Has anyone successfully appealed a grade this year? GCSES and A’levels 2021

[Questioningit]

Still debating whether to appeal one of DDs grades but have heard it’s impossible this year. Just wondering if anyone has had any success and on what grounds.

Sorry I can’t help but also wondering this!

I haven't appealed, but I was told by a friend who works in a school's exam office that the only appeals being considered this year are those where a mistake has been made in the admin. Eg a teacher said it should be a C but the exams officer mistakenly wrote down an E on the spreadsheet that got sent to the exam board. Other than that you would have to enter for the resit to improve on a grade.

@MsMMarple thanks that’s what I thought. Such a shambles this year I’d love to know if work was actually moderated by the exam boards this year because how on earth could it have been with schools doing totally different things and also whether any school’s centre policy was not passed or if that was just a tick box thing and they agreed them all.

I know that each school had samples called for moderation. But I don't know of any that were challenged. I suspect it was a tick box exercise, as long as some evidence was provided it was all just passed through without adjustment.

As above, an appeal is made on the assumption the school has done something wrong.

We had to provide a rationale for all of our assessment processes and moderated grades several times before they were signed off and sent away.

If you think the school has made a mistake, I would go ahead - you don’t have anything to lose, the grade certainly won’t go down.

@Pipperleen how did your school moderate grades?

The basics of it - in my subject, pupils did 6 small assessments, 3 were blind and 3 were prepared topics with a shadow paper a few days before.
Individual teachers then inputted results off the back of these. These were checked by me for the Dept and then I had to present the data to the senior leaders - with details of the process, basically showing how it was a rigorous but fair process for all.
When all subjects had done that, the data was looked at as a whole school to ensure the data was sensible, that there was absolutely no bias either way, etc.
The governors had a look and then we had to sign it off and the results got sent away.
The exam board came back with specific pupils and subjects they wanted to look at - we had to send in the work/evidence to show where we had got the grades from.

I think you can appeal on the grounds of “unreasonable academic judgement.”

What concerns me, is that some schools (particularly selective schools where the grade profiles don’t vary much year to year), have simply “fitted” students into the normal yearly grade percentages achieved in that school to avoid investigation.

So for instance, if there’s 12 doing Physics and, in an average year at A-level, 30% generally get an A, 30% an A and the rest a B, they have just applied these percentages to the 12 - so that 4 get an A - because if they give A* to say, 6, they may be accused of grave inflation and attract an investigation.

They say there are no grade boundaries this year which makes it hard to appeal “academic judgement.”

But if a student has basically achieved 98% in the assessments they did between April and June, but still been awarded an A (rather than A*), is is worth appealing in the grounds of “unreasonable academic judgement?”

@gingerlime this is what has happened with us. School has set grade boundaries based on prehistoric data so DD has come out with a mark that is a complete anomaly in that she has never received such a low grade in her entire school career and at least 2 marks lower than all her year 10 and 11 assessments. School used full length GCSE style assessments in may and Christmas mocks but then down graded the mocks in order for students to fit the boundaries. We had no idea mock marks were going to be altered and so had absolutely no idea she would get the mark she actually did.

I guess it’s work appealing then OP, as the board may look at her scripts and decide there is the evidence there for a different grade (on a national level, rather than in the context of that school).

I think school have really tried avoid anything that may attract investigation as this is is admin nightmare for them. So they’ve made whatever evidence they had fit the data for a normal year in that school.

Might be useful to get this moved to the Education Board OP?