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.

[quote ineedaholidaynow]@dollybird when I was at college in the 80s we were told 10% of pupils would fail, so I assume that was based on the bell curve.[/quote]
Well that's really shit. What if the bottom 10% don't do that badly?

That’s really interesting, Phineyj, thank you.

@dollybird I'm assuming those 10% would have got really low marks

Or exams are not the way forward anymore!

@dollybird I think for awhile you would get awarded an O-level if you failed the A-level, I am sure one of my friends ended up with 2 O-levels in one subject under that rule. Although I think that rule was then changed after a few years to have it as a fail

@Bryonyshcmyony

There's no issue with it.

They've always had loads more As and A*s than the state sector

Why do you think people use them

I agree! But on MN you get parents who pay denying this truth til they're blue in the face. 'Oh no no we chose X school because it gave DC a more rounded education' is the most common exclamation. Errr no - you paid to get better grades! So yes, of course you're right. You get better proportions of top grades in the independent sector. And always have done.

Well I do know people who pay to send their children to a local indie which has worse results at A level than our local state. That IS mad! It's an odd school but people seem to pay so thst their teens can climb trees shrug

Some parents send their DC to private schools as they have better pastoral care than the local state school. A child's mental wellbeing maybe more important than exam results

It’s all very “growth mindset” to believe that half of the cohort actually is exceptional and that exams only reward those who are good at exams and that everything else can be looked up, at leisure, during the course of the study.

I understand that every parent secretly feels that their child IS exceptional and that getting the very top grade this year vindicates these beliefs. As a medical student I lost count of the number of men who told me how smart and brilliant they were and how well they would have done if it wasn’t for xyz.

It’s not true though, that a fast-paced course like medicine or vet science would be readily accessible to an average learner, even if they did get all As this year. The volume is huge and the pace is fast. Medicine may not actually be hard but there’s a lot to get though and builds on itself. A student need to know the anatomy of the kidney at macroscopic and microscopic level before they can appreciate its fluid homeostatic role before they learn about conditions that affects this and which medications work on it.

There’s no time to leisurely cross reference everything because very quickly there’ll be another system, another organ. Effective study also needs well-honed processing skills and the ability to discriminate between important information and just noise and is also a skill in itself.

Most people entering medical school have been exceptional at school and even then the pace and volume is a step up.

If 50% of children in a large cohort are getting exceptional grades then the assessment is inflated.

Well, whichever way you look at it, it's odd that back in the 1990's you needed to be in the top 5% of students to get an A Grade (there wasn't an A*). I didn't actually know that many people who swept the board with A grades. One or two here or there maybe. A very bright friend of mine did get all A's - super super bright and still is, is now a partner in a law firm.

Most of us bright kids got maybe 1A and some B's.

If FB posts are anything to go by, EVERYONE gets A and A* grades now.

Utterly ridiculous on those kids who ARE the brightest and also on those kids who will then go to Durham University ( or wherever) and spectacularly fail.

It's also odd that all the way school, you can effectively put the top learners on one table out of 6 in a class. Apparently once we get to A levels (and probably GCSES), half the glass is exceptional. Odd that.

[quote Phineyj]ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2021/08/a-level-results-2021-the-main-trends-in-grades-and-entries/[/quote]
thanks, that is very helpful.

"Given the variation in evidence supplied by schools, with work being produced at different times under different conditions, it is hard to see how the awarding bodies could do anything other than sign off schools’ TAGs."

and generally very informative.

I doubt there will be many at Durham with As in their A levels and 4&5 in their GCSEs. Durham takes ages to offer and are stringent.

@nolongersurprised

It’s all very “growth mindset” to believe that half of the cohort actually is exceptional and that exams only reward those who are good at exams and that everything else can be looked up, at leisure, during the course of the study.

I understand that every parent secretly feels that their child IS exceptional and that getting the very top grade this year vindicates these beliefs. As a medical student I lost count of the number of men who told me how smart and brilliant they were and how well they would have done if it wasn’t for xyz.

It’s not true though, that a fast-paced course like medicine or vet science would be readily accessible to an average learner, even if they did get all As this year. The volume is huge and the pace is fast. Medicine may not actually be hard but there’s a lot to get though and builds on itself. A student need to know the anatomy of the kidney at macroscopic and microscopic level before they can appreciate its fluid homeostatic role before they learn about conditions that affects this and which medications work on it.

There’s no time to leisurely cross reference everything because very quickly there’ll be another system, another organ. Effective study also needs well-honed processing skills and the ability to discriminate between important information and just noise and is also a skill in itself.

Most people entering medical school have been exceptional at school and even then the pace and volume is a step up.

If 50% of children in a large cohort are getting exceptional grades then the assessment is inflated.

I agree with all of this. Half of the students are going to be below-average, so the grades should surely reflect this. Or maybe Michael Gove has finally succeeded!

There are some very informed posts from teachers in this thread and all seem to agree that the correct and fair approach is to predict the best grade that you think the student capable of achieving, even if that is not the grade they are most likely to get on the day.

