AIBU that we must accept many teachers do not have the appropriate professional judgment regarding what students need to achieve for A-Levels?

[darkwader]

There is no reason to suggest that nationally this year’s students are different significantly to previous years – certainly not as demonstrated by GCSE results.

Unclear why, but exam boards have been generous in this years results in all categories, showing higher results than last year, but needing to downgrade almost 40% of teacher assessed grade to remotely be a normal year.

Despite what teachers are claiming, it must be the case that 40% of grades were inflated by teachers – even if the individual students who had these inflated grades are hard to determine. The number of A/A*’s would not jump by 10%.

If every teacher had correctly provided grades, then the national mix would match previous years and no downgrading would have occurred. – so although maybe not the teacher who is specifically involved with a set of students; overall teachers are responsible for the disappointment because of poor grade assessment in the first place in aggregate.

Given that teachers have been predicting grades for university entrance for years and marking coursework in some cases – this shows the unfairness of such a system, as they are incapable of doing so to any degree of accuracy or potentially without bias towards those they know.

Students across this country are now being affected by this incompetence – even if not the students own teacher, the professional standards are to blame.

AIBU to now understand that this professional judgment does not exists for many, many teachers and they need to be evaluated each year before being allowed to be involved in marking and grading?

If AIBU - what am I missing?

Yabu. Students will always perform higher or lower than expected in exams, predictions are an educated guess. The grade boundaries vary each year. This year teachers had a really difficult challenge, they didn't have time to even finish the course! There is no set criteria for what constitutes a mock exam and schools use them differently. Eldest ds had one subject where they deliberately made the mock exceptionally hard to make them revise harder. Teachers want the best for their students and are doing the best possible in a very challenging situation.

An exam is not always the best way to demonstrate what a pupil knows.

Teachers know their pupils better than an exam does.

Well, for starters this year was pretty much done by using data from previous years. So if the class of 2017 was flaky or particularly disrupted in comparison to this year, this year's class has had their results worked out by taking 2017 into account. Hardly fair.

Secondly, grades are no longer based on "this is what a Grade B looks like, this is what Grade C looks like." It's based on a curve whereby a certain percentage of students will be awarded a particular grade. So last year's Grade 2 and that of the year before will not necessarily marry up.

Thirdly, if this is not a thread started purely to teacher bash then I don't know what is

what am I missing?

The fact that there have clearly been major cock ups with some of the grades awarded which, in my mind, casts doubt on the whole process. A straight A student being downgraded to Bs and CS? Not really likely is it?

(Thankfully none of my children were involved in this shit storm)

Who do you think mark the exams... every year...? Boundary shifts occur every single year. Cohorts change every single year.

Everything about this is ridiculous. I'm reading about algorithms which ensure that if you go to a traditionally low attaining school you are disadvantaged this year. What utter fool thought grading by algorithm was remotely fair? People complain that allowing teacher assessment to stand in Scotland weakens the integrity of the qualifications... well so does this. The whole thing is an absolute farce.

Utter rubbish. The issue is that teachers gone on what they’ve seen in the classroom over the course of Student a level course And will base their predictions on class assessments mock exams and other work. This is probably a more realistic review of what a child’s actual achievement is not two or exams which randomly pick bits of the course they’ve studied and examining them on. It’s very hard to predict which student is the one who’ll fluff the exam and which will magically pull it out of the bag.

If Gove and the Tory government hadn’t been so hell bent on doing away with coursework and AS levels then perhaps we’d have had a better external judge of where students are at.

The problem is not the teachers. In my experience, the teacher usually knows their students inside out.

More likely, headteachers threatened or put pressure on teachers to inflate grades. Or the headteacher changes the grades themselves before submitting them. I've seen it all before.

Well most of the A level results of my Y13 students have stayed the same. 4 have gone up and 4 have gone down (53 students in total). I think that would show I can judge them pretty well.
However the AS grades of my y12 students have been downgraded massively to way below the ‘historical data’ they have used in their algorithm and way below any results we have ever has before. I don’t believe I am unprofessional because I didn’t decide to award people U’s when they didn’t bloody deserve them.

It is very unfair, seems we are very lucky my child got her grades she expected.

I'm not sure I understand this discussion on exams - they are the basis of assessment we use for A-Level, and the intention is to predict what someone would have got in that exam - not substitute a different methodology.

I do understand that retried and current teachers are recruited as markers - but also that boards use seed questions and quality control cross referencing to check for markers who are not reliable, and are either retrained or not used further.

Irrespective of cohorts, you would expect variance (i.e. some grading up, some down), but not bias that is demonstrating 40% inflation of grades.

Maybe it is regarding that many students perform less well under stress, and many teachers raw predictions do need tempering by 5-10% to account for this before indicating these top students.

Whether absolute or relative marking, professional judgement means that the correct results should be more than 60% of the time. Its about working within the system specified - not a separate system the teacher wishes was in place.

Is this just too much benefit of the doubt given to borderline cases, where instead all teachers should err on the low side?

Also analysis of UCAS predictions is pointless as it’s all a bit of a farce brought about my universities themselves. They all want to appear to be better than they are by stating entrance requirements of eg A*AA when you know a student with BBB would have a good chance of getting in. This means teachers are told to use their most optimistic predictions for UCAS. A post results application system would be better in my opinion.

