Yr11/13 parents take a look at the sneakiness

[lifecouldbeadream]

The Consultation on how the GCSE and A level grades for this cohort has been released....... very quietly.

Consultation ends 29/04.

You can see the proposal here...... and it appears it includes SATs grades...... yes really......

www.gov.uk/government/consultations/exceptional-arrangements-for-exam-grading-and-assessment-in-2020

The projected flight path will now be taken into account when figuring out your childs grade. It is unlikely a pupil with a flight path of a 6 will achieve 9's in every subject. If the school put grades 9s in for a pupil on this flight path, it would open them up to further scrutiny.

No, it is statistically invalid to look at this on an individual pupil basis. They will be looking at it on a cohort level.

There’s always a kid who bombed their SATs for whatever reason. What will draw suspicion is if loads of kids are predicted 9s against expectations, and none of them are predicted less than their target. It should average out for a large sample.

@HandfulOfDust I hope that I will be able to understand the process when I’m back from my maternity leave Monday and will have the final say for several hundred GCSE and A Level entrants

I’m just talking about my experience. My experience is that objective data is better than subjective predictions. But it’s obviously not one size fits all which is why there isn’t a one size fits all process.

However, I am form the revolutionary camp that refuses to believe the naïve line that exams are accurate anyway. Lots of research on this last year which outraged people at the time. And now the same people are outraged by teacher assessment!

English and history A Level exam marking has a very poor record of 'accuracy'. It may well be that those predictions were the things that were correct.

The centre will look at it on an individual pupil basis.

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The consultation was also made public on the DFE & exam board social media pages too, so I don’t think it was intentionally sneaky

@Whatsername177

They won't be looking at individual pupils. Just that at a cohort level, students outcomes are broadly in line with their ks2 scores. This is done every year anyway.

I guess it's like any exam year where you can be lucky or unlucky based on the questions in the exam, your health on the day and so on. That said I would be annoyed if my dd got marked down based on her SAT target grades when she has been above target all through her time at secondary. Our school has a prize for the most improved students based on how they have improved on their target grade and dd was coming second on that.

I certainly won't be using ks2 data to influence any rankings or grades I give. I will base it on the students performance in mocks, class, homework and mini assessments.

There’s nothing sneaky about it and in the circumstances it’s the only sensible way to go. I’ve been teaching for 25 years and have also been an A level and GCSE examiner. The current system is very flawed - particularly in the more subjective subjects. The school data will only be used to adjust grades so if a school is too generous or too punitive based on past results there will be adjustments. The key grade will be the predicted one by teachers which given that we have to grade and rank order the entire cohort should be pretty accurate. The other stuff is for statistical balance. There will also be an appeal and the chance to sit an exam. As both the parent of a Year 11 and an A level and GCSE teacher I’m happy with the decisions that have been made.

I have a y11 and I don’t think this approach is sneaky at all. I suspect it’s the absolute best they can do in the circumstances.

There will be students who do well and students who feel hard done by out of this process. Same as the exam process. But then exams (and exam marking) are not a perfect scenario either.

And the fact remains that there is not much else the DfE can do. As a parent of a y11 who may well end up with slightly lower grades than he might have been able to achieve in an exam, I still feel that this process outcome is the fairest they could have come up with across the board.

@GivenchyDahhling

But SATS aren't objective data - they're very old, very dependent on the primary school and how much they prepped for the test, how mature a student was at 11 compared to 16. The objective data shows that teacher assessment is a far more accurate predictor. Obviously in this case it will have to be carefully monitored as clearly a teacher will have a vested interest in their particular student and may want to over predict but in general teacher prediction - especially with the benefit of mock results is clearly a much much better predictor than 5 year old SATS results.

@GivenchyDahhling - but why are the predictions subjective? I’ve taught my GCSE class for two years and I’m very confident about the rank order . As a department we are going to discuss every single student using all the data we have to ensure parity and I rate that over the exam lottery any day.

I also think that OP is misinterpreting the use of SATS data - lots our students haven’t done sats. The teacher predictions and rank order will be the most significant thing.

As a teacher I was informed about this consultation so it hasn't been kept secret.

