Why weren't teachers/schools more realistic with predicted grades?

[nervousnelly8]

Genuinely looking to understand how the A Level results seem to have gone so wrong. I don't work in education and DS is too young to be impacted, so hoping that those more informed might have some input!

Everywhere I see, people are calling for teacher assessed grades to be used. But if this happened, wouldn't the results be way out of line with history, rendering them useless as a form of comparison with other year groups? I understand that the model that has been used appears flawed when considering individuals, but does aggregate performance not also matter? Why wouldn't schools and teachers have been sensible in their predictions relative to previous cohorts so that their assessment could be used reliably?

Not really an AIBU I suppose, I'm sure IABU for seemingly missing the point completely!

@Buttercup77

Inflation of grades due to the predicted grades teachers have given have nothing to do with teachers being unrealistic, lenient or unprofessional. There will always be inflation because teachers can only rate competence and capability, not on the day performance. It’s actually almost impossible for the predicted grades not to have come out inflated as a consequence.

OP I’ll give you an example. You’re a chemistry teacher teaching 10 students. All of these 10 children are straight A students. They all achieved almost straight As in their GCSEs, their mocks and almost every piece of homework they hand in. A again and again consistently. As a teacher- What predicted grade for chemistry will you give these 10 children? A for each of them yes? But of course on the actual day of exams, all ten of them WONT get an A*. Most will but a couple might achieve an A and one rogue pupil might have had a bad day, no breakfast, no sleep and get a B or a C.

Have you done anything wrong in your initial teacher predictions? Have you not been sensible in your initial predictions? All you can predict is their capability. Not how each individual will perform on the day. That’s why grade inflation has occurred here. Not because teachers haven’t been realistic.

Inflation will always occur if teachers are assessing on performance on an average day or performance on a good day. In the example above, how on earth would that chemistry teacher know that one pupil (who has been A* all his life) would get a B?

But this is the issue. I don't have any skin the the game (and there is no solution here) but from what I've seen some teachers/schools would have predicted 10 A. Others would have predicted majority As but (at least) some As as well and maybe one B. Going with CAG's is really unfair to the children and schools who took the second approach. I've seen multiple threads now where it's clear that different teachers have taken different approaches. Particularly for students acknowledged to be on the grade boundaries - if you have 10 C/D students, some teachers would have given all C's and some would have spent a lot of time trying to work out which were realistically C's and which were Ds.

It's shit for everyone. Unfortunately this approach means that teachers took the lead optimistic approach are going to get hounded by students. They should be able to adjust their CAGs (and then we start again!).

@Clavinova

In Germany, students sat their final exams in April as usual, even though this was around peak deaths

Do students in Germany all take a similar final exam? Spread over one or two days rather than six weeks or so?

.... In the UK, most students would only be taking 3 A levels or equivalent Germany requires more subjects iirc, So I think the number of actual papers per student in Germany would not be fewer

Anyway, without a Tardis .....

Mary Curnock Cook, the former chief executive of Ucas, said the government must announce immediately that the cap on university admissions will be lifted to accommodate the new grading system.

Some other countries around Europe didn't do this, but still seem to have worked out something reasonable & fair, without drama

I can see all sorts of problems with the French solution;
From your link;

France -
"On 3 April, French authorities announced the school-leaving baccalaureate exams would not go ahead for the first time in history."

"Instead, students were awarded an average grade for each subject based on their performance in the first two terms."

"Local juries also assessed the grades, taking into account national average, schools' past examination records and the student's attendance."

Unfortunately this approach means that teachers took the lead optimistic approach are going to get hounded by students.

I’m going absolutely no where near school this Thursday.

Get ready for next year.

The changes put in place by Ofqual for next year’s exams, are dreadful. Even after consultation.

They take little account of 6months of missed school.

@Baaaahhhhh

(and we know how good Government are at procurement!) Not.

🤣 good reply

Caps lifted! What a crazy mess. Now its the university admissions people I feel sorry for.

