Were the SATs really that hard?

[SquashAndPineapple]

Ok, so my DS is basically Mr Average! I mean literally. It's uncanny! I kid you not, he's the walking talking version of average! He's bang on 50th centile for height! He was bang on the 50th centile for the recent BMI thing they did at school! He's pretty much bang in the middle of the class for SPAG, reading and maths. He is my walking, talking little version of the average UK yr 6 kid!!

He has had a LOT of practice SATs stuff come home from school in the last few months. Some of it quite hard IMO!!

I asked him how the reading SATs went because the media has gone mad with how hard it was. He said it was a bit like all the practice ones, maybe a bit easier!

So .... Was it really that hard?

If my little Mr Average found it .... well ... average (or even a bit easier than average), then is this just the media stirring things up? Anyone else have an average kid that found the paper kind of middly? None of DSs friends seem to have found it exceptionally hard. Obviously, they may have all done terribly and just thought it was fine when actually it wasn't, but ..... ?

Any thoughts!?

If a school goes on about their SAT scores a lot I'd consider it to be a red flag to be honest. A decent school will be interested and not put the performance pressure over to the learners. The pressure should be for educators to educate, not teach to test

Well we will all be able to see when it is published.

This carries on to gcse level. My son's mock English involved writing about holidaying in the uk v abroad. It has to be easier if you have been on holiday and even easier if its been in the uk and abroad.

I love how parents say that sats are bad for children and then use the sats results to help them choose schools when their kids start reception. Complete hypocrisy.

Absolutely!

If you use Ofsted reports and particularly that one word grade to choose your child’s school, you are absolutely buying into the system which places SATS front and centre.

Personally I think any inspection should penalise schools that put all this revision pressure on kids. As if you choose not to do that as a school, because you are putting pupil welfare and wellbeing first, you are at a disadvantage when it comes to being judged against children that have been hothoused.

I thought it was soo hard. The reasoning paper on maths I honestly wouldn’t have been able to answer barely any of them. I am convinced my GCSE paper wasn’t that hard.

From just chatting to people I now know pretty much the just of the reading paper, the context and some of the questions ..

I guess I'm not the only one, so those taking SATs late will also surely know now .. if not the questions then at least the contexts etc...! Seems a little unfair(?) though I guess theres not a lot can be done to make this kind of thing fairer(?)

*jist not just!

I hate the ‘make no effort, they are testing the school not the kids’ attitude.

These children have to sit exams every term once they are in high school and having the experience of some revision and some exam technique skill-building is important to prepare them for that.

It is ok for children to think that tests are important and some effort should be put into doing their best for them.

Having said that, there is a difference between supporting and pressurising and I think that’s is where some schools and some parents get things wrong.

If a child hasn't been able to take the test at the specific test time, they are supposed to be isolated from their peers with no opportunity for contact (removed phones, xbox etc).

Once the child is well, they return and sit the tests. If it is suspected that the child has been given some advanced warning/knowledge about the content of the papers, we are not allowed to permit them to sit it and they just score a zero for that paper.

That's how the system is kept "fair".

However, SATs aren't a fair system anyway because there are a very small number of schools who

Accidental early post.

Very small number of schools who attempt to game the system and cheat. That's why the LA checks and reporting suspected maladministration are both important.

To answer your earlier question though, OP, yes the tests this year really were just that hard.

The grammar question paper was reasonable but a number of questions were phrases in deliberately misleading ways. There will be children who are confident they have certain answers right but have actually fallen into the "trap".

The spellings were more difficult than normal. It was still possible to get a strong score but the calibre of the words was higher.

The reading was the most difficult reading paper that there has been since the change to the new curriculum. The texts were overly long and boring. The questions were frequently worded differently to the text so required a greater level of interpretation and there a significantly reduced number of possible correct answers, especially for the larger questions.

The arithmetic questions were fair individually but the overall content had noticeably increased with an increase in the number of time absorbing questions and a decrease in the quick no method questions.

The reasoning papers were reasonable but, again, packed. There were many 1 mark questions that should have been 2 and so getting through the entirety of the paper was a challenge in itself.

I've been a Y6 teacher for every set of these "modern" SATs (since 2016) and, for me, this set was the hardest overall. The problem is that it then becomes more incomparable, with children who have shown themselves to be at expected or greater depth in previous papers not getting those results this time due to the nature of the tests rather than the knowledge being tested.

Are the tests not standardised so that if the paper is harder one year, then you need lower marks to get a particular score? Therefore it doesn’t really matter how hard the test is.

In theory, that's how it works and if you ask the STA, that's the answer you'd get.

