A level grades

[DolphinFC]

If feel that value of an A grade ar A level has been reduced dramatically. I feel truly sorry for those very bright, hard-working students who would've got an A grade no matter what. Their deserved A grade is now lost in a pile of undeserved A grades.

I think people who may have got Bs in sciences will be perfectly fine doing a medical degree.

Generally maths and science are subject taken by students who excel in the subjects at GCSE, it’s common in physics and math that a b grade or even A grade (or 6,7,8,9) is a requirement for the A level course. DS did math 2 years ago they all had a talent for math it’s a subject that can make or break your results so not chosen lightly. All of his cohort were capable of A and A* it’s the exam that determined the result. The exam was a shit show that year.

My point is that online (summer term 2020) was better than nothing at all

Hell yeah

Grades have risen overall due to hedgehoggers explanation about teachers having to predict on children's best potential rather than allowing for those that will mess us or just miss a grade boundary

Absolutely

At no point in any career will you have to do your best work while being banned from referring to information.

I would argue that a trauma surgeon probably doesn't have the luxury of thumbing their way through a textbook whilst their patient bleeds out.

@nolongersurprised

Go to hospital and watch the doctors or nurses discuss diagnoses and treatment and medication

But the point is more that a medical degree is academically rigorous. If A grades are handed out without discretion then there may be students doing the degree that genuinely struggle with the high volume of work plus the academic demand.

Similarly, for maths degrees. Presumably they expect students taking the degree to actually be genuinely talented at maths, rather than a student who was average in their cohort.

It’s very feel-good for about half the cohort to get top grades but it also means that the grades aren’t very meaningful.

Uni students who can't handle the academic rigour of university courses tend to drop out of their courses. They don't complete the degree.

There is so much more to being capable of academic rigour than performing on one day. I really don't understand why so many people are fixated on exams. Exam grades reward the lazy kids who never turn in classwork but are good at cramming, the well-off kids whose parents buy them study guides / practice exams / tutoring specific to the exam, and yes, the tiny handful of kids who are both hardworking and good at test-taking.

However, placing the entire grade onto one exam punishes kids who are diligent in class but suffer with test anxiety. They penalise kids whose parents cannot afford exam prep and tutoring (or who are too exhausted or uninterested to seek that out in the first place).

And, IME the way exams are normally done definitely encourages teaching to the test, rather than teaching the subject and developing a pupil's curiosity: DSD has decided not to get a qualification in biology after all, because her school is literally teaching the same material she learned at N4 level, and she's bored out of her skull. What is the point of that?

There's more than one way to measure aptitude.

@Bryonyshcmyony

I think people who may have got Bs in sciences will be perfectly fine doing a medical degree.

Well now a B in sciences means you’re worse than 50% of 18 year olds at sciences. That was a C 25 years ago and you wouldn’t be considered good enough to be eligible.

@2thumbs

At no point in any career will you have to do your best work while being banned from referring to information.

I would argue that a trauma surgeon probably doesn't have the luxury of thumbing their way through a textbook whilst their patient bleeds out.

A trauma surgeon's education has a hell of a lot more to it that being taught to one test and performing to it on one day. That's a really poor analogy when we're talking about teenagers at the beginning of their adult lives and careers.

At no point in any career will you have to do your best work while being banned from referring to information

You might not be 'banned' but there are plenty of times in meetings where someone asks me a technical question and I am expected to just know the answer, and the meeting will flow from there. It's not unreasonable to develop memory skills.

Besides, exams don't just test bare knowledge, they also test your ability to do something quite in limited time. I could probably spend quite a long time doing a careful German translation as I understand the grammar rules but have very little vocabulary. Instead of using a dictionary for every word, it's important that someone is able to just apply that knowledge quickly.

@Headsinsand

These kids are all exceptional to be able to achieve at all under the circumstances of the last 18 months with interrupted schooling, serious illness, poor access to the right technology, teaching staff trying to rewrite entire courses to work online while also parenting their own children. Children trying to learn in a house with parents working from home, other children trying to do online learning. Vanishingly few people were set up to have 3,4,5 people all online trying to work or learn at the same time. Many adults crumbled under the strain. Posts on here every other day that parents can’t cope with home schooling and working.

It’s super shitty to slate the efforts of kids who have had 18 months of this at a critical time in their education.

You're talking as if the endgame of A-levels is to reward students for working hard in trying circumstances.

It's about identifying how each student ranks in terms of their academic ability. Is it really that hard to understand?

If people truly think that we've progressed over just 2 years to the point that now almost double the number achieve top grades as did in 2019, through some miraculous increase in academic ability then we've lost all sense of reason.

No one is slating these kids at all. If grades had been 25% down this year they would still have deserved everyone's praise. They have done brilliantly to even get through these past 18 months and still maintain their studies. Hats off to them.

It doesn't change the fact that it's absolutely impossible that they're 80% better academically than the previous cohort or indeed any other cohort ever to take A-levels.

