Did teachers making predictions know there would be far fewer As and A*s awarded?

[GMH1974]

... because otherwise it sounds like they will have over predicted a lot of students. Or did they just go on what would have got the grade last year? And what are universities going to do if loads of their prospective students fail to get the grades? Will they just offer the places to foreign students who can bring more money for the university?

Teachers knew that there would be fewer A and A* grades as the government said they wanted to move back to pre-covid grade profiles.

Universities took this into account in offer making. And most will also adjust their confirmation decisions to reflect the overall profile of grades.

It's business as usual for predicted grades and university offers. Every year students predicted 4 A*s fail to get them and others will. Some will do better than expected and some worse. At least there is less chance of students from some schools being given vastly inflated grades that they don't deserve, whilst those marked more fairly may get the places instead.

I understand the apprehension but the playing field is level for those applying this year. Unis need home students so they will adjust according to standardisation of results.

Every year there are stories of student with 4 Astars, getting no offers or place at Uni but the detail behind is often neglected and tends to be, applying for the most competitive Unis, without safe choices and subjects not a good match. Most students don't get their predicted grades but most students that apply go to Uni.

Yes they did.

Also prepandemic only about 20% predicted grades were correct anyway.

The stuff in the press and the article from the education secretary is scaremongering and of no help to anyone.

2022 results were part way between 2019 and covid levels.
2023 results will be back down to 2019 levels.

This has been known for quite some time by schools (including students) and universities.
It doesn't reflect how exam papers are marked, but where exam boards decide the grade boundaries will lie.

Teacher predictions and university offers will have been made accordingly.

Essentially it makes no difference anyway.
Same number of uni places to fill. Same number of students doing a levels.
University X has 100 places for course Y. They'll have made offers, if they have spare places they'll take students who have just missed the grades.

Of course the teachers now and presumably took this into account. I know at my daughters school they looked at 2019 mark boundaries as a guide.
It's still a best guesstimate.

But thats over-simplyfying matters isn't it - this year has seen the 2nd highest number of applicants, way higher than pre-pandemic years. From UCAS -

Figures for the January Equal Consideration Deadline show 314,660 UK 18-year-olds have applied, down slightly from 320,420 at the same point in the cycle last year (-1.8%) but significantly up on the pre-pandemic figure of 275,300 in January 2020 (+14.3%). This puts the application rate for UK 18-year-olds at 41.5% compared to 43.4% in 2022 but up from 39.5% in 2020.

Of course it's simplifying. But a simple way of showing that panic is not needed. Headlines have been scaremongering (as they do every year). Teachers are experienced in making predictions, and of course knew what is going to be happening with results this year.

Your figures are for applications, not offers. Do you have data on the number of offers made? As this will correlate with the number of places available.

I suspect that this is exactly what has happened.

If you look in the academic common room chat there are admissions people saying they are seeing more missed offers, and I have heard the same under-recruited comments elsewhere. I assume that the exam boards have, as intended, hit the 2019 grade distribution, so it isn’t that results overall are any worse than expected. However, if schools had over-predicted by more than than they did in 2019 (because there is always over prediction) then candidates who in 2019 wouldn’t have received offers because they didn’t have the predictions will now be in the pool of offer holders. As a result, more people are failing their offers than the unis were expecting.

Another factor of course could be that unis did the same sort of thing in reverse - think that the unusually high success rate of recent years might hang on, even if subconsciously.

This might mesh also mesh also with the IB chat - the overall stats are I think if anything slightly higher than 2019, but there seems to be a lot of chat about missed offers. Overpredixtion would be the only explanation. However I don’t know through whether there really has been more offers missed, or if this is just chat.

Not sure if this will work - pasting posts mentioned above

Oh dear. Not good news

At least if a young person doesn't get their grades and misses out on thier place it is down to them and they only lose out to others who properly earned their grades. 2 years ago, 2021 cohort, the students had masses of stress not understanding at all what the process was and not knowing if their school was going to mark in line with 2019, push the boundaries a bit, or all out inflate everyone's grades. Losing out might have meant losing out to those less deserving.

Schools have known about the plan to mark in line with 2019 grade distribution for long enough to predict accordingly.

However, there are always over predictions and disappointed kids. It's always stressful for those going through this process. I always feel for them having to deal with this unnecessary stress. I'd favour an after results application system.

Best bit of advice we took away was to make sure your child likes their insurance university. And perhaps young people need to stop applying to the same 5 universities for each course.There were plenty of other RG universities with good courses in clearing this past week.

We knew in advance, but also the vast majority of teachers do predict somewhat optimistically.

At the schools where I've taught sixth form, predicted grades for UCAS aren't really "If you had to bet money on it, what do you think this student would get?", they're more "What is the realistic best case scenario for this student?". Because it feels like everyone is predicting this way, if you predict in a more accurate way, it feels like you are disadvantaging your students.

