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.

What’s your interest in this? TBH you sound more than a little vindictive. Do you have a link to the stats?

Looks like the SNP are continuing to flush their education system down the toilet to buy a few votes. This years results are now meaningless.

And what will happen in the years to come? I see lots of Scottish 'experts' on TV saying now is a great opportunity to get rid of exams and only have teacher assessments to 'close the gap'.

As I just said on a Scotsnet thread, I think the SQA as sole option for exams in Scotland has gone.

Allow AQA, Edexcel, whatever other boards to start setting Nat 5s and Highers. Bit of competition in the market. SQA continue to be shit, they lose customers.

Probably won't happen though as the SNP will never relinquish their stranglehold on Scottish education.

Why is Swinney not out of a job?

Because the kids go back to school tomorrow. Someone needs to be in that seat in the next few weeks in case it all goes tits up

Pressed send too soon

Swinney is still in his job so they can sack him if the back to school thing goes tits up

And now I see from the BBC website that the NUS are already demanding the same happens in England, and the results here aren't even out yet!

If the English boards do the same thing I'm going to be really pissed off. We did internal moderation based on the guidance from the government and if they ditch that now it will benefit children from schools who didn't bother to follow the guidance in the first place, and disadvantage students who attend schools where proper processes were followed.

Snap Chloe. We are horrified.

overtherainbow88 I mean that had we not moderated properly we would have sent in inflated grades too. Not deliberately, but because as a teacher you tend to think the best of your pupils. The moderation showed that we were initially overly optimistic for our students. So we reassessed that grades to more realistic levels and are pretty confident grades won't be moved down. If moderation wasn't done by schools, leading to overly optimistic grades for students, exam board moderation is there to do it for them.

If moderation by the exam board is abandoned, that will disadvantage students from schools where the proper moderation process was followed in the first place.

Its absolutely not nonsense, that happened to two pupils in the school I work in - I know what grades they got last year and the year before, I know what grades they had in the prelims, I know that they spent a chunk of the summer doing their UCAT assessment.

The school may have had poor overall results but that does not mean that all the pupils in it had poor results.

We have a huge number of EAL pupils, a lot of pupils with very poor literacy skills, lots of very low results.

We also have a number of pupils who live in the catchment area due to parents attending or working at the local university who are housed in the local sink schemes as they have cheap houses there no one else wants, and of course some pupils achieve very highly despite their very deprived home situation. Every year in amongst the C grades and D grades and No Awards we have a handful of pupils who achieve so highly they go on to study medicine/law/veterinary medicine at Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge . This year those pupils were downgraded based on the schools average results, not the pupils exam history.

No one at the SQA looked at any evidence to judge this, no one looked at their coursework or their prelim. They had an algorithm based on statistics rather than individual pupil ability.

Yes they could have gone with the appeals system but the number of appeals would have been huge any way with no way to look at them within the tight deadline before University starts up here next month.

I'd rather some students get an inflated grade so those who did the work get the grade they deserve than have some students downgraded and lose out on their university courses due to some statistical algorithm and nothing to do with the work they had been putting in for years.
Those who get unfairly high grades will soon be shown at college or university.

Don't forget also that the last few years the Scottish Government have been pumping money and initiatives into deprived schools to try to address the attainment gap.

@Notthemessiah do you have a child getting their GCSE/A level results this year?

I'd rather some students get an inflated grade so those who did the work get the grade they deserve than have some students downgraded and lose out on their university courses due to some statistical algorithm and nothing to do with the work they had been putting in for years.
Those who get unfairly high grades will soon be shown at college or university.

Agreed @yetmorecomplaining

Reversing the decision was absolutely correct.

The way the moderation worked was that the pass mark was effectively different for each school, and in a deprived area there were some exceptionally bright young people who failed an exam which, had they attended a school in a wealthy area, would have been deemed a pass. How is that remotely fair?

I agree that modulation was needed to produce overall results that looked 'right' however in my opinion ruining the lives of bright kids unlucky enough to live in a deprived area was not a price worth paying for it. Let's get a bit of perspective here.

I'm appalled that people think the original plan was reasonable.

I don't have secondary age children.

Mock grades aren't fair either - not unless children know beforehand that they could be used in this way

Prelim grades are often used for appeal and whilst I agree that unless children had known beforehand that this was their only chance they many not have performed their best. But in these circumstances given it sounds like teachers estimates and coursework has not been taken into account, this was the last exam kids did and it should give an indicative grade. When I have a problem with what’s happened is those children who have received lower, sometimes by 2 grades, than the prelims.

