Applying for uni in 2021 part 2

[poppycat10]

Hi all, this is a continuation thread from www.mumsnet.com/Talk/higher_education/3828249-applying-for-uni-in-2021?pg=40

Each school is doing things differently- and in my opinion the grades this year can only be compared within the school.......

Were schools given guidance on where grade boundaries should sit this year?

@LeiatheSchnauzer not as far as I know

And how can they be when each school would have a different grade allocation policy?

Oh, I think I see, subject to the marks their pupils are achieving? But does that mean that each school will ration out their a's to a certain proportion of their students? I thought each pupil was being assessed individually rather than against their cohort? I seem to have got this muddled.

There are no allocations of grades. There is no ranking. Each student should be given their grade on their merit alone. But schools will be scrutinised if they suddenly give all A stars 😊. And we are setting our own grade boundaries- because no one gave us any !
We have to be able to prove the grades we give with hard evidence and this can be challenged by parents and students (directly to the school) so we need to be robust in our evidence. Any school not doing this is being v v silly. You can all appeal if not happy and they have to justify everything. Terrifying for me, good news for students.

Thanks @mumsneedwine. I had thought I had a handle on it but suddenly found loads of gaps when I was trying to support dd. So sorry to see the impact this is having on teachers.

Any exam board governed by JCQ will require 5 pieces of evidence. They want the same 5 pieces wherever possible across the cohort or class unless there is a good reason why it shouldn't be and that has to be explained. The assessment pieces must have taken at least an hour.

CAIE is different and requires one full paper to have been taken as part of it 3 pieces of evidence.

The student can be told the marks on the assessed pieces but the actual grades.

As mumsneedwine says there is no ranking and all grades need to be evidence backed and indeed schools have to submit their protocol they are following and the exam board will decide whether they agree that it is acceptable prior to submission of grades anyway.

Schools have also been asked to keep an eye on their usual grades so if they are wildly different then it is more likely that moderation will take place.

Sorry can be told the marks but NOT the actual grades that should say

I suppose I am unsure why the general consensus is that the grades will all be inflated this year. If schools are all carefully grading actual work completed then nothing is based on predictions.

@SeasonFinale don't understand how this would work. Different schools will be using different pieces of evidence and different exams. So how can there possibly be comparisons between them?

Because if an exam board moderates a school and sees that the assessment set is not of a sufficiently high standard to warrant an A* they would get moderated down.

The same way that exam papers used to get UMS marks they would decide whether an assessment was easy or difficult. If considered easy they would set a higher grade boundary and if a hard paper a lower one. Schools will not want to risk moderation and should therefore be sensible.

Well you seem to have more faith in exam boards moderating than I do season ...... Let's see

No I have more faith of a school's fear of being moderated so in effect they will self-police

Do you honestly think all schools are going to be so bothered about being scrutinised by exam boards?

The reason for cancelling exams is because of the lost teaching time for the disadvantaged students. Because most private school students have been taught and grammar school students have taught themselves if the schools have not. Yes this is a generalisation but you get my drift.

If schools were not bothered about delivering teaching to their students during lockdown I don't think they will be so bothered about the possibility of being scrutinised by exam boards and I honestly don't think they need to fear this anyway.

Whilst I agree there is no fair way of assessing the AL grades this year, I am not naive enough to think that there will be standardisation across the schools and an A from one school will be the same as an A from another.

I am not sure which are the schools that did "not bother teaching" their students and think you have a very strange view of teachers not knowing what constitutes a certain grade. They are professionals.

There will be some schools testing over a wider range of topics and some over a smaller range.

The material produced and the marks obtain still need to be of a certain level.

Whilst my youngest son was at and indie selective, DSS at a non selective indie and oldest at a state comp I would have no issue in knowing that their teachers at all three were professionals and knew at what levels their students were working and achieving.

It is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

Surely it's the schools (are there really so many?) that were not bothered about delivering teaching to their students during lockdown who will have the fewest students holding offers at the kind of universities currently very obviously assuming that the school anyone to whom they make an offer attends won't hesitate to award the required grades? (I'm assuming that even at the one non-bums on seats university DS2 has applied to, his course is one of the odd not-very-if-at-all oversubscribed ones, since his offer came quite quickly).

Hang on- if you guys are saying all institutions are equal meaning all professionals and the standards are also equal - why are we having this fiasco in the first place with the summer exams?