There is so much more to being capable of academic rigour than performing on one day

Of course, but I don’t believe that nearly half the cohort has performed to the very highest level.

The universities have probably also been hit by Covid so need the students, presumably. And academically rigorous courses have academically rigorous exams so there’ll always be a need to perform in the day, with exams much harder than any high school exam.

Dd says an a* in biology is about 60%

Is that true?

If people truly think that we've progressed over just 2 years to the point that now almost double the number achieve top grades as did in 2019, through some miraculous increase in academic ability then we've lost all sense of reason.

A miraculous increase in academic ability whilst simultaneously having interrupted schooling. serious illness, poor access to the right technology etc etc…

These kids just need sensible advice, that these grades won’t get them far in the more academically rigorous setting of certain courses at university, they’re not a reliable indicator of actual suitability for certain courses even if they’re technically eligible, and they should still look to do something after school that suits them, not what these grades suggest they should do.

Honestly I’m cringing at the thought of some of the people I was at school with getting into medicine this way, the horror…

@Bryonyshcmyony

Dd says an a* in biology is about 60%

Is that true?

Could be, grade boundaries are moveable. So even if an exam was sat and say, 4 As gained in the cohort, 1 could be 90% and the rest much lower down near the grade boundary for that year. I’d like to see set grade boundaries tbh, then you’d get a better picture of who was up there in the 80/90% for an A. But they aren’t and that’s fine.

It’s the teachers or whoever it is that awarded the grades Willy nilly. They should be ashamed of themselves for not being honest.

At no point in any career will you have to do your best work while being banned from referring to information.

Not true..

Niche career maybe but in commercial aviation it was (and still is) a requirement to perform some of your very very best and perhaps most safety critical work, either as pilot or cabin crew, without reference to information.

I’d be pretty sure it’s the same in other lines of work.

@Carycy 'awarded grades willy nilly'?
I assume you noticed that by far the biggest increase was in the private sector with the least oversight into the grades that were awarded.

I can absolutely assure you that in my school and in my authority, every single grade awarded was checked, cross marked, moderated with other schools in the authority, and any anomalies such as a subject in a school giving 90% As where previously it was 20% were called into question and every single one of those grades were checked and had to be verified and justified, and adjusted if this could not be done.

Fuck right off with your 'they should be ashamed' when you clearly have absolutely no idea about the processes that happened to arrive at these grades.
By all means take a long look at the private sector where many of these checks were not in place but for your average comp? the workload of staff and pupils was tripled to make sure as could be that the grades were merited on the evidence we had.

Carycy Have you read any of the detailed explanations given in the thread by teachers about the assessment process?

@Carycy

It’s the teachers or whoever it is that awarded the grades Willy nilly. They should be ashamed of themselves for not being honest.

You have no idea have you?

@notimagain and yet for the pilot and the trauma surgeon mentioned earlier there are the co-pilot, cabin crew or anesthetist, nurses and other doctors there with them to discuss, check, verify, assist.
The trauma surgeon might not be able to check something but he can ask/discuss with any of the others in that operating room.

The pilot has checklists and manuals to refer to and follow, other crew to discuss with and contact with the ground to talk to.

@Carycy

It’s the teachers or whoever it is that awarded the grades Willy nilly. They should be ashamed of themselves for not being honest.

RTFT 🤬

By all means take a long look at the private sector where many of these checks were not in place

They were!

Headsinsand Are you implying that teachers who work in the private sector were less ethical about the assessments? Private school teachers are professionals following due process just like all other teachers. Do you not think it's more likely that the inequalities that already existed between different groups of pupils has been exacerbated by inequal pandemic experiences and outcomes?

@notimagain in the days when passengers were allowed in cockpits I remember a time I was allowed as a young teen to sit in one of the jump seats in the cockpit whilst going on holiday as a member of crew was family friend. Suddenly a light started flashing and the crew got their manuals out to see what the possible problem was. I remember them telling my father afterwards I was very calm in a crisis. It was more (luckily) I didn’t realise how serious an issue it could be, otherwise I might have been running down the aisle to my mum screaming that the plane was going to crash!

Obviously if a decision has to be made in a split second then they wouldn’t be reaching for a book. But also if there is more than one member of crew they would be discussing the issue. They would also have hours and hours in the flight simulator practising many different scenarios.

Also many crashes unfortunately can be down to pilot error

I taught an incredible student this year. Flair, creativity and a really original way of both writing and analysing. Thanks to being able to mark something in the region of 20 assessment essays, we were confident that they met the criteria for an A*. The same student put tremendous pressure on themselves and could have bombed spectacularly in a 2 hour exam.

Knowing that it wasn't a huge, impersonal exam room demerit definitely helped my weaker students and made them focus continuously, rather than leaving it all to the end... and realising it was too late. I've seen that happen too many times over the years.