However, the boundaries never change by more than a few marks either way and the difficulty is definitely more significant than that.

The cynic in me says that it works like GCSEs do where the boundaries are decided by the percentage of children who get above/below that mark. However, that means that the results are actually not comparible year on year.

He might still come out as 'Mr Average'. If the whole nation generally felt it was tough, then this will be reflected in the raw scores. If the raw score is generally lower, they will drop the scaled score to keep the pass mark in line with what's it been.

Politically, we're not out of the pandemic for long enough for them to lower the scaled score to the point where it will look like more children are passing than ever before (because that would imply that the lockdowns did not affect the children's learning at all). They will need to make a political statement through the scaled score about teacher assessments being fanciful in comparison to the actual test scores, so it will be interesting to see how this dilemma pans out for the dfe. They either make the scaled score high to let us all know that a teacher cannot know their class as well as a snapshot test does, or they panic that the tests were in fact too hard so lower the scaled score to show that the children weren't affected by the tests at all.

Either way, it bears no relevance on the children's futures. A good secondary will do their own assessments on year 7 to get a good picture of their ability to know how best to support them.

In short: Sod those SATS and the government for using such young children as political pawns.

My son isn't the most academic (but is absolutely exceptional in sport, art, science, history etc.). He came out saying the English papers were fine but came out quite upset on Thursday saying he went blank at the maths paper. Luckily the school are very relaxed and encouraging. Theyve made it clear to the children it isn't a reflection of them as a whole person. I'm tempted to not even look at his results, he is who he is. I think he is a lovely, clever kid with good manners so to me, it does not matter at the age of 10.

It's true that the scores will ve standardised but that's no consolation to the 10 or 11 year old who knows they didn't know the answers or finish and feels crap about than and sometimes, themselves.

I’ve had this exact same thought OP. DS (who is on the high side of ‘expected’) said he thought the reading test was fine, he finished with time to spare. This is the opposite of what is being said in the media. I can only assume he has missed the point / context of the comprehension. But then I’m also pleased he hasn’t been stressed out by it. We shall see.

My child heard the news report about this and was amazed - they said they and all their classmates actually thought it was quite easy. They have done below-average to averagely well in all their mock sats btw so I’m not stealth-boasting! I’m hoping for ‘as expected’ across the board for them. Hopefully they’ve not just totally misunderstood the questions!

I think SATs are pointless and needlessly stressful btw, all our local secondaries do their own testing to put pupils in sets.

There's a few things to remember about exams.

Firstly they moderate them. In SATS case they will move the marks to get 100 so that is the centre of the bell curve. So if it's a harder exam then they'll need fewer marks to get each level.
In GCSEs it's done by percentage. So if you think of there being 100 pupils, and the top 10% get an A (yes I know it's numbers now), next 10% get a B etc, then it doesn't matter if number 10 scores 99/100 or 5/100 they still get an A, and number 11 gets a B. So what does matter is if you score relatively worse than others. So if you normally are around 8th to 12th and you find it harder than the others and come 12th, then you'll get a B. If You find it easier and come 8th, you get an A.

Secondly for the OP, sometimes it's easier for some students than others. For example someone who normally can answer all the questions, may get overly panicked by finding one they can't answer. That may then throw them for future questions meaning they do score relatively badly.
if you think of a paper that starts with easier questions and then gets harder as the paper goes on.
Or it could be that the first questions are average difficulty, and the later ones are harder-in which case the ones who don't normally worry too much about the last questions because they can't answer them anyway, won't be worried. Those who normally expect to answer them may then say the paper is harder.
But if the firstr ones are harder than normal, then those who find them hard normally may find them impossible. But the students who can do the later ones may not notice-but then say the paper is easy because the harder questions are only "normal".
So that's how you can find some people finding it fine, and others hard.

But also I don't think social media helps.
DD (standard comp) did one of the exams that hit the news of students crying during the exam and lots of students posting pictures of tear stained faces etc.
She came out of the exam, I asked how it was, and she said everyone thought it was okay except the last question which was a bit weird, but she'd done it.
Within a couple of hours after school as the social media hit, she saw classmates who had been fine during and after the exams putting up posts of "everyone in the exam hall was in tears" "I can't cope...". She was even named in one post as apparently really upset and they said "if Mini-Margaret can't cope then..."
And when the results came they had good results, especially at the top end, which was exactly what the school was expecting as they had a particularly strong cohort in that subject.

I'm not sure why people do that. Whether it's to cover their bases in case they've messed up. One of dd's friends said she'd done it because she thought it would put pressure on the exam board to lower the grade boundaries, which won't happen.