To think that the Scottish government should not have caved over exam results?

[Notthemessiah]

So the Scottish government have caved in and have given their students the grades that their teachers have said they should get, despite the fact that overall they are massively inflated compared to previous years actual real results.

AIBU to think that this will massively penalise those pupils at schools where teachers were actually honest and realistic about their students likely results and instead benefit those who chose fantasy figures either through actual deceit, sheer wishful thinking or believing that the grades would be downgraded by some kind of system anyway.

Everyone was bleating about how it was unfair that pupils going to worse-performing schools got their results downgraded, but the stats don't lie - theirs were much more inflated compared to previous years that those from better-performing schools and it's ridiculous to think that all of them were suddenly going to improve this year.

It was always going to be an unfair system whatever happened but this just turns this year's results into a total joke - how universities, employers etc are expected to interpret them and compare them to other years is anyone's guess.

I hope that this doesn't happen in England and Wales too but it's hard to see how it can't - otherwise it puts Scottish students at a big advantage over their English and Welsh compatriots.

Ultimately if the people of Scotland are unhappy with how the SG handled this then they can make it clear at the next Election.

As Scotland is traditionally more left wing than England, I think we’ll find that most of Scotland will support this.

I’m not an independence voter. But, the Handling of Covid by and this by the SNP makes them the far superior party in my view. The admittance of mistakes and taking steps to rectify them is the sign of a mature government

Sorry if this has been covered, following as a teacher in the English system - are prelims the equivalent of mocks or of GCSEs?

@Evilwasps

I've no idea why they decided to moderate using previous results for each school, it isn't fair, doesn't make sense and continues to perpetuate the divide between better off and poorer areas. What they should have done is base the grades solely on each student's performance using course work and prelim results as evidence. If any school came out overall as very different from previous years results then that could have been investigated.

There was a girl on the news saying she got 94% in a prelim, predicted an A, then downgraded to a B because of the school's previous performance. Now that just isn't fair

My kids aren't in exam years so doesn't affect me directly but know a number of people like you quote. Kids who got really good prelim results who were then downgraded. One got a c in maths prelim and was downgraded to a no award. Had worked really hard to get their marks too and then got no award.

Kids education in every way has suffered as a result of covid.

Don't have a child doing a-levels at the moment, so no - nice insinuation though.

Neither does anybody else in Scotland

Coursework (folios in English) was completed, sent to SQA and then sent to examiners who were told to mark it, then told not to at N5.

Higher was not due until after Easter. We had ours completely done but it was not collected. AH English is submitted in 2 lots. The first lot, due after Easter, we had mostly done. The second lot still had a chunk to go as AH involves a dissertation and lots of writing so they need every minute.

So, we awarded grades based on early drafts. We looked at work from kids who had been off for two weeks or who were waiting for teachers to get back to them.

Would it have been fair to get things finished in lockdown and allow all the kids with private tutors or well educated parents to submit work of a high standard?

How do you judge the child who has been off for weeks after a bereavement but had done some A grade work earlier on?

We agonised over grades. We had spreadsheets and numbers, drew lines, cross marked.

And then they threw all the data up in the air and moved some up and some down with no rhyme or reason. No reference to previous exam grades or the ranking.

For something apparently done by statistical analysis it had very little clear basis.

If they had just chopped off the bottom dozen and moved them down, or even got in touch to query things we would have understood.

But identical pupils with the same previous profile in my subject - Pupil A ranked higher than Pupil B - saw B going up and A going down. By a grade. Swapping the order we placed them in.

It is madness.

And we had a tonne of evidence but what about subjects that didn't? Should those pupils be penalised on appeal because their teacher did not video a drama rehearsal or their Art work was trapped in school?

And there was NO subject specific guidance at all - it was generic and useless.

Under normal circumstances in Scotland there is no right to appeal. If a student doesn’t get their expected grade they can ask for a technical remark (checking that there were no errors or missing pages) or a full remark where the paper is marked again. The number of grade changes through this process is very small. If a pupil misses an exam a school can submit evidence for a grade to be awarded - a prelim paper may form part of this evidence.

Because of the no right of appeal in normal years (the appeal process was removed a number of years ago) the value of the prelim has fallen significantly and not taken seriously by many. There are no standard prelims, they vary significantly from school to school and in many cases past papers are used - nice gift for those pupils that have done all the past papers.

So prelims were not a good basis for deciding appeals this year. One of the problems with the appeal process that was put in place this year is that the sqa set very different parameters from the guidance that had been set for teachers to estimate grades - so the confidence in appeals putting things right was falling as the reality of the moderated grades set in.

If the SQA has engaged with schools throughout the process then this could have been avoided. The action taken today was the only way to fix many wrongs. And while the Scottish government has committed to funding extra places this year it has to do the same next year as this will create a two year bulge.

But identical pupils with the same previous profile in my subject - Pupil A ranked higher than Pupil B - saw B going up and A going down. By a grade. Swapping the order we placed them in

That’s shocking.

If they changed rank order then that is genuinely bizarre.

@olivo Prelims are the equivalent of Mocks in England

Would this process mean we’d still get downgraded if there was a wholesale issue a la Scotland or would the interval rigour mean we’d be less affected?
Amazingly, we applied the same kind of rigour in Scotland.

@deFleury

Couldn’t it have been pushed back to schools then to reassess?

Exactly, schools with a different pattern of attainment to usual should be been required to defend this with examples of the students class work, home work, or mock papers.

Totally.

And it wasn't just the schools who I'm deprived areas inflated.

They believe it was done across the board.

