Any downside to higher predicted grades?

[MadamBuxton]

My DS has just had the result back from a recent mock and achieved a comfortable A grade. His ‘official’ prediction (school call it the UCAS reference grade) is an A but his teacher said to him unprompted today that he’d be happy to increase the reference grade to A* if DS wants it. The reason he gave for it being a choice is that a University might give a higher offer if he has higher reference grades so it could work against him. Surely not?! My understanding is that an offer would never be higher than the level published on the website for that course and in fact a higher prediction could only help by making it more likely he gets an offer?

Am I going mad or is his teacher? Any words of wisdom appreciated.

I’m not surprised I didn’t get any responses to my OP - it was a very long-winded way of asking if Universities ever make higher than published offers. Anyone?

They might specify a specific grade for a specific subject. A friend was asked to get an A for further maths, an A for maths and an A for business studies. It's rare to only get an A for maths if you're going to get an A for FM, so the offer effectively exceeded the standard A*AA quoted on the admissions page.

I think you will find that the published entry requirements are often stated as 'typical offer' or 'standard offer', both of which give the university scope to make an offer to an individual student which deviates from that.

Yes they do. Particularly in the circumstances Hoghgyni says, where the typical offer is say, AAA with two sciences, and a candidate is predicted A chem, A Maths, A Spanish, the offer will be AAA with the A* in chem. So it is not actually higher, but more restrictive than the typical offer. Does that make sense?

This is very interesting OP!! I’ve heard the exact same thing. Teachers saying to students that although they think the students will get an A* in the actual exam, they think it may be best to predict an A as otherwise universities will only offer the higher grades.
I don’t understand this either. If the prediction is AAA then students can’t apply for A*AA, or they can but are they going to get offers?
According to Ucas data only 18% of students achieve the predictive grade or above. Therefore if a student is predicted AAA a university would assume there’s an 82% chance that the student will not achieve AAA and will achieve less. So probably think they’ll get BBB or something.
I really don’t understand it.

@Hoghgyni and @Ulelia I’m maybe missing something but I can’t see how your examples account for a teacher giving a predicted grade of A when the student is likely to get an A*. What’s the rationale for downgrading. Especially as universities know that predicted grades are usually aspirational.

I have no idea why a teacher may do that. I answered the question about whether a university may change their standard offer

I was under the impression that the opposite was true and the higher your predictions the more chance you have for receiving lower or even unconditional offers.

However, I am new to all this as dd is u6 and applying this autumn so all advice is good.

DD has just started at uni. One of her friends had to get A* for FM and AA. Another had a similar offer for Cambridge. The standard offers didn't specify grades in any subject, but they are just that, standard.

Maybe it’d be better asked on higher education or in staff room? I’m not understanding the rationale at all either.

I thought I’d put this in higher education so thanks for pointing that out. I’ve just added it there.