A’Level disasters 😔😣

[OverTheRainbow88]

Any other schools been majorly hit?

I noticed in this article that three private schools said they had record breaking results. How would they have record breaking results if grades were not supposed to be allowed to be inflated on the previous years?
www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/18648209.a-level-results-day-sw-london-surrey-receive-results/

@areyoubeingserviced

This is just going to encourage more parents to lie and cheat to get their kids into the best state schools. There is little point in trying to encourage parents to send their kids to the local low performing comp, when they would be at a disadvantage, despite being hardworking , intelligent students

I always thought that a hard working child with a supportive family would do well wherever they studied

Fuck me was i wrong about that!

My only consolation is that at least ds2 is at a more academic college which regularly gets good results and he has had a heads up that EVERYTHING counts from September (he has been excellent during lockdown...got an email from one teacher saying he was the only one in the class completing all the homework)

Can't they use their mock results now so the official ones don't apply?

@DayB1Day- I am dreading next week too.
DD is already panicking despite being a very able student

I notice a few people complaining that their A level grades were lower than their GCSE results.

A levels are supposed to be harder. You can't guarantee that someone who shines at basic GCSE level is still going to shine as the material gets more difficult or requires more insight. Lots struggle.

Can't they use their mock results now so the official ones don't apply?

Who knows.

It has to have been a “valid mock”. They haven’t told us what that means yet.

@PurpleDaisies

Can't they use their mock results now so the official ones don't apply?

Who knows.

It has to have been a “valid mock”. They haven’t told us what that means yet.

Is it still a “valid mock” if it produces results that are higher than the school usually achieves in the real thing?

Sounds like a bit of a Catch-22.

I just wonder where these Autumn exams are going to take place.

Is it still a “valid mock” if it produces results that are higher than the school usually achieves in the real thing?

Who knows?

I expect the criteria will be more about exam conditions etc than the school’s historic performance.

To be fair, the pupils who are most likely to have suffered under the model are high achievers where the school has no history of that. They’d do much better than the school’s average in the mock. They’re the ones who really should be having their grades adjusted upwards.

I just wonder where these Autumn exams are going to take place

And what will happen if there are further lockdowns- either locally or nationally.

I think one of the pupils interviewed by the BBC summed it up perfectly when she said ‘ this is not a game of Tetris ‘

I agree PurpleDaisies but there will be so much inconsistency. My school carried out mocks under exam conditions but it’s blindingly obvious some departments marked very generously compared to others. In my subject no students have higher mock results than the grades they received today: in other subjects they all do.

@areyoubeingserviced

"This is just going to encourage more parents to lie and cheat to get their kids into the best state schools.
There is little point in trying to encourage parents to send their kids to the local low performing comp, when they would be at a disadvantage, despite being hardworking , intelligent students"

State selectives had an even more frustrating time over this than comprehensives. Overall, the yearly increase in A grades went

state selectives 1.2%
comprehensives 2%
independents 4.7%

It'll be interesting to see what Gavin Williamson and Co consider "valid"

It's a bit calmer in our house now. DD2 managed to get into somewhere in the same city as DD1's back up offer. They were never going to the same uni, but had always planned to go to the same city (They're twins, not living together is going to be very, very strange for them even though they've always had their own friends).

Autumn retakes won’t be fair. Who can afford tutoring to make up for 9 months out of school?

Also this year’s uni places will already be allocated. Maybe a small number of students could delay a year without much impact, but if numbers are significant there will be an impact on next year’s intake.

I think this pandemic has exposed the serious limitation of statistical modeling, if nothing else
A bloke with a spreadsheet is just that. It's not science. The fact that he can make wild assumptions, key them in, and produce some "effects" or "results" which are calculated to 15 decimal places may make it look scientific, but it's really never anything more than some bloke with a spreadsheet.

That's the problem here (condensed into an oversimplified nutshell maybe).

Second what @louderthan says. I also work in HE. Please check with unis - we are all desperate for students (and want to fill a hole left by international students due to combo of pandemic and brexit)

oversimplified

You said it.

@woodlands01

High achieving comp with some downgrading, about 25% by 1 grade. I am most surprised that most students know their CAGs (which are most definitely different to UCAS predictions) to compare against. We did not tell our students at all. In fact as a teacher I do not know the final CAGs submitted for my students only what I put forward. They then went through 2 strict moderation's, one in subject, one whole school. I do not know what the outcome was.

@woodlands01

At dd’s school (also high achieving comp) they didn’t know the CAG until after the “official” grades released today. But then if we wanted to know, the school happy to release the CAG - and why not? It’s information pertinent to the child and their education.

DD been downgraded. Along with pretty much every maths pupil. She was taking maths in year 12 and further maths in year 13 so while not ideal, is not make or break. But the school are understandably pissed off that it seems that not a whit if interest was shown in any of the meticulous evidence provided, purely the ranking. Dd was ranked as a sound A although her HOD said with some hard work and a fair wind they wouldn’t have been surprised if she got an A*. But they didn’t have the evidence to back that up and so the CAG was conservative. Rightly so.

It’s a total kick in the teeth for teachers and students alike.

At least Dd has the chance of a resit in October. But we have to pay £130 for it. We are fortunate in that this isn’t an issue. Nor getting a maths tutor because while the school will try and offer some revision sessions for the resit, there is limited school time before resit.

How can teachers facilitate resits in Autumn when they are already struggling to help next year's A Level and GCSE students make up one lost term in the next two?

Resits also mean you lose a year - it's not like we are in an environment where an 18 year old can get a decent job for a while.
It's clear that the headline figures looked okay (A* up a few percent as a sweetener to the voters happy) but within the detail there is a wealth of unfairness caused by sloppy workmanship on the algorithm. Christ knows they had enough time to do it properly. I look forward to them finding and documenting lots of "smoking guns" on that algorithm and using them to force the government to change direction.
It's really important they push the year group through the educational system to minimise damage on years below and even above at unis.

All solutions are very imperfect at this stage but I would probably find extra money for them all to go to uni and ask unis to subject them to rigorous testing at the end of Year 1.

I don’t understand the outrage.

They don’t have to just accept these grades - they can appeal or sit the exam in the autumn.