To think that the government did this on purpose

[therhubarbbrothers]

The A level results fiasco seemed to penalise bright children from disadvantaged schools. Aibu to think the government knew that this would happen but saw it as acceptable ?

The u turn where grades upgraded by the algorithm are kept still penalises children from disadvantaged schools.

Do you think they would have gone ahead if only disadvantaged schools had an upgrade?

The situation is the same as before the u turn, children from better schools will have been given higher results by an algorithm and brighter kids from disadvantaged schools wont.

It's a PR disaster for the government, if they did it on purpose then they are even more incompetent than they already appear to be.

Bluntness
Perhaps teachers predictions are not generally terribly accurate. However the accuracy levels this time around will have increased greatly due to the research criteria and the mammoth amount of work required to ascertain the most accurate grade for each student.

Civil servants work for whichever party is in power. The eradication of technical staff and knowledge will lead to more and more incompetence. But because it has all been skimmed under the label of austerity, the public have no idea.

All of the agencies required to monitor/regulate/prevent frauds and such like have had huge staff cuts. Not irrelevant staff. The ones who know what they are doing.

Oops - sorry. Not you Bluntness. Brain not working again today - migraine.

What Peaseblossom and JuniperFather said.

Am I the only one thinking that Williamson is just another minister chosen for their stupidity, inability and lack of backbone so they can provide the face to the public while DC is running the show? It seems to me Boris and his friends won the election but handed the show to DC to manage while they enjoyed the perks of the job.

Some folks are reacting like thousands and thousands of kids were given grades worse than they would have achieved, and everyone was downgraded, that’s not the case at all. Overall the grades given were still better and over inflated v previous years

40% were downagraded. That sounds like thousands and thousands to me, even if some of them deserved the higher grades. I do get what you're saying, and I wouldn't have had much of an issue if people were being downgraded by one grade eg BBB got CCC. That would make sense.

It was the bell curve aspect of it that really got me - the idea that because someone got an E last year someone had to get an E this year, even if everyone was predicted a B or above (which can happen in a cohort especially with smaller subjects). I wonder if anyone got an A when they should have got a C "because someone had to get an A because someone got one last year". Somehow I doubt it.

I agree with pp's who've said the government didn't plan it. They didn't want grade inflation. Fine. But don't create a system that has (a) ridiculous results and (b) discriminatory ones.

That sounds like thousands and thousands to me, even if some of them deserved the higher grades LOWER grades.

The algorithm was flawed. Some schools (private) got higher grades than usual. It should have been the same, or max 2%.

Staticians and head teachers pointed this out months ago but Ofqual continued. Why? Incompetence? Lack of testing? Who knows.

The issue is an exam performance can’t be questioned

Are you a teacher Bluntness? Or an exam marker? In my experience, exam performance can very much be questioned. So I'm curious as to your evidence that grade inflation is an actual phenomenon I.e. that markers are awarding higher marks for lower quality pieces of work. On what basis are you making assertions to grade inflation?

I don’t think it was done on purpose. The sole purpose of this government has always been “get Brexit done”. The entire cabinet was chosen for their dedication to a single cause, not competence in any area.

This government isn't intelligent enough to have managed to do something like that, don't worry. It's the same with the Scottish government, they were just too dim to see what was happening and how it would look.

For such an important and unique year I would have expected GW to ask searching and detailed questions, the implications of this are huge for the exam system, the university admissions system, for university funding, for Covid reasons as universities which are overcrowded could become hotspots and let’s face it for electoral reasons and nothing pisses off a voter more than seeing their child’s hopes dashed for no good reason.

For example

• what is the impact at centre level?

-how does the model deal with outliers ( can you show me examples)

• what have we done to check the model results back to individual school submissions have you got evidence of sample testing
• what will be the effect of this number of downgrades from CAG by candidate on university admissions
• what appeal procedures are in place, have you recruited the extra staff
• can we run the model over the 2019 actual results and see what the change would be
• and then lots and lots of questions about the parameters and variables used to build the model.

Good God I am only an accountant , I’m no rocket scientist but surely this stuff is obvious. What are we paying him for ?

Whilst we keep paying our top Civil Servants peanuts in comparison to the top positions in private sector companies , we are always going to get people doing those jobs that have no experience of industry or the outside world and can afford to take those positions due to inherited wealth.
If we truly want the top talent, we need to pay them accordingly and stop this dumbing down we're so good at in this country, in case we offend the great unwashed by them being 'overpaid'. We should want the best and most highly paid people to want to do the job. Not Boris or the Jacob Rees-Mogg types that have absolutely nothing to lose and who like to play at being powerful whilst us oinks are shafted by their games.

I agree with Juniper father but also

They DGAF much about the impact of their actions

I note that the bright deprived background kids will still be at a disadvantage in trying to sort things out with their now oversubscribed unis

it conveniently distracted from the impending disaster of a no deal Brexit

but I agree that they probably did not finely plan any of it

It was done to avoid the 38% grade inflation from predicted results. It got most grades right and there probably wasn’t a fair way.

