now if it took someone 30 seconds to do 100m....

Change breeds resilience - putting this and next year's cohorts at an advantage in that way.

That's how I sell it to my kids anyhow (both affected)

I have no doubt that there are going to be even more grades:

I agree, it seems fairly obvious to me

By the time i am in my dotage i can see me being told by my great granddaughter her childrens grades of 43's ....and i will have no idea whether i am supposed to be impressed by that

Its nothing to do with the change from oetters to numbers...nothing at all

*Rufustherenegadereindeer1

No it isnt the same, mainly for this reason Because the preparations just weren't adequate

No past papers, no idea of the requirements and constantly changing grade boundries*

I disagree, it was exactly as disorganised. Speaking to my Mum, she says my DBs year were a trial and it wasn't even guaranteed that the 'experiment' would be continued. They could've ended up being the only year with GCSEs.

As for moving grade boundaries, it's always been so, just not as transparent as now. I remember my O'Level maths teacher explaining standard normal curves and how they are used in exams to ensure similar standards across the different the years.

I'm not disagreeing with the political interference but don't believe for one second that it wasn't going on back then too. It's just that without the internet it wasn't so widely known. I think that society in general was probably less savvy than it s now.

y10parent

I think we both feel a bit differently about this, one of those agree to disagree moments

Every time the specification changes (approximately every 4 years), there are no past papers but there are specimen papers, and there's also teacher trading from the exam boards.

So if students are sitting different exam papers with different exam boards in the same subject, based on the same curriculum, how on earth can their results be compared

So if students are sitting different exam papers with different exam boards in the same subject, based on the same curriculum, how on earth can their results be compared

Because the grade boundaries - set by an overarching comittee called the Joint Council for Qualifications - will differ between exam boards in order to level the playing field.

" Uniform Marks

The uniform mark scale (UMS) is used to convert candidates’ component raw marks into uniform marks. All of the JCQCIC Awarding Bodies offering AS/A Level and GCSE unitised qualifications (AQA, Edexcel, CCEA, OCR, WJEC) use the same method for converting raw marks to uniform marks.

Following the marking of scripts, an awarding committee will review the quality of the work and the statistical and technical evidence for each unit. They will decide where to set the raw mark grade boundary for that unit. Examination papers can vary slightly in difficulty and so raw mark grade boundaries may change from series to series. Uniform mark grade boundaries are fixed, that is, they do not change from series to series.