Based on postcode? wtaf.

what are you missing? Well, the fact that you clearly don't understand how much a cohort can vary.

Over 2 A Level classes (Biology and Chemistry) I have multiple students with a grade being awarded 2 grades below their mock grade, and this mock being at least 2 of the 3 papers (a few had been absent for the last one). Now, I mark for the exam board too for GCSE and A Level, so I'm quite sure my mocks are marked well, plus we moderate in the department.

Today I saw students with C grades at mock, and given a C or a B by us as a prediction, being awards an E or a U by the exam board. Straight A* students being given a C when they have As in mocks, and had As in every assessment since the start of their A Levels. We know exactly why that has happened; last year we did not have an A and we had a U grade. This year's cohort is so much stronger. They were going for medicine, veterinary science and engineering.

If anyone thinks that this is fair, when they have been assessed to the absolute best of our ability with actual papers as mocks, backed up with monthly assessments created by me as an examiner since the start of their A Levels and an end of Y12 mock, then obviously they have a much greater understanding of assessment and progress than I do.

@Etotheipiplus1equals0

That precisely shows you personally have very good judgement - but my question is as a group, there must be very many who do not for this to have occurred, and yet the overall grades to have increased.

Overall this situation is down to these teachers without that good judgement, and is my AIBIU.

But what is the system? How can it be possible for our awarded grades to be lower than any previous year? Those grades are counted in your 40% but it is manifestly unfair... There is no way they would have done as badly as a cohort as that algorithm predicts.
Does that mean that somewhere there are students who have done a lot better than they should have? The system is opaque and until we understand the system it is premature to blame teachers for adhering to it.
I think there will always be a rush of overprediction. There is a reason why you have to declare an interest in any particular schools or students when you mark exams. It is hard not to be biased when these are students you have got to know and you care about. Our school did it’s own statistical analysis to try and guard against this, not all will have.
In coursework, the work moderated and checked by the exam board. It is completely different. The only moderation here is statistical leading to winners and losers.

I can easily believe as many as 40% of students are borderline eg, on a good day they would get an A but if they were careless in the exam it might be a B.

When teachers assessed they recognise that those kids were A students, or B students and discounted that of course, any number of those borderline 40% kids in their class might have had a bad day and slipped a grade boundary.

And I agree that that is the fair way to do it, otherwise you arbitrarily decide who might be most likely to have a bad day,and doing that without relying on prejudice that disadvantages poor and vulnerable students is almost impossible.

(The 40% borderline figure I can believe because I was no more than 5 marks below the higher grade boundary in all 3 of my a-levels! If i had been in a better place at the time i probably would have achieved completely different results)

@MaryBerrysBomberJacket

Even if cohorts do vary - that would mean for national averages, which are not shown to vary, then some schools must have better cohorts than others; meaning that accurate predictions would balance out.

I realise you are looking at individuals, and yes, this baseline is a mess - understood. But still, having national grade segments for A/A* increasing by a third is not viable - so many predicted grades must have been very wrong. Those teachers who predicted wrongly are to blame for your students not getting their grades based on the model.

Ahh should have checked before posting *always a risk of overprediction

• to blame teachers for not adhering to it

If you actually try reading the answers youve got so far there seems to be a reasonably good summary of the factors involved.

No. You misunderstand how grades are awarded each year.
Essentially every years’ A Levels grades are in relation to other students in that cohort. Teachers only know their own classes, not every student in the country!
Plus, we have grades according to what we had evidence for, not what we thought those students would have actually achieved in the real exams had they sat them. There are so many misconceptions in your thinking.

Gavin, is that you?

Is this going to be the governments line? Blame the shit teachers?

@Etotheipiplus1equals0

Apologies, when I did A-Levels the in-school assessed work, such as chemistry practicals did not seem to have external people present - that may have changed or could have been different in different places.

All I am saying really is that there does not seem to have been many students awarded higher grades than predicted in major subjects - and yet the overall number of awards has gone up in each top grade; and hence a large number of teachers must not have been able to predict with any degree of accuracy to have 40% wrong.

It is this level of incorrect prediction that is now causing pain across the board - as everyone is now affected by those predictions.

I'm going to join the chorus of YABU. A big factor for me is the impact of the actual exam on grades. I have a student this year who I predicted an A. She got it. But had she sat the exam I suspect she would have got a B because the exam situation causes her to fall to pieces. Her actual ABILITY in the subject is worthy of an A. Conversely, in previous years I have taught lazy arse students (boys usually) who drift along til March of Y13 and then suddenly panic, do a fair bit and trot out by the book answers to a predictable question in the exam and do better than they really deserve. A genuine assessment would be based on continuous teacher assessment, as the submitted grades were.
And YY to differences in cohorts. I had 5 students last year (small subject). They were academically weak and got C-E grades. This year, the cohort were much stronger, A-B. Fortunately they haven't been downgraded but its a nonsense to say that if the predictions were higher they must have been inflated by unprofessional teachers.

Oh and piss off to the poster who said private schools will buy better success on appeal. We're not all Eton and Harrow and don't have funds for this.