Despite disliking this government and believing they are corrupt, the grades now given are probably far less an accurate predictor of the grades that would have been achieved.

The hardest hit are large six forms doing minority subjects where the previous small cohort did badly. The best effect was for tiny six forms where previously their few children have done well. There was consideration of outliers. There was an appeal process. It’s not entirely fair, but what is? Research shows that teacher assessed grade predictions are frequently much higher than those achieved.

The crime is in not preparing and communicating earlier. It’s where AS levels might have been useful.

Incompetent

They (everyone who had a voice in this fiasco) were focused on the national results being the same as last year.

To achieve this, they focused on making schools and colleges results the same as last year.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that results are individual and affect individuals lives and futures. The algorithm removed the fact that results need to reflect individual abilities not the school. The results removed the link to individuals and became a lottery.

The incompetence is that no one realised this. Or that people did realise and were shouted down or ignored.

@Mummyoflittledragon

Bluntness Perhaps teachers predictions are not generally terribly accurate. However the accuracy levels this time around will have increased greatly due to the research criteria and the mammoth amount of work required to ascertain the most accurate grade for each student.

No one is disputing that. But the predictions were still forty percent higher than ever achieved. We can’t get round the stats, so yes it was better than the normal fifteen percent accurate but still way, way out.

So if teachers were unable to predict it accurately and for good reason, a computer program was always going to get it wrong too.

There is no point going back to teachers as a pp suggested, because they were the ones who grossly got it wrong in the first place, Even with all the work done, it would just have opened a huge round robin of discussion and horse trading.

The key issue here is it is impossible to predict which kids will achieve on the day and which won’t. Because exams are not just about optimal ability they are also about actual performance.

The humans took a shot at it first and got it very wrong. The computer them had a shot at it, to try to correct the human error, and it also got it wrong, although arguably for less kids. In both sets of results the over all results were over inflated to benefit kids.

Not all kids achieve their predictions, teachers and a computer program are simoly unable to predict which ones. That’s the core of rhe issue.

Completely agree OP. Keep the oiks in their place. The government pretend they support social mobility but they don’t really. It’s too much of a threat to them.

As far as I can make out, Ofqual applied a formula that worked a bit like a dry cleaner handing back people's clothes in a completely random way. 100 customers turn up, 100 garments are returned, job done. The fact that Jane got Mark's three piece suit and Mark got Lisa's wedding dress is just an unfortunate glitch.

It is incredible that nobody in government or Ofqual grasped that it's not enough that the results overall look like last year's. It's absolutely essential that each individual candidate gets a fair result. Not treating people like individuals is the unforgivable thing.

It's also extraordinary that nobody grasped that some degree of grade inflation this year was inevitable. In a normal year you might have a cohort of (say) 20 Maths candidates. Of those you know that if absolutely everything goes well all through the year, including the revision period, and the paper doesn't have any horrible questions, 5 should get A*, 5 A, 5 B, 2 C, 2 D, 1 E.

As I understand it, the above would be what the teacher put down as CAGs for this cohort. Now, in any previous year, on results day there would have been some surprises.

Jake, who'd done brilliantly all year, gets a U because during study leave his girlfriend dumped him, Jake fell apart and ended up not doing any of his exams. He was predicted A*.

Lana, who find Maths tough, was predicted a C, but after working her socks off all year, following a really effective revision strategy and finally 'getting' some key concepts just in time, gets an A, to everyone's amazement, including Lana's.

Alex was predicted A but succumbed to exam nerves on the day and messed up a key question. Final result is a C, which is a huge disappointment.

And so on. Now, the CAGs couldn't take things like the above into account, because the whole point is these things are unpredictable.

@Bluntness100 at my school we gave some students a lower grade than they had performed at for the last 2 years because we had to ensure our results were the same as and not higher than previous years. I know of other teachers that were told to do this in other schools. This did not sit right with me at all. Then some pupils were pulled down by the algorithm. I can assure you that not all teacher grades were inflated.

@EngTech

I look at it this way, if it is not on FB, it’s not true 👍👍😂😳😳👍

What does that mean, I 've only had half a coffee so might be bit slow this morning but I cant work that out at all

I really can't see anything deliberate about the algorithm, I heard some kind of qualifi actions person say that it was the placing of too much emphasis on not having grade inflation that skewed the results, nothing to do with anyone wanted private schools to do better, that was one of the consequences

I agree with CherryPavlova. I've spoken to two HT's and a Head of Department in the last few days and they all acknowledged that in a normal year they would not expect all of the students predicted to get in the A range (as an example) would actually achieve that. So now there will be more students awarded the grades they had hoped for claiming places at their first choice university. Those universities will therefore be over-subscribed. Causing more chaos. I don't think there was any right answer to the problem. But yes, the government stuffed up how they handled it!

Never mistake for malice that which may be explained by ignorance and stupidity.