English GCSE results are badly down this year - NATIONALLY

[Itchyandscratchy]

A picture has been emerging tonight of schools up and down the country reporting English Language results severely down on predicted forecasts.

Biggest area of contention is - predictably - C/D borders.

Most schools are reporting an average 10% dip.

Reports say that AQA - amongst other boards - have, without any warning at all, raised grade boundaries significantly, thus affecting grades. Most students seem to have dropped a grade at least from their mock/predicted grades.

This will impact enormously on students and their FE paths; schools who face going into special measures when their A-C results dip and Ofsted swoop. More schools will be effectively forced to become academies.

Students are being used as political pawns and it absolutely STINKS. I am dreading handing out envelopes to those students tomorrow who will get D grades, which a year ago, with exactly the same work would have got Cs.

I am gutted.

Captainhastings can I ask which board that was ,my ds has one rogue English paper which definitely cost him an A*. He met his offer but it is niggling , the marks over all for that paper are odd and the school and quite a few are having remarks

My first thought about this was that people aren't turning to Academies and Free Schools fast enough to suit this government, which is determined to take education away from local democracy. So you raise the bar, more kids get low grades, you put in "special measures" and force the school to become an Academy!

Job done!

To me as a arent i am glad they are making the exams "harder" i am sick of hearing that a* students are having to have top up classes at uni or collage because they are not being taught what the should know at gcse or a level

Also for me its not about this being fair to one set of students or nother the question
Sould be WHY the hell are people siting exams on diffrent days at diffrent times a year my view all children should sit the said exam on the same day at the same time in the whole of the uk

And personally i dont care if i get flamed for this is you are in favour of your child doing a easy exam you are a bad parent and a bad taecher

Why the hell would any one want their child to get a mark they cleary dont deserve
Ifa student gets a a* at gcse level in maths say they should need a remdeial class in maths before they start a level if they do then the question is then should that said student haven gottan an a

I very much doubut that the exams have been made to hard more like all along they were to easy

Uni should be reserved for the eleite and the best and the brigtest

I find it actaully quite shocking that with the grades i gained at school i would of been able to go to uni

And also that E and garde are consired a pass at gcse thats how bad pur education has got

Is it right that with two pupils living in the same street, one could have a C in English GCSE having scored 10% less than a child who took the exam in the June of the SAME academic year doing the same Controlled assessments and speaking and listening tasks?The report published by AQA after the January series makes no comment that the CA and S and L were too easy so why did pupils taking the same tasks in June get penalised significantly. The govt/exam board deal with statistics I deal with devastated children I have grown to care for over the past 5 years, plus they picked on the C/D borderline on the Foundation paper, the most vulnerable. Sickening.

They shouldn't have changed the goalposts for children in the same academic year.

But, other than that, I think that exam boundaries DID need to fall. The mark required to get a C in some subjects on some papers is ludicrously low and marks can't keep on going up and up every year. Do that and a C becomes a bad thing not an achievement and an A* becomes the norm. Crazy.

Ilovegeorge Yes. I have two students with the same raw score and they have different final grades. One did the exam in January and one in June.

My students who had a C in January (and worked damn hard for it) and a D now are free school meal students, SEN students, looked after children, EAL... the most vulnerable.

That's the final raw score - made up of all three units. It's just ridiculous.

Can someone put me straight - is it solely AQA GCSE English or is the A2 affected too as captainhastings indicated.

I think the AS AQA lit/lang has been a disaster this year at DD school. The highest grade awarded to the whole class was D. Several E and alot of U handed out.

what manicinsomniac said.

In terms of grades, it is unfair, but long term it has been unfair for a long time that students have passed GCSE English but don't know how to use an apostrophe or when to use a capital letter.

I'm not trained to teach English but have had to tech some really basic things to 16/17 year olds with GCSE English.