Yes quite. It was more a point that teachers were not deliberately inflating grades for the hell of it to look good or giving D grade students an A for example. Predictions had to be backed up by a huge amount of evidence and the grades were checked and double checked against the evidence by senior staff. Asking a teacher to asses with zero margin of error a students exact grade is impossible. Are they 51% A and 49% B or 51% B and 49% A? Rounding differences and ceiling effects all impact inflation. It’s much easier to predict students at the top end than middle-of-the-range students. You could over-predict or under-predict a C or B but a student can’t achieve anything more than an A*. I’m amazed the % is only 12%.

Like you said, it’s a difficult situation. It’s so hard to make a 100% accurate prediction as a teacher can’t take into account on the day performance and the algorithm doesn’t take into account a particular strong or weak cohort, it weights on size of cohort and doesn’t assign grades at an individual level, only cohort level.

I suspect a small number of teachers were deliberately inflating but really not many. There's been at least one teacher say on Mumsnet that she was under pressure to inflate (but resisted) - some teachers would have bowed to that pressure (and some will have inflated off their own backs). That's just reality and as someone else pointed out some teachers/schools have always found ways to game the system.

The majority of inflations will be either on the grade boundaries or because teachers didn't (or couldn't) evaluate which students were the ones who would have had a very bad day. The problem is (and this is not teachers fault) that the CAG has not been calculated consistently between schools and the algorithm that was meant to sort that out has been a complete shit storm.

I would hate to be a teacher right now. There's no winning.

If many/most schools assessed students as they should have, with minimal grade inflation then students at schools which did choose to over-predict would have an unfair advantage surely

This could be totally wrong but it seems that what's happened is the CAG results for the smaller private schools with cohorts of 15 or less in each subject were accepted. As detailed by pps it's impossible to predict which students are going to screw up on exam day so the small private schools, quite fairly, predict all their probable A/As and these are given. It's bound to be an over-estimate but that can't be sorted. Having awarded this inflated level of A/As there are then fewer left in the pot so everyone else, state and larger independent schools, goes down. Add in that if a U had been awarded in a particular school in the previous 3 years then in that school a U had to be awarded this year means that even if this year's lowest performing student was working at C they got a U.
Awarding the CAGs is the only way out of this total mess, but I wonder about the boy I saw on Newsnight last week who was the first from his school to be offered a place at Cambridge (to study medecine I think) and who was told last week his place had gone.

@HipTightOnions

They can't account for the fact some pupils every year underperform, they couldn't choose that could they

Uncomfortable as it is, that’s what the ranking was for.

This. Teachers don’t want to be the bad guys but the truth is, if you were downgraded from an A to a B or C at a school with a decentish track record, it’s because your teachers thought that other kids would have been likelier to do well than you. Maybe because you are talented but lazy, maybe because you are capable but bombed extra badly in your mocks, maybe because others are just a bit more capable than you. The ranking system in a way makes sense because clearly nowhere near as many people assessed as A or A would have got one - as Nicola Sturgeon said, the CAGs were “just not credible”. The trouble was the other bit - estimating how many of each grade each school should reasonably be expected to get this year, which is incredibly hard to do. Clearly some schools took full advantage and some did not.

*as Nicola Sturgeon said, the CAGs were "just not credible".

Before she accepted that the algorithm was even less credible.

I'm a teacher and examiner, and I worked hard to ensure my students had CAGs that were as accurate as I could make them. But there are things we cannot predict. These things affect students' results. I teach in a low socio-economic area and in the three years I have been at the school, I have had students' grades affected by...