But algorithms meant some schools had a greater percentage drop on submitted grades than others.

To me results standing wasn't the best way. It still means a divide and perhaps the higher achieving schools have more 8's than usual which will be advantageous over the deprived schools who may just have inflated to mores 4's and a pass.

I thought the original system was basically to take mocks results and compare to achievement and progress etc and estimate each child's grade and they'd use the bell curve to check distribution was typical.

Teachers have plenty of records to show that. Even I have all ds acheivements and predictions as the years have gone on.

His predicted grades at end of year 10 were much higher than end of year 8 because he put in the work. His mocks were higher than his predicted grades.

To get predicted grades on an algorithm isn't any fairer than getting inflation that way.

Getting equivalent to what you've proved you can do is the fairest option imo.

Mistressiggi

I’m sure lots of schools did - what I’m asking is whether the downgrading only happened in schools where grades were dramatically over previous performance or if those schools who used their own previous performance as a guide were not downgraded.

@Smileyaxolotl1

I think 15% increase in grades is about right actually. And I don’t think many people are understanding why there is a disparity... If you have 4 students who you think all have about a 75% chance of getting an A grade you would predict them all that grade. In normal exams one of them probably would get the grade below. Which one would be impossible to predict when you are likely to be talking about 1-2 marks different. When this pattern is copied across all students it is obvious that the overall pass mark will rise.

Excellent point and well explained.

Thankyou

Smile the issue is that when they looked at the results in deprived areas, results went up by 20% on 2019. They won’t have downgraded all schools by 20%, they’ll have looked at each school compared to their 2019 results (and before) and spotted the ones that looked like they had massively overestimated. These would have been the ones that faced the biggest adjustment.

Schools weren’t downgraded because they were in a deprived area, they were downgraded because they were too generous with their grades.

More schools in deprived areas were generous with their grades (or there were schools who were super-generous) so deprived areas underwent a bigger adjustment. There will be schools in deprived areas who weren’t adjusted by much at all.

If they changed rank order then that is genuinely bizarre.

Yes, that makes zero sense. Are you sure of the rank order, cis?

@SmileEachDay

Mistressiggi

I’m sure lots of schools did - what I’m asking is whether the downgrading only happened in schools where grades were dramatically over previous performance or if those schools who used their own previous performance as a guide were not downgraded.

I would like to know this too. DD due GCSE results next week. I am pretty confident that her school would have moderated to ensure that results are broadly in line with previous years and am confident in their ability to rank students including my own DD but am now worried that they will ignore it all.

That’s what I though @noblegiraffe.

Unfortunately this knee jerk climb down means no one will have any faith in the results.

For those saying it’s discrimination- it isn’t. My school is in a really deprived area. We’ve steadily climbed in terms of results to a point where my department gets around 70ish% 4+. It would be totally unimaginable for my dept to submit CAGs of 84% 4* for this year. That would be my dept being overly generous.

I am sure that my daughter's school will tweak the rank order to make sure that people with Oxford and Cambridge offers get the grades they need. This is very unfair.

I think this is the right decision for this year but equally I find it astonishing that the Scot Gov have done this U-turn. It’s pretty obvious that this should have been the position from the start - just accept the teachers’ views and treat this year as an anomaly for comparison purposes. Why did they come up with an approach that they were so adamant about only, defending it a week ago only to do a complete turnaround a week later. Nothing to do with it being an election year next year surely?

Swinney should resign, and I am not normally in favour of knee-jerk resignations. He was clear today that he instructed the SQA to do the results as they were originally announced, he was responsible. And for that he needs to go.

@PurrBox

I am sure that my daughter's school will tweak the rank order to make sure that people with Oxford and Cambridge offers get the grades they need. This is very unfair.

Oxford and Cambridge of course will now have more students than they planned. They're two of the few English unis that Scottish students go to - more will now have met their offer than anticipated. So less leniency for English applicants....

That still doesn't work though, Smile, because you can look at previous years and then still come back to the fact that this year, this student is on course to get an A which might make 2 more getting As than last year, which leads to being downgraded.
Unless you literally went "four failed last year, so the bottom four on our ranking will fail this year, only 3 As so better make it the same again". Which I think is pretty much what the SQA did.
I won't bother trying to make every year better than the one before in future, what is the point? A brighter than usual group (like I had this year) - better dumb then down, so I won't be accused of over estimating, lying, or just generally being incompetent.
What does it say when teacher estimates were actually raised ? Does anyone imagine that if a teacher thought their pupil deserved a B, they would estimate a C? Yet I know personally of students getting the grade above their teacher's estimate.

YAB massively U - why the hell should kids from already disadvantaged backgrounds have yet another hurdle to face. How does this even negatively affect those who weren’t at poorer performing schools. Genuinely don’t understand why anyone would be angry about this

Mistressiggi

Totally accept that the standardisation will disadvantage some individual students. And that’s shit - I wonder if it will disadvantage more or less than linear exams do (which tend to be less successful for disadvantaged students)

Every year, there are outliers also - the kid who was lazy all year but pulled it out of the bag in the final exam, the kid who was doing well but freaked out.

How would you have done it, Mistress?

why the hell should kids from already disadvantaged backgrounds have yet another hurdle to face

If it had been kids in advantaged schools who had the over generous grades that had been downgraded would you have been arguing that they deserved the higher grades?

If not, then you can’t argue that now.

I am delighted that they have readjusted the grades.
The worst it does is inflate the grades of some disadvantaged kids - I can live with that. That is a much better outcome than them being deflated.
The advantaged kids will always be fine anyway.