A level assessments…

[WHMum1806]

Sorry if I’m late to the party and I’ve missed threads on this, but my DS isn’t chuffed with his results - they are all a grade lower than his predictions.

I’m not sure if they are justified or not but I don’t seem to get much sense from the school in terms of how they were awarded. They say they were based on exams…errr sorry I mean assessments that just happened to look a lot exams and were done under exam conditions. But won’t say how these translate to grades saying it was done on a pupil by pupil basis.

I just wondered if anyone else had this issue and how transparent other schools have been in explaining how they arrived at a grade? Do pupils have any right to know what was used as evidence for their grades?

Your son should have been told what evidence was used and what weighting each piece of evidence had.

Has he only just got his results? Our school sent details on the appeals process before assessments and on results day.

www.jcq.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/JCQ-Guidance-for-Students-and-Parents-on-Summer-2021.pdf

His school.should have told him which assessment or other evidence were being used to count towards the overall grade and what marks he got in this assessments.

However there are so many factors involved once you have the raw numbers for each piece of evidence, that there would be no way for you to extrapolate a final grade from those marks. It was an incredibly complicated, thought through and moderated process.

Does he know how he did on his assessments ? The final grades received by my child were in line with their assessment grades.

Our schools deadline for appeals is tomorrow so he might want to check what his schools deadline is and act quickly, if he wants to appeal his grade.

We were told in writing it was on assessments only, they have given us raw scores but won’t say what the grade boundaries were. But when questioned they said the assessments were a guide to grading but the process was more complex and students viewed on an individual basis. Which seems a contradiction.
The grades didn’t affect his uni place and we had a family tragedy so I’ve only just got the headspace to question this.

Mine looked at previous years boundaries and asked around for other people's scores in the hope that she beat the people that normally get similar scores and obviously the closer you are to the smartest kid, then the better your odds for a top grade.

@xyzandabc I could understand that but if the school are saying they were only using assessments (which were in affect 2 exams per subject) then that is the same as a normal year where a score = a grade and you can see how near or far you were to other grades.

Sorry to hear about your family tragedy.

As you know, A level assessment processes were a mess this year. And it was pot luck if your school was a stickler or more laissez faire about the grading system.

There were a few threads at the time. What a possible consensus said was.... if your young person had moved on to the course of their choice, i.e. hadn't been negatively affected by lower than expected grades, to try to move on, put it all behind you and get on with new studies - basically not dwelling on what was a flawed and unfair process however unjust that seems. Threads also said that appealing is not likely to succeed as schools could effectively set their own rules and sometimes these were more vague and opaque than others.

If your son got his university place I’d just accept the grades and move on.

Schools tended to give raw scores and percentages, but not grade boundaries to allow them more flexibility, vagueness and to tweak things for different pupils without causing uproar....

@CrumbsThatsQuick I think that’s sensible advice and I’m sure that’s where we’ll end up but just wanted to cast the net out there for info/advice.
Tbh I just want the school to show me the evidence for his grades, doesn’t seem too much to ask!

But it wasn't a normal year. In a normal year, where a score = a grade, all students across the country who have all taken the same tests are compared to each other to set the grade boundaries. Then a grade is awarded depending on the score.

This year every school had to make its own way of awarding grades and could only compare its students to each other, not the whole country. Every school did it differently in the best way they possibly could to award grades that were fair to their students.

Just some of the factors that had to be considered when turning those raw scores in to a grade:

For each subject, how many different bits of evidence are they going to consider?, which ones will they be? Will there be any weighting applied to any of them? If one class sat a different paper, was it harder than the one the other class sat? Does there need to be an adjustment made for that? What will that adjustment be? If a student missed a piece of work, do they get 0 and that 0 is included in an average mark? (So an average of 6,7,8 and 0 = 5.25) Or do you discount that piece of work and just take an average of the work they did do (So an average of 6,7 and 8 = 7)? Big difference, which is fairer ?. Are all bits of evidence moderated? Or just a sample? Which samples? Who moderates?
Then add the teachers holistic judgement. Then compare the results with previous cohorts, are they in line with what the school usually gets? Is there a reason they should or shouldn't be in line? At what point do you put special consideration in? Before or after or in the middle of the above.

So unfortunately this year while a score might give you an indication of grade, a lot of other factors had to be taken in to account before a grade was awarded.

@xyzandabc as I said under that scenario I can understand what you are saying. BUT for DS, according to his paperwork, his grades were based on 2 assessments per subject which were exams by another name. Even if grade boundaries weren’t possible surely a pupil should be given something meaningful to allow them to know how their grade was awarded, how else can they know if it is worth appealing?

To ask another question, are the school obliged to show me what they used as evidence for DS’s grades?

I'm not quite clear from your posts whether your ds knows which assessments were used and what he scored in those assessments. If he knows both of those things, then the school probably aren't going to be able to tell him much more. If he doesn't know either of those then he absolutely needs to ask the school to provide them.

They can't tell you grade boundaries because they were somewhat fluid depending on all the factors previously mentioned. 2 students who scored exactly the same marks may possibly not have ended up with the same grade once all the factors have been taken in to consideration. Unlikely but possible.

As others have said, if he's got his Uni place, I would move on and accept the grades are what they are. It sounds like you've had a lot on your plate recently and you don't need another plate to add to your spinning pile.

Tbh I just want the school to show me the evidence for his grades, doesn’t seem too much to ask!

I genuinely don’t mean to be obtuse but unless you have an indepth Knowledge of the subjects, exam specs, interpreting mark schemes etc, what use is seeing the evidence? Is it the case that you think your son got really high marks and they have pulled his grade down?

@xyzandabc sorry maybe I’m not being clear. His assessment form shows only 2 assessments per subject were used to award his grade. He was told the same. Those 2 assessments both took the form of an exam. Nothing else - so all the complicated scenarios you mentioned above about coursework, class work evidence etc don’t apply.

We have the raw scores for those 2 exams, (those 2 exams being the only 2 thing his grade was based on) but those scores are a bit meaningless on their own with no explanation of how they translate to a grade.

@Getawaywithit I accept the scores he got, I just think as allegedly his grades are based solely on ‘exam’ results it should be fairly clear cut in his case what score they deem is an A, B, C etc and I don’t see the harm in telling him those grade ‘
‘boundaries’

If the reality is that they used those exams as guide then a) that goes against what they put in writing and b) as all his grades went down what evidence did they use for his predicted grades given the month before assessments.

If you ask what evidence was used then you'd presumably get a copy of his 2 assessments.

Have you looked up the grade boundaries if it was a past paper with published boundaries ?

Can he ask other people in his class what score/grade they got ?

Do you remember how he found those assessments compared to previous ones?