• The student who stayed up all night revising and then fell asleep in the exam.
• The students who thought the exam was in the afternoon and so missed it.
• The students who sat the first exam, thought they had done terribly, so didn't bother turning up for the second exam.
• The students who didn't read / listen to instructions and answered all 6 topics instead of the 4 specified.
• The students who decide to answer a section they've never studied because they thought the questions looked easier.
• The students who didn't see the questions on the last page and so missed 1/4 of the exam.
• The students who decided they didn't want to answer the 12 mark questions (worth half the marks on the exam paper)
• The students who run out of time and don't complete the exam paper
• The students who decide they just can't be bothered and don't bother writing anything in the exam at all.
• The students who misinterpret the question, go off on a tangent and lose marks. Or they don't know a word in the question so they don't answer the question at all, or they write something completely irrelevant(Economy was one word that threw loads of my students a few years back) .

This happens every year without exception. I see it as an examiner too. It happens way more frequently than you think! But I can't predict who it will be. Neither would it be right for me to do this. So all I can do is predict what students would get if they answer the exam correctly. Yet, given that in reality many students make these mistakes, inevitably predicted grades will be higher than actual grades.

But I can't predict who it will be. Neither would it be right for me to do this

Exactly. The whole premise of the exercise is flawed.

The students who decide to answer a section they've never studied because they thought the questions looked easier

Ds1 question about rivers or ice

A normal child would pick the topic he’d been taught...rivers

But nooooo...he chose ice

I'm the mother of the student who:

attempted suicide just before her GCSEs

was hospitalised for other reasons during the actual exam period

was ill again during her A-levels

The very thought that her grades should be used to downgrade some student several years later, someone she has never met and who has nothing to do with her- it's outrageous!

@corythatwas

I hope your daughter made a full recovery and is well now.

@Sarahbeans

I'm a teacher and examiner, and I worked hard to ensure my students had CAGs that were as accurate as I could make them. But there are things we cannot predict. These things affect students' results. I teach in a low socio-economic area and in the three years I have been at the school, I have had students' grades affected by...

• The student who stayed up all night revising and then fell asleep in the exam.
• The students who thought the exam was in the afternoon and so missed it.
• The students who sat the first exam, thought they had done terribly, so didn't bother turning up for the second exam.
• The students who didn't read / listen to instructions and answered all 6 topics instead of the 4 specified.
• The students who decide to answer a section they've never studied because they thought the questions looked easier.
• The students who didn't see the questions on the last page and so missed 1/4 of the exam.
• The students who decided they didn't want to answer the 12 mark questions (worth half the marks on the exam paper)
• The students who run out of time and don't complete the exam paper
• The students who decide they just can't be bothered and don't bother writing anything in the exam at all.
• The students who misinterpret the question, go off on a tangent and lose marks. Or they don't know a word in the question so they don't answer the question at all, or they write something completely irrelevant(Economy was one word that threw loads of my students a few years back) .

This happens every year without exception. I see it as an examiner too. It happens way more frequently than you think! But I can't predict who it will be. Neither would it be right for me to do this. So all I can do is predict what students would get if they answer the exam correctly. Yet, given that in reality many students make these mistakes, inevitably predicted grades will be higher than actual grades.

Excellent description.

This is what I thought all along. This is what I thought inflation (as they like to call it!) would be higher but it was more a case as this is fairest way to award grades to students who have already had their education massively disrupted.

I think people are forgetting that their college and uni experience will also be different for this group.

@corythatwas

I'm the mother of the student who:

attempted suicide just before her GCSEs

was hospitalised for other reasons during the actual exam period

was ill again during her A-levels

The very thought that her grades should be used to downgrade some student several years later, someone she has never met and who has nothing to do with her- it's outrageous!

I'm so sorry your dd was so Ill.

What what a lovely selfless attitude you have towards it not affecting others grades. We need more people like you who look at bigger picture.

I'm so sorry your dd was so Ill.

What what a lovely selfless attitude you have towards it not affecting others grades. We need more people like you who look at bigger picture

This

@Northernsoulgirl45

I'm so sorry your dd was so Ill.

What what a lovely selfless attitude you have towards it not affecting others grades. We need more people like you who look at bigger picture

This

Absolutely

💐