To think that the whole gcse / A level grading system is rigged

[SparklesandGold]

Just my opinion.

But isn’t it funny how GCSE and A level grades have significantly for higher ever since exams were cancelled?

I can’t help but think the whole thing is flawed. I am not teacher bashing, but come on, It’s hardly surprising to wonder if some, not all, teachers bumped their students grades up intentionally.

AIBU?

They couldn't have been used for next year because there is a November option for pupils to sit them exams. This was the same last year. So the papers will be used for that.

Christ, I wouldn't be a teacher for all the tea in China. I often proof read for uni students and my son. You imagine it's a quick ten minute skim read to check for errors. It takes agesssssss and I can read an entire book in two hours when the mood takes me.

JulesCobb
Why complain about being called a goady fucker and then make post after post being a goady fucker?
It’s not appropriate to call someone that.
It is if that’s exactly what you’re being.

Not a goady fucker, I was expressing my opinion on the fact i thought it was strange that all of a sudden grades have increased.
This is the thing with “opinions” people should be open to, shock horror, changing their opinions when presented with, oh I don’t know, actual facts and reasoning from those who are experts in the subject rather than their own bitter feelings. People will, and rightly so call a spade a spade when you become so entrenched in your own narrative when you won’t accept what those more educated in the subject are telling you. You can continue to be ignorant to what is actually happening / happened with the results, but prepare to be called out for your “opinion”.

And I’m not alone.
Ah yes, excellent company you’re keeping.

If you had 6 kids all capable of getting an A but they sat exams. On that day 3 might get an A, two a B one had a bad day and got a C. How can you evaluate this unless they sat the exam? You can't so they all must be awarded their potential grade of an A.

How about if someone said " nurses were rubbish at their jobs last year, they let si many people die"? It would as risible as your comment is. Yes grades were higher, because they were assessed differently, the variables of exams were ironed out, and that difference meant teachers' workload and stress spiralled.

'Ok I mean yeah, I can see the other side too'
Only now, 130 posts in?

Every year a certain number of students are 100% capable of getting an A.
On the day, one will have a cold, two will be going through family break up and / bereavement. One will have an unexpected panic attack and one bad hayfever. In the end maybe 6 or 7 will fulfill their full potential.

So in teacher assessments which 7 do they give the A to? Roll a dice?? Of course not!! All 10 with A potential get the A. It’s only fair.

I actually think that pure internal teacher assessment is immoral. It can not be fair year on year as the system is too open to variation.

That may sound harsh but it is based on 16 years of being a teaching including a senior teacher, PGCE mentor, NQT mentor.

From my experience there are vast variations in house even with internal moderation. Take the work to external moderations to compare with other teachers, for professional development reasons - and there was always great variations in standards of work.

I worked for an exam board. As an exam marker there were huge variations in the work that came in to be marked but the standardisation process was rigorous and then marks were scaled each year to ensure consistency.

No one likes to hear it but it was a good system for ensuring that year on year - the standards were the same and pupils who took GCSE's a few years previously were neither advantaged or disadvantaged.

I was a SENCO, so on to the second most prevalent argument regarding that teacher assessment supports SEN pupils better.

What we need is a different approach to SEN pupils completely with a return to more practical and less academic qualifications which are well funded.

It is flawed to have the people who teach the content to assess the content and award the marks. This is not teacher bashing nor a slur on the professionalism of teachers - it is basic accountability.

being a teacher (!) not being a teaching!! Back to skool for me.

So, @Cherryana, what do you suggest should have happened this year?

Do people feel GSCE were inflated? State and private?

I heard about A level

@Cherryana I agree in the most part with what you say.

I want exams, as a maths teacher they are fine for assessing our subject. However I can see why other subjects may benefit from ongoing assessment.

I don't know what the answer is.

@SmallPrawnEnergy

A poster shared this the other day on a similar scathing thread and I think it needs posting again to be honest.

__

You will read a lot this week about inflated A-Level grades with teacher's predictions and how teachers have deliberately exaggerated grades for their own gain.

Think again. We haven't. Let me explain.

Let's take five members of an A-Level class who are all slated to get B grades overall. They have been progressing all through the course towards those grades and look pretty good so far.
Now let's take a NORMAL examined year. Your five sure-shot B grades go into that exam room and sit those papers. Now let's go to August and you get the following:
Students 1 and 2 get B grades as expected
Student 3 spends extra hours revising, practising and practising, manages to revise the one question that comes up and gets an A
Student 4 drops to C because they were one mark off the higher-this-year boundaries. Any other year would have been a B.
Student 5 missed either one question/one text/one case study/one equation and dropped to a low C or even a D. Yup they screwed up, either by accident/stress/personal circumstances and there's at least one every year in every class who does.

Now let's take THIS year. Your five sure-shot B grades are back again, only now you have to predict their grades. They have all been consistently working to this level.

Do you give them all B's? Of course you do because that's your evidence. Which student becomes your scapegoat? Which one do you 'assume' will be the screw up or victim of boundaries? Student 1 who had that one bad assessment? Student 2 who has bad attendance? Student 3 who works at B grade but it is really low in the band? Student 4 who has major family issues? Student 5 who is actually capable of more but doesn't revise and blags assessments? No. You don't. Because you don't let (you are also forbidden to let) bias cloud your judgement. So they all get B's sent off, including that one student who may have managed an A.

So grades will go up and be artificially high, but of course they will, it's an anomaly year. You have no data to draw your usual bell curve from (what makes a B one year may not another).