I think dd's school are being very professional and scrupulous. My concern is that her year are being held to the same standard as 2019 despite the reduction in quality of education received. Yes, the assessments are being chosen to only cover subjects covered but her class for this science subject did manage to cover all the curriculum, just not with the same level of detail which would have been achieved before. Therefore dd, who is probably consistently in the top 3 of her class, is swinging between a stars and b in her topic tests. So it is likely that she is hovering between an a and a b for her final grade, which will not get her into her first choice uni.
But if she is one of the highest achievers for her subject then the grades for that class for 2021 will be very out of line with previous years when there would have been up to 4 or 5 a stars typically awarded.
Would that also appear as a discrepancy to moderators?

Interesting question Schnauzer will indeed moderators be bothered about lower grades or just the higher ones?
SeasonFinale despite teachers being professionals we all know that A level grades are actually given on a curve and not A* equals 80% plus etc. No one ever knows what raw score is required for a grade so expecting teachers to give accurate grades to raw marks is a huge expectation. Also knowing how hard or easy a paper is from one school to another is impossible. Unless they are hugely different. Many teachers are not examiners either. It’s a huge ask.
I’m also pretty sure that schools will be ranking their students and matching them to results from 2017-19. How else will they determine the ‘similar profile’ otherwise?
@MarchingFrogs I’ve read your post several times but don’t understand your point. Could you clarify please?

@NotDonna

From the point of view that the 'better virtual provision' schools are possibly 'better' overall and may well have a greater proportion of their Yr13 now needing very high grades to meet their offers; in a proper A level exam year, not everyone will meet their offers on the day, but the universities making that level of offer are obviously very concerned that that even where some scrutiny is to be made of the basis on which grades are given, it is unlikely that a normal proportion of applicants won't get what they need.

Whereas a school which hasn't bothered to try to maintain a good standard of virtual education may well be a 'less good' school generally. And 'not good' schools generally don't have lots of students applying to the likes of Oxbridge/Durham / LSE etc. Either because the student demographic is such that university per se isn't necessarily the intended / realistic / suitable destination of many (hands up, guys, who thinks that a university only requiring CCC as their usual offer is a bit of a waste of space, really, poor kids deluding themselves that their 'degree' from such an institution is actually worth anything, etc) or because nobody cares enough about the bright ones to make sure they don't apply to the 'wrong' universities (see above). So there is not the incentive to assess (or 'assess') a vast proportion of year 13s as having achieved a clutch of A*s and As, because that was the 'stretch' prediction you gave them in October and which they now actually need to meet their offer.

Although, of course, it's possible that the parents of the students needing BBC will be leaning on the teachers just as heavily not to dare give little Johnny a C in more than one subject, but presumably that level of university will be in the bums on seats category anyway and less concerned about too many offer holders making the grade.

The teachers are setting the papers for the internal assessments or using past papers or using papers provided by the exam boards and so for the latter two there will be grae boundaries. For ones they are setting themselves they will ahve set the AO criteria required and these may be subject to external moderation so they should know where the boundaries are. It isn't rocket science. Most schools have had enough people go through them at various grade levels to have a bloody good idea where a student's work falls within grade. If they don't they are in the wrong career.

The consultation specifically said that it will not be possible to compare grades awarded between subjects or schools or relative to previous years ie they have explicitly given up on the concept of thorough moderation. There will be the discussed spot checks for anomalies. In CAIE’s case this has been identified as significantly differing from the 2019 results, which rather cuts across Gavin W’s statements about originally aiming for a similar grade profile to 2020

I hadn’t realised that A levels needed five 1hr long pieces of evidence. That seems curiously more than was needed for A levels themselves.

Thank you MarchingFrogs I now understand what you’re saying.
seasonfinale I didn’t think the exam boards had provided grade boundaries - just grade descriptors. Aren’t grade boundaries usually determined post exams, according to the curve?

Catching up with this thread..... DC's all gearing up for their exams. DD is fairly relaxed about her upcoming exams. All things being equal, she should do well, and the school are being very holistic about the whole thing. My only gripe was being charged for the exams, even though the school aren't using their papers. Would love to know what exactly my £350 is covering. Gold leafed certificates perhaps.

So DD very ahead of the curve. She likes to feel in control, and know what she is doing. For her it is her coping mechanism, to have all her ducks in order. So, Exeter firmed. Accommodation booked. In person open day for offer holders booked. Student finance complete, and letter of confirmation received.

So, just exams to complete, and then the long summer.

Focus will be on trying to catch up with driving lessons, theory test and, hopefully, get a test in before she leaves for uni. She was so delayed last year, with provisional license delayed, lessons delayed then cancelled, as her instructor prioritised that years uni students, which is fair, and then another lockdown. Perhaps I was stupid, but I didn't take her out to practice, due to lockdown, although I know some did. So she basically has to start again from scratch, and has now delayed until after her exams...... almost sorry we even bothered now, as she won't need to drive in her first year anyway..... ho hum.