I think it is important to note that this system was ALWAYS going to be unfair on an individual level. That's why the government promised proper exams in the autumn.

It is, of course, arguable that exams themselves are unfair on an individual level. But that doesn't make the news because we are so used to it.

Really, I think what most people are struggling to accept is that the school you attend will have an impact on your performance for the majority of pupils. It's fine when that's all about how to get your own DC in to the "best" local school, but now the general public need to recognise that it's also true for students who don't get in to the "best" schools. This year it's easy to blame the exam board moderation for actually acknowledging that fact rather than the far harder thing which is to accept that it is true every year.

But Grumpiest, if those exceptionally bright kids deserved the mark, they could appeal. There was a process for that.

@noblegiraffe the point is that the grade proposed by teachers was to be assessed by reference to evidence. No one was being asked to “poodle around”, but there is an expectation that they act professionally. If there was no evidence the grade should not have been proposed, (and definìtely not awarded) lockdown or not.

The Scottish Government has failed those students at schools whose teachers did things properly and didn’t over estimate as all grades are now tainted by the over guesstimates of teachers.

I hope exams are restored in future years but awarding inflated results this year is interesting.

Pupil A goes to a private school and is tutored all through school, his university-educated parents help him study etc etc, the school predicted that he would scrape an A (and he probably would have done) so that’s what he got.

Pupil B comes from a deprived area, her classes are disruptive, she had no where to study at home, her parents can’t help her with the coursework, she has caring responsibilities etc. her teachers predicted an A cause if she had a good run at the exam with no distractions and was able to study at home she is more than capable. Had she sat the exam she would probably have got a C cause studying in her home environment is tough. The teacher predicted an A and now she has an A.

Now both kids are going to university. Which will do better? Pupil B still has a poor environment to study in, but fewer distractions in class, and pupil A will have to learn to push himself. Does pupil A deserve his A more than pupil B?

The way the moderation worked was that the pass mark was effectively different for each school

Nonsense. There was no exams this year. And therefore no pass marks at all.

Some schools submitted grades which are seriously out of kilter with expected performance. Either they didn't bother with the moderation or they did but still found the cohort notably more capable that previous years. In England, they can appeal on the basis of the latter.

"Those who get unfairly high grades will soon be shown at college or university."

At which point it will be too late for the student who actually should have got that place but didn't because their teacher didn't inflate their grades.

There's a fair few people opining on here who only know the English system. One thing to note is that Scottish students do exams earlier so had basically finished.

Unlike in England, Scottish schools submit predicted grades annually so I don't know why the reliability of individual schools wasn't judged by that.

My understanding is that Nat 4s are completely teacher assessed so Scottish teachers are used to submitting grades.

And coursework could have been a useful tool as it was completed and ready for submission ( and externally marked afaik).

We agree, Simply, I was just pointing out that it was impractical to suggest that teachers collate portfolios of student work and that the SQA conducted spot checks of those portfolios during lockdown,

For example I don’t have any examples of my student’s work. None. I do have my mark book and mock results but then how would SQA check that my mock results were reasonable without the papers?

@Notthemessiah

And now I see from the BBC website that the NUS are already demanding the same happens in England, and the results here aren't even out yet!

Please England, dont follow this madness.

@noblegiraffe

But Grumpiest, if those exceptionally bright kids deserved the mark, they could appeal. There was a process for that.

I understand was going to take months (until May 2021?) to get the results though, and in that time a devastated young person has list their confidence and motivation and dropped out. Why should they have to appeal? Why should they need to spend months worrying about whether they'll get the grades they worked for just because they live in a poor area? Why should they lose a uni place or job to a child from an affluent area whose grades were allowed to stand?

Schools did internal moderation in Scottish schools too, each department had to send a statement to explain exactly how the estimate grades were determined, how pupils were ranked within each band, what evidence we had used (so it could be requested at a later date if need be) and give any reason for a big variation on previous years results.

So for example one department had poor results last year and higher estimates this year - but last years poor results were due to teacher absence for more than 6 months of the year with no subject specialist cover- a letter was included to state this to demonstrate why higher estimates than last year was appropriate.
I don't believe anyone read any of the information sent from schools to the SQA.

I am also sure the stats show that schools weren't inflating every student . A handful of borderline students per school produces inflation that looks dramatic but it wasn't widespread over inflation of every child in a school.

It CANNOT be right that pupils who got 5 As in highers last year were then awarded low Advanced highers. 5 As at higher is an exceptional achievement. Those are the very brightest students. They just don't go on to get Cs and Ds.

I know they could appeal , although I would worry about speed. At least it was free in Scotland, unlike in England.