Teachers haven't exaggerated grades, instead we are working against:

• Previous years boundaries that go up and down, sometimes quite dramatically. I have had students get A's one year and C's in another with exactly the same mark.
• Not knowing what is on the paper (e.g. mine only get examined on 2 out of 3 possible topics and if one particular one comes up, some students will do better)
• Each year also brings 'bad' papers and 'good' papers - you get one bad paper/poor question/poorly worded section and that's your cohort all down - teachers have been asked to predict against this too.
• Giving students the benefit of the doubt because you know they COULD and have demonstrated in assessment that they CAN so why not give them the grade?
• Exam marking is notoriously unpredictable, inaccurate and uneven - particularly in essay based subjects even in regular years.
• Also I cannot speak for other teachers but this year's group for me have been one of the most able I have had - and having a student's personal progress judged against previous who may have been less able/more disadvantaged/more scuppered by course changes seems ridiculous.

Also, quite bluntly, predicting and ranking exam candidates for teachers has been hellish. I don't think anyone would like to be asked to rank a group of people on their POSSIBLE performance knowing that the grades they give will make or break a student's future.

And finally, students WORKED for these grades. Teachers didn't magic them out of thin air. We based them on eighteen months of evidence, assessments and grades. And every time someone declares 'oh they aren't real grades' you belittle their work and achievements.

Save your judgements for the govt who turned schools into exam factories which means it's all on one or two papers at one moment in time.

(EDIT: This example can also be applied to the upcoming GCSE results too)

EDIT 2 - Also this year's grades will not be included in schools progress/judgements and league tables so it is literally in no teacher's interest to inflate grades artificially.

Brilliant post. Spot on.

But you are being a goady fucker - the PP was completely right.

@LadyLooLaa

I will accept that you are not teacher bashing and answer in that spirit. With no support from government or the exam boards, we set, standardised, marked and moderated hundreds of exams. We had to use the data from this to generate the grades. Every single grade was supported by data. We did not get paid extra for any of this and the exam boards still got paid for all of this (this is usually their jobs). We had to submit our grades for external scrutiny, so if we were wildly different from what was expected it would have been picked up on. We do not get performance related pay, so there is no incentive to inflate grades. If anything it makes it difficult for future years if we were to inflate them. So, YABU.

Well said. In addition to this, after all TAGs had been entered and the opportunity to enter data closed, exam boards called for samples of work in order to ensure the grades were fair and based upon robust assessment. These kids worked so hard, in really difficult circumstances, and to suggest that they do not deserve the grades they received is actually really shitty. And it quite clearly IS a teacher bashing thread!

@leafygarden42

But you are being a goady fucker - the PP was completely right.

Freedom of speech and all that.

@SparklesandGold

What gets me is that some students complain that they’ve had it so tough.. their exams were cancelled, what more could they want?

Perhaps not to have lots of exams instead of just one and not having to worry that one test they messed up in Y9 could pull down their whole grade? Or maybe trying to get motivated and used to a whole new system while being schooled via Teams and missing their friends?

"Freedom of speech and all that."

Yeah, right. Bugger how it makes others feel.
You go right on ahead.

Freedom of speech and all that.

Ffs OP are you 8, you're just embarrassing yourself.

@CallmeHendricks

"Freedom of speech and all that."

Yeah, right. Bugger how it makes others feel.
You go right on ahead.

I’m sorry, but this was not a personal thread against one person or a group of specific people.

I think because grades have suddenly shot up and teachers were deciding the grades, it is reasonable to wonder if some, NOT all, had been bumped up.

@CallmeHendricks my sister says you're a big poo poo pants

Op you mentioned A levels which have been higher and reported on

But where have you seen the same re GSCE? For this year?

@TSSDNCOP

ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2021/08/gcse-results-2021-the-main-trends-in-grades-and-entries/

Marsha here's a good gcse round up.

Regarding GCSEs..... The results have been high for YEARS now. Over a decade and a half for sure. Massive amounts of high passes, and A*. Thing is, for much of the last couple of decades, a large chunk of the final grade was course work, and in many schools, the teachers made sure the course work was of a high quality; in some cases helping the pupil, and sometimes even re-doing the work, so that the school would have pupils leaving with mostly good grades.

I have seen it happen over and over. And in many cases, schools let the pupils take some of the GCSEs 3 or 4 times. Then they would put forward to best grade of the 3 or 4.

And don't anybody tell me that this has never happened. It's happened a LOT. Not blaming the teachers, the schools are told they must have good exam results, or they get their arse kicked/lose funding etc... So it's in their best interests to make sure the kids do well. So the work that isn't great, is re-done.

Not massively good for the kids really, as when they are almost ALL doing well, how are employers meant to decide who is good and right for the job and who isn't? SO many pupils have got jobs and apprenticeships based on fake results. Jobs they couldn't do that well, and often failed at, and ended up leaving.

Also, I have known many cases where pupils have been 'helped' with their GCSEs and they have gone on to fail their A levels spectacularly, because they aren't capable of doing them properly. They can hardly do the A levels well can they, when they couldn't do/didn't do most of their GCSEs on their own?

Then with their crappy A level results, some of them go to Uni on a 'clearing' course, and then fail at that too, because as I said before, they could barely do GCSE level work. So Uni work is way out of their reach, so they drop out - or end up with a rubbish grade - as they can't cope with the Uni level education.

Seen it happen quite a lot.

We need to go back to the days when it was OK for some people to not do too well academically, and we need to stop telling everyone they need to go on to A levels and university. It's not for everyone, and we need to stop this mad idea that you're a failure if you don't go to Uni. There's so much more out there for people to do, and so many more opportunities.