What a shitshow A level marking and university admissions are this year

[IheartNiles]

We’re in England. Loads of students at high performing school have missed their grades. The Oxbridge shoe-in students didn’t get a single A star.

The concessions made to students in 3/4 UK countries is not a level playing field.

International clearing is offering competitive courses at BCC at Russell groups.

it’s a mess.

That said this year I do think some allowance should be made for the fact it's the first proper external exam most of these students have sat. Because that is an unusual factor for this cohort.

What sort of allowance? Technically allowances were made by maintaining the grade distribution in 2019 even thought students won't have been as well prepared as the 2019 cohort due to covid disruption. What other allowance would you want?

Grade boundaries are misleading here. This year, it was decided that the distribution of grades should return to that in 2019, rather than the significant skewing to higher grades that was seen when students were awarded grades by schools in 2020 and especially 2021. So this year, fewer candidates achieved higher grades than in the last 3 years, but a similar number to 2019 (actually slightly higher I think). So any disadvantage this cohort had experienced through covid disruption has not affected the overall grades compared with 2019, the last year with no covid disruption at all. The cohorts of 2020, 2021 and 2022 were actually advantaged in terms of grades. This year are not.

And yes, some candidates have been significantly more disrupted than others. That happens every year though. Some children are ill, or bereaved, or experience other upheavals in their lives. There is never a completely level playing field.

That said this year I do think some allowance should be made for the fact it's the first proper external exam most of these students have sat. Because that is an unusual factor for this cohort.

Allowances are being made; by the universities responding to grades achieved.

Grade boundaries for A level history for my board this year we're SO high - way higher than 2019 - higher than they've ever been.

@GCSister id like to have known that when guiding both dcs through their university choices….
(or for them to have been told that!)

Presumably because the questions were easier.

But A levels are not about going to Uni.

These results will be looked at in 10 years time by employers who won’t be thinking ‘oh it was covid time blablabla’.
It will be the one exam some students will ever do.

That's your school or college's responsibility. They should have someone who understands how university admissions work.

The problem is that would only tell you what happened last year. The context of HE admissions changes every year and that will impact the sort of offers being made and also how flexible universities will be with those offers come results day.

The 2023 cohort will have a similar issue to the 2019 cohort in that they bookend the abnormally high grades in between. At the moment, these grades feel like the anomalies, because we have had 3 years of grade inflation. In 10 years time, those 3 years will be the anomalies. That's why I think this should have happened last year (although possibly keeping the advance information in 2022).

@LifeIsShitJustNow Imperial are v v unlikely to have dropped their offers - they'll have made more offers than places precisely as they expect some to not make it - same with Oxbridge.

That doesn't mean anything. Maybe the questions were easier. Maybe history education has benefitted from needing fewer resources over the last few years, compared to other subjects

That's all on the official stats page, discoveruni.gov.uk, broken down by courses.

Unfortunately, the teacher shortages and lack of training budgets (different thread!) have meant that in my experience a lot of careers/UCAS advisers within schools haven't got a clue. It's another one of the shocking things about the realities of education today, and one with huge knock-on effects. 🙁

They have different education systems. How they teach, what is core to curriculum and approach is different.
That does not mean that they have different grade boundaries or indeed have more support to 'teach to the exam' as other alluded.
I would argue, as someone who works across all four home nations education systems and International Schools, that the issue here may be that England's education system is rather broken and extreme in it's approach....?

Your first paragraph on student expectations perfectly encapsulates the problems with A-levels as they currently are.

Then university teachers have to spend an inordinate amount of time fixing the bad habits and mindsets picked up during them.

I know two 🏫 in our area of Wales have done exceptionally well

Well, for starters I do think it would be fair if English students had allowances similar to NI and Wales, and therefore a similar grade profile- I think included advanced information and similar, which clearly does make a difference. I know it's a relatively small proportion of students from those countries, but it is still arguably creating unfair competition.

Based on grade boundaries in my subject for my exam board, they actually moved the A*-B boundaries up (a small amount) and C-E down, a similar amount, so I'm not convinced the 2019 plan has actually benefited the students at the top (although it probably has benefited those at the bottom). In some subjects/exam boards, grade boundaries have gone up across the board.

2019 was the first year of fully linear a-levels, wasn't it?

NI and Wales had much longer lockdowns.

There's flexibility, in that they can decide how many offers to make, and who.

But outside of Covid, I'm increasingly convinced there are courses that ask for e.g. AAA, and then almost all the students accepted will actually have AAB or even lower- change that to any grade profile you like! Maybe it should be an average over the last 5 years, or something, and it wouldn't help this year anyway.

But it creates this system where there's pressure on teachers to predict high, to get students offers, knowing the student will likely not achieve the offer, but will get into uni anyway. BUT then parents will turn around and question why did their child not get their predicted grades (often after having put pressure on us to put them up!), when I've sent home reports showing they aren't on track to achieve their predictions etc etc.

Increasingly, the whole system feels like a bit of a farce. I very much feel like if I predict totally realistically, I'd disadvantage my students.

A lot of universities were still giving first choice students their places anyway. So I don’t think all of them were offering those places in international clearing with substantially lower grades. Eg my DN has just gotten onto his Cambridge course with ABB (the A is in the subject he’s studying).

You can see from Welsh and N. Irish results though, the additional help they've been given hasn't just compensated for that though.

But lockdowns weren't the only disruption to teaching. Just because we were not in lockdown in Summer 2021 did not mean that all English schools were necessarily open, or open fully, or all students were in them.

Compared to some schools, we weren't hit so badly, but that summer I had days when I had 1/3 of the class or less in school- some of my students missed 6 weeks of that summer term. Even in the 2021-22 school year, there were schools local to me doing partial closures or similar. Certainly Y12 were a popular year group to leave to "self study" so I could be pulled to cover a younger year group. There was still disruption with students missing school to isolate etc.

I also think just not sitting GCSEs was a huge factor for some students.

Yes, we can always say that the playing field is never totally level, and I agree that's always true. And to be clear, some of the students I teach and on here have done amazingly. But equally it's really clear this results day has been a bit of a shock to the system for a lot of people, and in retrospect, given the disruption this year group have had, I feel like some additional support may have been helpful.

Which board? My DD was predicted B, got a C but her course work mark was quite high so she no doubt list marks in exams. She is going to get first choice anyway but it’s interesting to hear about grade boundaries being v high as they also were for English Lit too. 88% got her a B. 3 marks off an A!

Sorry my above post was for the poster mentioning History grade boundaries

Good lesson for the Oxbridge shoe ins that they maybe aren’t as clever as they think and things in life won’t always go their way maybe?