This will lead to predicted grades being higher across the board than actual grades, which the universities know about and adjust for.

Except this year ... where everyone received the grade they would have got on their best day, and we've seen massively improved results which are less than fully credible.

So are teachers being too positive and kind, and if so how do you stop them?

So are teachers being too positive and kind, and if so how do you stop them?

You don’t necessarily stop them, but just recalibrate what a grade is worth - raise the bar for what is required to achieve an A*

It is too subjective and that will always bepkavued by conscious and unconcious bias

Absolutely people do not seem to comprehend it will have a detrimental effect on university places for a few years now. Private schools were fully aware that if they submitted work at the grades they deemed to be appropriate, the government simply did not have the resources to query it. Unfortunately far too many teachers have gone for the best graded work rather than the average... quite evidently given the unreasonable and unrealistic percentage jump in grades this will no doubt be queried as with the amount of school missed for that age range the grades just would not be there.

Can’t get the share token to work:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-level-results-universities-will-have-to-fill-gaps-in-schooling-h6njh9pv5

Teenagers will head to university with gaps in their education and need support during degree courses, the government’s former education recovery tsar has said. Sir Kevan Collins said that the headline figures of high A-level grades masked inequality and missing knowledge.

(Continues)

*“Some children missed a chunk of the syllabus and were graded on what they were taught, not on what they missed, but what they haven’t been taught is going to be essential for some degrees,” Collins added. “One question for universities is how they are going to support children so we don’t see huge barriers to learning.”

He agreed that this could lead to greater drop-out rates. He said: “This is a long-term issue and focusing on one cohort is a mistake. This isn’t a problem we can put away and pretend it didn’t happen in September.“

The gaps in education argument will be particularly acute with subjects like Maths. Miss a step there and you can be stuffed. I think there will be more drop outs this year. And I'm not laying blame, just saying. There will.

Well, whichever way you look at it, it's odd that back in the 1990's you needed to be in the top 5% of students to get an A Grade (there wasn't an A). I didn't actually know that many people who swept the board with A grades. One or two here or there maybe. A very bright friend of mine did get all A's - super super bright and still is, is now a partner in a law firm*

I also got As across the board, but I wasn't super super bright - I was just good at exams and had a good memory. Hence why I keep trying to tell the employers on here that they should not be judging potential employees on academics, but on their ability to do the job.

Unfortunately far too many teachers have gone for the best graded work rather than the average

not unfortunately -it's exactly what should happen. When I did GCSE back in the dark ages of the late 80s, my English and English literature exams were 50% and 100% coursework respectively. For English you chose your best 5 pieces of work - and 10 for English lit. Not an "average", the best. And especially when students have had a torrid time.

The only thing about allowing schools to assess GCSEs in particular is that some of them did bugger all in the way of teaching during the first lockdown - and this will have let them off the hook when they should have been accountable for the decisions they made.

@shallIswim

The gaps in education argument will be particularly acute with subjects like Maths. Miss a step there and you can be stuffed. I think there will be more drop outs this year. And I'm not laying blame, just saying. There will.

Maths had the smallest increase in number of As and A stars given

No worry about my dd as they covered every part of the curriculum, infact had finished it completely by Easter in all three subjects and she was examined /assessed on everything (private school)

Private schools were fully aware that if they submitted work at the grades they deemed to be appropriate, the government simply did not have the resources to query it

This is yet another example of a nasty slur against teachers and schools. Dds school produced a huge amount of evidence for each pupil and were more than aware they could be moderated

In fact we parents assumed private schools would be moderated more rigorously, as did the school, so all evidence and assessment was water tight and correct.

@Bryonyshcmyony,

I am afraid you are living in a fantasy world.

Statistics always beat anecdote and speculation. The rise in grades (especially at private schools) cannot be explained except by teachers (schools) being VERY generous.

The grades did need to be carefully evidenced but the evidence consisted of the best work done by the student, not their average work. Most importantly, the final assessments consisted of past paper questions which the pupils had probably done before. Some teachers gave massive hints as to which ones were coming up. Especially in a subject like Mathematics, this is not really a meaningful assessment.

Universities now have a massive problem in sifting through these ‘grades’ and selecting students.

DD's 6th form college covered the whole curriculum for all her A levels too.

I got one A at A level back in 94 and I remember it being a really big deal (not super bright, my other grades were B and D plus a D AS level). It was a really big deal when I got two A's and seven B's for GCSEs too. Now it feels like anything but an A or A* is considered not good enough, and I don't want my DD to feel like that.

@Bryonyshcmyony,

And ‘pupils’ (well, mainly parents) could challenge the evidence selected by the school.

So little ‘Flossie’ who averaged 73% in topic tests but struggled to assimilate the info and shored 58% in her Year 12 examination, could ask to have that evidence excluded as her ‘mental health’ was fragile during this period.

So, yes, huge amounts of evidence were assimilated and discussed, but the evidence was chosen selectively to optimise the pupil’s grade (which was actually following OFQUAL advice).