University 2020 :5: Results day approaching and beyond

[MillicentMartha]

Old thread
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/higher_education/3855474-University-2020-4-The-wait-for-grades-and-better-days-ahead?pg=40

Less than 3 months to go until we have a better idea what the future has in store for our DC. Let’s hope that even if most lectures are online that accommodation is open and they can move up, across or down to their university towns and start their student life.

We should have been in the middle of exams, instead we have this strange limbo of lockdown. It could have been worse, though.

Sorry yes more like 6 teachers for 3 subjects x 3.5 hours per teacher per week.

I am definitely not a mathematician. And sometimes same teachers in y12 and y13.

Well the teacher concerned consistently called DD by a name she doesn't use in their weekly double lesson, so I doubt if he was aware of her uni plans. By the time you factor in interviews, strikes & coursework prep, they probably spent half a dozen lessons in the same room. It's far easier to know your students, and you probably care more about doing so, in a smaller school taking students from 11-18. Not everyone has that luxury.

Hope the treatments going OK @JulesJules... Must be stressful...

BackforGood a fair number of our A level classes have twenty or just short of twenty students in them.

A huge difference as well in a sixth form college when you only teach them for 1 or 2 years, unlike a school sixth form when they have been on your radar for 7 years.

My school teaches A level for 9 hours a fortnight with usually 2-3 teachers per subject, so maybe 1-2 hours a week with a particular class rather than 5.

Thanks @oneteen !

I'd just like to put it out there that if my DD's teachers happen to give her the benefit of the doubt because of being aware of her uni place hanging on an A, I'm fine with that. But then I'm cheap :) I also don't buy that there is this mass of teachers out there who are so utterly useless at their jobs that they don't have the bare minimum of interest in their students. I know there are some, I buy that there are a good wodge, but I don't buy that there are loads. I think what some posters on here are really trying to imply is that their DC's grades will be hard won and on merit. I frankly just want this messy year over, with DD moving on to a decent uni where she might have some fun to end the year on a more interesting note. If she gets the grades but not entirely on merit, I couldn't care less. This years grades are meaningless pretty much.

This years grades are meaningless pretty much.
A bit hyperbolic...

Not hyperbolic to my mind Ironoaks. This government is utterly chaotic and the DfE has been at the limpest end of the chaos.

As in, it appears not to have an effing clue about anything.

I can't agreed that's this years grades are meaningless @goodbyestranger as they represent two years of work for thousands of children. The assessment model is different this year but has been designed to give candidates as close a result to what they would have been expected to achieve as possible. By definition that can't be meaningless.

But I do agree that DfE have been the laggard amongst Government departments throughout this crisis. Woeful performance all round. Matt Hancock may not be everyone's cup of tea but at least he has got stuff done. Gavin Williamson has achieved very little.

sandy I did type the qualifier 'pretty much'! If the system as outlined by Ofqual works absolutely ethically and is applied absolutely uniformly across all schools then it might be ok. But it almost certainly won't be, and I've seen enough instances of really bizarre downward moderation across various subjects over the years to have real doubts about the fairness of how things will pan out. And the government's slew of meaningless flip flopping communications with schools simply serves to underscore my hunch that it's all a quite serious shambles. But at the same time it's hard to feel too exercised by it, given the even bigger shambles we're looking at generally at the moment. Theory is sort of ok is as far as I'd go.

The Times is reporting today that initial reports are showing that schools are being too generous in their marking for GCSEs and A levels- the article is behind a pay wall but as it’s based in a report from the FTT Education Datalab Research Organisation I’m sure it will be in other news outlets too

Well maybe you could say that these results will be more representative of ability and effort that a one off performance on one given day? Not all pupils do their best in exams. Maybe this system is fairer?

Maybe it is possible that anticipating moderation down in any event those schools pitched high so that when moderated down they ended up where they wanted to be or maybe so they didn't have to deal with complaints from pupils and students and could say It wasn't us , we have you higher , blame the boards.

@errorofjudgement I think generosity was inevitable if you are staying from the student end unless the schools try to match to their previous results. The truth is that most students may have a good day or a bad day and grade boundaries can move quite a bit, so the teachers may expect A/B, but they will all want to err on the side of generosity.

Makes sense. I know my DD dropped a couple of grades in her actual GCSEs than predicted. Went higher in a couple.

Interesting times!

It struck me that the over grading wasn't huge and another journalist could have looked at the survey and written the headline 'teachers grading only marginally overtstated' but instead picked the more headline grabbing one above. Not an expert though and don't know whether that margin is expected or not.

Changing the subject, but partly related as I am still worried DS grades will be moderated down, Birmingham CS confirmed this week that they won't consider deferral requests until after August 1st and will only allow deferrals on achievement of the standard offer (which on reflection makes sense as they will be competing with next years students where they only make standard offers). DS is leaning toward a gap year but keeping an open mind and I think we will have to be prepared that he may need to take up a place in September.

I agree with Oratory that The Times are looking for a story and ‘ teachers marking as expected’ does not sell newspapers .

I have pretty much no doubt that under the usual circumstances ds would have achieved his first choice, but under this system well who knows . He has worked consistently very hard so that has got to be in his favour but statistical models don’t distinguish do they.

We gave locked down , respected the process etc However we live in a rural area with very few cases so it almost feels surreal and a small part of me wishes they could have sat the exams and moderated afterwards . I think it would have felt a more valid experience .

Its difficult.. I think Gavin Williamson words 'all children will get the results they worked so hard for' won't be true for the schools with mixed inconsistent historical results... Dds school is incredibly quirky in terms of historical results, class sizes etc and it would be impossible for an algorithm to take into account so many variables.

My thoughts are that the teacher assessments are somewhat irrelevant and the grades will be determined by the rankings allowing the exam boards to meet their grade quota and state they have been fair and applied the same rule to every school using historical data.

Any news on when exams will be September/October?

@Railingsohno there was an announcement that it would be A levels in October, with results by Christmas, GCSEs in November.

[quote Monkey2001]@Railingsohno there was an announcement that it would be A levels in October, with results by Christmas, GCSEs in November.[/quote]
Great, thank you!

@oneteen we just don't know how the moderation will go. I had that same thought and was thinking that it would almost be fairer if each school was told that based on previous results and cohort tests/GCSEs/SATs/CATs they had a total number of each grade to distribute among their students and could therefore manage internally if the distribution of those grades went to different subjects from normal. Obviously that would look very unfair as it is a top down approach rather than bottom up, but I think it may have been less random than fine tuning with statistics which can only work for consistent, large entries.