This process will use a wide range of data and whilst it is not ideal DoE/Ofqual have had to try to create a one off system that all colleges/6th forms/unis/future employers are more than aware of for this cohort - I know that it is upsetting for yr11/13 students but no final formula will be perfect

Only 4 pages in and pp can't be arsed to read the thread that has, stated numerous times that the SARS data is used cohort wide, not individually
OP this is a really technical, specialist thing that experienced senior management are grappling with. Emailing this out to every y11 and y13 parents would invite a plethora of confused, angry responses. Ofqual, just like schools generally have had to make these policies up pretty quick to give the best possible outcome. The existing system when exams are sat is far from perfect or objective in many ways. If universities, colleges and students are prepared to be flexible and open to options come results day, I suspect that the vast majority will end up somewhere they are happy with.

Really? My dd did really badly in SATS but brilliant in mocks!

Handful don’t worry I know it’s from personal experience that’s why I emphasised that - I am not accusing any system of being better/worse. It’s that one study went against what I see happening.

I agree with Piggy that exam marking has a very poor accuracy record in the humanities. Dd got a weird A Level result last year and put a remark in for one paper that went up 8 marks (up a grade). A friend went from a D to a B from a remark. In fact no one went down.

As an NQT I taught in a large comprehensive and had a ‘challenging’ group once a week after a timetable shuffle. I hardly got to know their names. Many of them didn’t hand in homework and getting anything on paper was a challenge. How I would have ranked them I don’t know.

I think that’s the point @Musmerian - you’re confident about the rank order, know your class well, will have these departmental discussions etc. So on that basis for your class a subjective process will probably be accurate. But that isn’t true across all departments in all schools, which is why predicted grades can be so wildly inaccurate.

I teach maths but I also (used to!) do a lot of private tutoring with pupils from a lot of different schools and a significant number had a new teacher for Y11 - with them being the latest in a long line of teachers. I’m really not trying to be argumentative or cynical, even - my point just is that there are so so many variables across all the schools and departments in the country that I think that the best way to standardise is with as much objective data as possible.

In my 20 years of teaching I can think of 2 students that performed better than my prediction. UCAS predictions are very generous and usually the head of 6th begs me to put them up-which I’m happy to do as long as at least 2 choices of uni are realistic. Before getting her up I think some people need to read the bloody document as they are spouting rubbish.

Het up

The reference to KS2 grades is essentially to ensure that schools that have had poor Prog8 scores for the past three years don't suddenly magically have a Prog8 score of +1.2 or whatever.
The new GCSEs are already standardised each year- the 9s are awarded to the very top %, they don't give out more 9s when there's a very able cohort, they just move the 8/9 boundary down.

I think this is the least worst option. Purely basing it on SATS (which is the only truly objective data that could be used) is incredibly unfair on those students who have worked hard and over achieved from their SATS.

Schools should have enough data on students to predict them a grade. The ranking will be trickier especially with big cohorts. Surely by March all students have done one mock exam in each subject. This allows departments to begin the ranking process.

@Haskell There will be no progress 8 figures published for this academic year.

So frustrating when people pitch in with their comments without RTFT!

SATs will NOT be used to predict an individual’s GCSEs.

They WILL be used, where available, to check the whole cohort is getting the range of grades that is expected, in the same way grade boundaries are set for GCSEs

There’s a typical curve with results. I just don’t see how you can use Sats data for an early cohort for sats at that, to judge the performance of an entire cohort including those who didn’t sit them.

While I appreciate that some children would have performed better/worse in an exam scenario, it’d be on their own merits. In this case teacher assessment may bear no resemblance to the final result, but we’ll never know will we. There will be no ability to question the way the school determine it, and that protects teachers to a degree, but there will be no way to work out what got changed above centre level, and I really feel for a group of students assessed in a way that seems to have so little ability to question in the process itself.

I’m not naive and as I said as a former CoG I’m not unable to read the document either.

But surely as schools will not be judged on the results this year- but going forward students will, there should have been more publicity about this if they actually wanted Parents or students views, and I don’t count putting it on the website as publicity. Given the fact that almost 100% of news is Covid related, I’d think they could have found a second to mention it. It hasn’t been, so in reality no-one is actually being asked their opinion, because they don’t want it.

The cynic in me would ask why that might be?

They’re explaining how they’re going to do it, but looking at the models for correlation for SATS to GCSE, and even if cohort to cohort, I’m just concerned and I really hope that in August I’m proved wrong and the vast majority of students got the grades they expected and deserved.