It’s right that 16% of ucas grades are achieved. So every year even when exams have been sat most are disappointed but quickly get over it as they still get their uni place.
Most schools over predict and there are strong incentives to do so. Without the prediction you won’t get the offer. Even without meeting the offer, most courses even at v good unis will still take students who missed by 1 or 2 grades. So the key is to get the offer in the first place.
And then these CAGs given by teachers ....not as generous as ucas because teachers knew historical performance would be looked at, but still predicting at a level over 10% better than last year. This shows those grades weren’t realistic. But teachers gave them because they knew there would be downgrading, they were meant to remain unknown to students and if you were going to be downgraded it was better to be from a lower base.
The trouble is, most students just don’t actually have an entirely realistic sense of what they are on track for or what similar students to them in previous years who went to the uni courses they are keen for, actually achieved in A levels - it’s all lower than they think.
And to everyone saying it’s wrong to base on previous performance, in these circumstances when exams weren’t possible, it really was the only way. Actually school performance is pretty consistent to within a very few percentages over time. Schools with historical low performance weren’t going to get stellar results in exams this year and the top performing schools weeent going to bomb. People don’t like this, but it is the reality.
This is an awful year for the students. Although most results would have been very similar to what was awRded today if exams were sat, any element of control that the students had is gone. Politically it is hard to deal with - government would like to be able to say all students can have top grades, to avoid criticism. Scotland went a big step towards doing this. And yet government wants integrity for grades across time. Even with these so hugely disappointing results, they were alreDy 2% up on last year - that’s a lot. And they panicked following Scotland and looked for a way to further boost grades which wouldn’t be as drastic, as most people’s mocks won’t be higher than the teacher grade, but it feels like some control is returned ....although actually that’s backfired as fury will grow when people realise not all schools had even done mocks or some are strict and harshly graded and some almost open book and lightly marked and there will be some government won’t accept...so there’s no level playing field added there. Actually better schools are more likely to have what’s needed for the appeals and to push students through the process.
How could it have been better? If schools had been told to spell out to students what their usual performance over 3 years was and that this years results would be similar. This would help, plus making student aware than less than 20% of ucas grades are achieved. Unfortunately, expectations needed to be lowered for this all not to be devasatating, but expectations weren’t lowered and government have strung out the upset by having an appeals system which isn’t even yet decided so no one who is disappointed knows whether to try to accept it and move on or live in hope. And all that shit is before you even get to the nightmare of unis trying to allocate places and accommodation when they don’t know how many who failed to meet their offer later will...or even when.
Terrible management of a situation which was alwYs going to be hard to deal with.