There's also a certain med school locally to me which only interviews if you've got an Astar prediction (or so we are told)- if a student has a good UCAT and strong GCSEs, I'll often predict an Astar - maybe not if they were a B grade student, but if they're being predicted AAA anyway, it seems fairer to give them the chance?

There's also a lot of pressure from parents to give unrealistically high predictions- which I won't give into, but I know some teachers well.

Anyway, basically, the system is a mess, it's normal for people to miss their predictions, unis know this and plan around it.

I would suspect that the majority of schools have taken it as best they can into consideration.

Some teachers may have been too harsh, and assumed 2019 grade boundaries with a lower achieving (due to missed school) cohort. And if they wish the media will be able to run a lot of stories about the wonderful pupils that got better than their expectations and are very happy.

Some teachers may have used the 2022 papers and grade boundaries. This would be a little silly as it's been known long enough that isn't the case, but it's possible some have. The media can choose to run stories about the devastated pupils whose results were not what they hoped for and didn't get into the university of choice.

Those two different stories could be run any year anyway if the media chose to. Normally they choose the top run. In 2020 they chose the bottom one. They manipulate it by something as simple as that.
I suspect they're already planning on the second one.

The idea is the same proportions this year get each grade as in 2019. So in real terms, over the entire cohort, there should be approximately the same amount who are thrilled with results above what they wanted, and those who are disappointed. It does depend on what teachers have predicted though.

However:
Universities have the difficulty any year that they don't know how many of their offers will be make the grades.
When they get the grades from their potential students, they have those who made the offer, who must be accepted. Those who have not made the offer can still be accepted.
If the course is already full of those who made the offers, then they will refuse all the ones who failed to make the grades. They don't have a choice to say "actually A made his offer, but we preferred B".
After that they consider the offers individually over the week before, and decide which students who have not made the grade they want, and which they don't. It may be that they decide it's better to use clearing, or better to take those who missed grades.
Dd1 missed one grade for Durham. She could see that they accepted her the previous evening, so they'd obviously taken some time to consider it and then decided to accept her anyway.

I suspect this year is particularly difficult though. They don't want to end up with too many students as they did in 2020 for some places. So it might be that they have chosen to make fewer offers to make sure they don't end up with too many. They then, if they don't have the spaces full, can choose to accept students who have missed the grade.
I suspect that may well be the case. So we may see a bit of an upturn in students who missed the grade but still get accepted. We may see an increase in courses in clearing too.

One thing for students can be is that for dd1 in 2019, track (UCAS) was updated before she got her A-level results, I think by half an hour. So she knew that she had been accepted before she knew her results.

Do you have the link for this chat please, I cant find it. Thx

It's in the Marking and Assessment Boycott thread amongst discussion about that

Our guidance is to predict grades that are aspirational yet achievable, what students would achieve in the most favourable circumstances. (i.e, no major disruption to learning, no family/health/mental health issues) and if students put decent effort into revision. We used 2019 boundaries this year just to be safe.

The reality is not all students will meet these predicted grades, some may have a death in the family just before exams, or their own health issues, a big chunk of students just don't revise as much as they could (many openly admit this at result day). So predicted grades won't be completely accurate because of all these factors.

Thank You.

had a look at the thread. Looks like many of the RG Group haven't filled their seats

I’m so nervous for dd tomorrow

It's not that level a playing field, sadly. In Wales and NI they have not aimed to go back to 2019 levels just yet and are still aiming to be a bit more generous, taking into account the impact of covid etc. They are aiming for a midpoint between covid and 2019. In Wales they were given some idea of topics that had been removed from the syllabus, for example.

To be honest, I'm not convinced the "advanced information" helped all that much last year, in England. Some things, like getting additional equations in physics are helpful to some students, but I think a lot of students misunderstood the information they were provided with and revised too/very narrowly. It also only really helps if you intend to do a lot of revision anyway!

DD's AS biology advance information in Wales was "suggested areas of focus for revision" which is pretty unhelpful given that it also said that everything would be examined and should therefore be taught and revised. None of the content was actually removed from the exam.

They are aiming at a grade distribution broadly midway between 2022 and 2019 but the number of DC this will benefit is tiny compared to English numbers.

I imagine university courses will bear in mind which year and which country A levels were taken in,

@FortyFifty
*"At least if a young person doesn't get their grades and misses out on thier place it is down to them and they only lose out to others who properly earned their grades. 2 years ago, 2021 cohort, the students had masses of stress not understanding at all what the process was and not knowing if their school was going to mark in line with 2019, push the boundaries a bit, or all out inflate everyone's grades. Losing out might have meant losing out to those less deserving."

Yes but this year's were in the position you describe with their GCSEs.They have had a double whammy!